Palestine activists must not be permitted to flout the will of Parliament
The police have responded to criticism by stating that what has been witnessed is ambiguous. Next weekend there will be no such ambiguity.
After Palestine Action claimed responsibility for breaking into RAF Brize Norton and vandalising two jets in June, Parliament voted in July to proscribe this organisation too – in the Commons, by 385 in favour and 26 against. Expressing support for Palestine Action is now a criminal offence punishable with a term of up to 14 years imprisonment.
Campaigners are planning for a mass flouting of the terror laws, with 500 or more activists openly and unambiguously planning to proclaim their support for Palestine Action next Saturday. Their tactic is that the police will have to charge so many with terrorism offences that the courts will be overwhelmed – or else that the law will not be enforced and that it will thus become a dead letter. If trials follow, the campaigners will seek to turn them into spectacles where Israel too rather than just those accused are in the dock.
This is now about more than just the rights and wrongs of Israel's response to the Hamas murderers. It is about whether the will of Parliament is enforced on Britain's streets or whether random self-appointed tribunes can overturn laws they do not approve of.
It is essential that the police enforce the law to its full extent next weekend. To the demonstrators' favourite chant of 'Whose streets? Our streets', the only correct response is that the streets are not the domain of those who have brazenly come to endorse a group that our elected representatives have deemed to be terrorists. This could not be allowed to happen at the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and it cannot be allowed to happen in London now.
It is an indictment of the state of our court system that it may not have the capacity to cope with a few hundred arrests, but enforcing the law comes first.
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