Chris Nineham’s violent arrest
On Monday, protesters will rally outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court at 9am calling for all charges against Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal to be dropped.
The Defend the Right to Protest rally will be addressed by MPs including Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, trade union leaders including Fran Heathcote and Maryam Eslamdoust, and leading voices from the arts and entertainment world such as Brian Eno, Juliet Stevenson and Khalid Abdalla.
It’s the morning Nineham and Jamal face trial on charges relating to a protest over a year ago — the January 18 2025 national march for Palestine.
Police had imposed restrictions on the march, saying it could not proceed to lay flowers in memory of Gaza’s murdered children outside the BBC as planned. Instructions were confusing, with demonstrators told they could and could not be in certain parts of central London depending on the time. Mass arrests followed alleged breaches of these conditions and Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Nineham, the chief steward of the march, found themselves charged with public order offences.
“This is only happening because of the restrictions put on this demonstration in particular and on Palestine demonstrations more generally,” Nineham explains.
“Since October 2023, we’ve seen an unprecedented change in the way peaceful protests are policed.
“I’ve been involved in organising demonstrations since the beginning of the century, and we’ve never had every single demo slapped with restrictions on where people can and can’t go.
“We’ve never had a situation where police are so intrusive on demos — looking not just at what placards people are holding but the T-shirts they’re wearing, the books that are on the stalls.
“This is political policing. And if police are the arbiters of where you can march, when you can march, how often you can march, which is in the pipeline — then you need state permission to demonstrate, and are approaching a situation where this isn’t a democracy at all, especially in association with all the cases around Palestine Action and the arrests there of people for holding the wrong placard and so on.”
What is it about the Palestine issue that rattles the state so much?
“I’d say there are two elements. One is a longer-term trend, since the 1980s the legislation around policing has got tougher — in lockstep with disenchantment with political elites. Governments have become less popular and the Establishment instinct is to clamp down.
“That’s accelerated over the past five or six years with the attacks on the climate movement and new legislation making it easier for police to ban protests, to pick on particular protesters.
“And that’s then turbo-charged by the Palestine situation. People have seen in their millions the carnage that Israel has created in Gaza and it’s created huge anger.
“People want it stopped — and even while people in the Establishment itself maybe feel uncomfortable, we’ve seen the text messages from Wes Streeting to Peter Mandelson saying he thinks Israel is committing war crimes, that Establishment still sees supporting Israel as a core interest.
“Because of support for US foreign policy, because of its historic support for the creation of Israel and the role Israel plays for the West in the Middle East…
“So everyone knows what they’re doing is wrong, but they’re going to carry on doing it, and it’s not some minor element of foreign policy but facilitating mass, systematic murder.
“So they’ve lost the argument, for all the accusations that we’re hate marchers or terrorism supporters or risk creating disorder on the streets, claims anyone who’s been on the marches knows are false.
“So they’re left with nothing but brute force really. That’s why the police are becoming more aggressive, why the state is claiming people involved in civil disobedience are terrorists and that pop musicians are public enemies.
“Palestine has become the flash point for the whole question of civil liberties — and if you think freedom of speech matters, the right to protest matters, you have to force the government to retreat.”
Is that retreat coming, with the government’s ban on Palestine Action having been ruled unlawful in the High Court?
“I hope so. But there isn’t a mainstream political party so far — or if I’m honest even a significant section of one — openly and clearly saying, ‘this is wrong.’
“A majority of the population have one opinion on this — not everyone by any means, there’s a hard right that supports Israel, but a significant majority — and yet that opinion is not represented in the political mainstream, so the way that plays out depends on a number of things — among which are our continuing to deepen and expand the movement, how well we organise, sustaining our discipline and breadth and avoiding provocations.
“Whether we can link the Palestine movement to the wider movements against war and the far right. That’s all key.”
A pitifully small contingent of MPs (just 22) voted against the Palestine Action ban last summer, despite much bigger rebellions against disability cuts. But now the government’s authority has crumbled following the Peter Mandelson scandal, will that change?
“That the government could hardly be weaker is obviously a factor in our favour. But we don’t see much sign of a political shift.
“We’ve seen it before, while the ruling class is prepared to make concessions in certain circumstances on economic or social questions, foreign policy is seen as sacrosanct — because of our imperial history, the City’s role as one of the main financial centres in the world system, the high level of foreign direct investment.
“So a breach with the United States, a change in our approach to foreign wars, would be felt as a body blow to the cross-party consensus on Britain’s role in the world and the architecture of British capitalism.
“That’s not to say we can’t change things. We already have — I think the anti-war movement has already made it virtually impossible for the government to send large numbers of troops abroad, and we’ve made some headway over arms to Israel as well.
“But it’s a very serious battle.”
That pro-imperial consensus is deeply entrenched in Labour, and has been for most of the last century. But the party always had a vocal anti-war wing, until Keir Starmer suppressed it, most obviously when he ordered Labour MPs to remove their names from a Stop the War Coalition statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or lose the whip. Now with Morgan McSweeney’s departure the Starmer project looks like it’s run out of road — will Labour’s pro-peace wing revive?
“Well, I very much hope so, obviously. But I have doubts.
“The experience of a pro-peace leadership in Jeremy Corbyn provoked this counter-revolution against Corbynism which has gone so far that it’s completely marginalised anti-war politics in Labour.
“My own view is that we need a new political vehicle that can promote genuine, systematic anti-war politics. Look at the succession debate around Starmer — Palestine, war and foreign policy are not even in the frame.
“Yet the opportunity to build a mass movement for a complete break with the past is here. That was borne out when Trump was threatening Greenland, and polls found 75 per cent of the British population said they would support removing all US service personnel and bases from British soil.
“That kind of demand has been a marginal argument since the high point of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s.
“It’s really important that we understand we are in new terrain, partly because the Trump administration is conducting an imperialist policy that is completely open and unashamed, and millions of people, way beyond the anti-war movement, think it’s completely mad.
“So we need to be very serious about strategies to reach out to these millions who half agree with us, but aren’t familiar with the movement, maybe are still put off by some things the movement does — be as open, and as outward looking, as we can.”
We won’t get anywhere with that if the state stops us protesting. Join the rally outside Westminster Magistrate’s Court at 9am on Monday.
The Stop the War Coalition ia also urge mobilisation for the anti-racist Together alliance demonstration on March 28, May 16’s counter-demonstration against “Tommy Robinson’s” planned far-right march and for the London Peace Conference on June 20.
Source: Morning Star