42 people arrested at protest supporting banned Palestine Action
Protesters gathered for the second week in a row in central London after police reiterated that showing support for the group was a criminal offence.
Other demonstrations were also planned across the UK on Saturday, including in Manchester, Cardiff and Londonderry, Northern Ireland, according to campaign group Defend Our Juries, who organised the event.
Two groups of protesters gathered underneath both the Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela statues in Parliament Square for the demonstration shortly after 1pm.
The individuals then wrote the message 'I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action' with black markers on pieces of cardboard, and silently held the signs aloft as they were surrounded by Metropolitan Police officers and members of the media.
Some demonstrators could be seen lying on top of each other on the floor as police searched their bags and took their ID cards and handmade signs.
Officers could then be seen carrying away a number of protesters who were lying down, lifting them off the ground and into waiting police vans parked around the square.
Other standing protesters were also led away from the statues and placed into the vans.
The last of the protesters was lifted from the Nelson Mandela statue shortly after 2.30pm.
A Metropolitan Police officer at the scene told the PA news agency that 46 people had been arrested at the protest, but the force later confirmed on X that the figure stood at 42.
All but one of the arrests were for showing support for a proscribed organisation, while one person was arrested for common assault, the Met said.
In a post shared on X, Defend Our Juries said the protesters had been arrested 'for holding cardboard signs' and that further arrests had been made at the Manchester demonstration.
Scotland Yard said its stance remains that officers will act where criminal offences, including support of proscribed groups or organisations, are committed.
The force added that this includes 'chanting, wearing clothing or displaying articles such as flags, signs or logos'.
Police arrested 29 people at a similar protest in Parliament Square last weekend.
The terror group designation means that membership of, or support for, Palestine Action is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The move to ban the organisation came after two Voyager aircraft were damaged at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on June 20, an incident claimed by Palestine Action, which police said caused about £7 million worth of damage.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced plans to proscribe Palestine Action, saying that the vandalism of the planes was 'disgraceful' and the group had a 'long history of unacceptable criminal damage'.
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Daily Mail
31 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
SAS veteran disgusted at Labour's betrayal of his comrades breaks 44-year silence to reveal his regiment saved the life of Irish Republican Bernadette Devlin following a horrific murder attempt
He saw a lot of grim scenes in 20 years of active service all over the world, yet this one remains stuck in his mind more than 40 years later. 'It was a nightmare inside there,' recalls a soldier whom we will call Andrew. 'There was the husband on the kitchen floor with blood spurting out of an arterial wound. The children were screaming and their mother was in the bedroom with at least six bullets in her.' Fortunately, she was still alive – just. It was January 1981 on a snowy Northern Irish dawn at the bottom of a dead-end track in rural County Tyrone. Andrew was in charge of a three-man military observation team who had only just disarmed the gunmen responsible for this carnage. It was now very clearly a life-or-death situation. Andrew had to summon immediate medical aid, without which the parents of those screaming children would soon be dead. He also needed military back-up as soon as possible, in case the terrorists received reinforcements or twigged that they actually outnumbered their captors. The gunmen had severed the telephone line to this remote bungalow and the soldiers' radio wasn't working. Having despatched one of his men to run in search of the nearest house to ring for help, he was left with one other soldier to manage three angry terrorists, three hysterical children and two critically wounded civilians. Thanks to Andrew, however, those children would not become orphans that day. His swift actions also averted major civil unrest. For that young mother was Bernadette McAliskey, one of the most high-profile Republican sympathisers in Northern Ireland. Up until now, even she has not heard the full story – revealed today by the Mail. A few years earlier as Bernadette Devlin, she had been the youngest MP in the House of Commons. There, she went down in history for crossing the floor of the House to hit the Home Secretary in the face after stating that the Parachute Regiment had acted in self-defence when they killed 13 civilians on 'Bloody Sunday' in 1972. She had since married teacher Michael McAliskey and the couple had three children aged nine, five and two. Her would-be killers were a hit squad from the outlawed loyalist Protestant paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association. As it was, the attack prompted vicious reprisals from the Catholic Irish Republican Army. Had she died, however, there would have been sectarian mayhem. This was the height of 'the Troubles' and inter-community tensions were already at boiling point. There have been numerous conspiracy theories ever since, including a popular nationalist narrative that Bernadette was under observation from a unit of the hated Parachute Regiment who made no effort to save her from a loyalist death squad. Years later, in a 2002 interview with the Mail's Geoffrey Levy, she attributed the couple's survival to a passing patrol of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. Today, however, the Mail can reveal what really happened that horrific morning. For the men who saved Bernadette and her husband that day were from the one Army unit which Irish republicans hated even more than the Paras. They were from the Special Air Service. And now the man in charge of that operation – 'Andrew' – has decided to speak out. He has done so with heavy heart as he has spent more than 40 years keeping his memories to himself, according to the regimental code of honour. But the current Left-wing rewriting of the history of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, repainting the Special Forces as villains and besmirching the reputation of 'the Regiment', has goaded this taciturn 70-year-old soldier beyond endurance. He is appalled by the prospect of publicly funded human rights lawyers dragging Army veterans into the dock in pursuit of compensation for convicted terrorists and their families. He is furious that Sir Keir Starmer claims the current British law designed to protect veterans is 'unlawful' – as he did again last week – because it clashes with a European one. Emboldened by the Daily Mail's 'Stop The SAS Betrayal' campaign, he wants to show that, far from being some sort of rogue unit, the SAS were there to save lives – even those of the people who loathed them. Andrew was a 26-year-old corporal with six years in the SAS behind him when the call came through in January 1981 to mount an observation operation on the McAliskey home – overnight. 'We were very busy in those days. This was what we called a 'fast ball' operation,' he says. 'I had spent the day protecting a Belfast councillor during his constituency surgery. Then this job came in for that night. There was information of a threat to a celebrity politician. I learned afterwards that she knew she was on a hit list. 'There wasn't time to do a background study on the situation. We were just dropped off in the early hours of the morning and left to make an approach march to a grid reference where this bungalow was situated.' There was no question of walking up the lane. The three soldiers had to make their way in the dark for miles through driving snow around a peat bog. Their orders were to establish an observation position as close to the bungalow as possible, staying out in the open, regardless of the weather, for up to a week (a standard operational procedure known as 'hard routine'). Each man was armed with an Armalite M16 rifle and a Browning 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The plan was to keep watch round the clock, taking turns to sleep. They had only just arrived at first light and were still doing their initial circuit of the property, known as a '360'. This had just become more problematic following the discovery that the couple were breeding greyhounds in an outbuilding and the dogs had started barking, at which point the three soldiers could see a Hillman Avenger driving up the lane towards the house. The car was carrying three members of the UDA, Andrew Watson, Thomas Graham and Robert Smallwood, armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver and two 9mm Brownings. Leaving the engine running, they had jumped out. Two were smashing in the door to the bungalow with sledge hammers while a third set about tearing down the telephone line. Inside, Michael McAliskey had already seen a man in a balaclava through a window and yelled at his wife to hide under the bed. He rushed to the door and was trying to hold it back but the gunmen prised it open. A pistol was thrust through the gap and bullets started flying. He was hit in the arm and the gang pushed on into the house, one shooting at Michael – now on the floor bleeding and pretending to be dead. Another man went in search of Bernadette and found her in the bedroom. He fired at least six shots into her back, chest, legs and arms (some reports say as many as nine), leaving her for dead wedged in the gap between the bed and the wall where she had tried to hide. The children, unharmed, were in deep two gunmen ran for the car, just as the driver had managed to pull down the telephone cable with a rope. They were suddenly face to face with Andrew and his two colleagues, their M16s raised and ready to fire. 'We were seven or eight metres away and it was face on face like two charging bulls. We had every right to drop all three of them,' says Andrew. 'But we had shock on our side and we were more assertive. We were all in Army camouflage shouting, 'Security forces. Put down your weapons'. They could see it was a case of comply or die – so they complied.' Andrew ran inside, saw Michael on the floor and three children 'running around, hysterical' before finding Bernadette. Despite suffering multiple bullet wounds and now being confronted (while naked) by a second armed stranger in the space of a minute, the famously forthright political campaigner was still defiant. 'I suppose you bastards are coming in to finish me off,' she groaned. 'I didn't say who we were. I couldn't help her with this great hole in her chest. I just told her help was on its way,' Andrew recalls. Then he turned his attention back to Michael. 'We didn't have any drips or tourniquets. I just told him to keep the pressure on his arm to stem the bleeding.' The immediate problem was communications. As they were running towards the house, Andrew had issued the signal: 'Contact! Wait out!' This was the all-important alert telling HQ that his unit was going into action, to clear the airwaves, to await his next update and to have reinforcements despatched immediately. 'But communications just ended with my transmission. I never got the confirmation back that they had heard us.' Did anyone even know they were there? With no phone and no radio (standard-issue Army transmitters were notoriously unreliable in freezing weather), there had been no option but to send one of his two men to run off in search of a telephone. 'Luckily, as it turned out, the unit had heard my 'Contact! Wait out!' and had already deployed a quick-reaction force from the resident unit in Dungannon,' says Andrew. A company from the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders were on the ground inside 15 minutes, followed swiftly by a helicopter to take the McAliskeys to hospital. 'Then we handed over the scene,' says Andrew, 'and extracted ourselves.' 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Times
33 minutes ago
- Times
Kemi Badenoch is right that the welfare system is a fiscal disaster
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Daily Mail
41 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE My father was defrauded out of £64k by The Salt Path author Raynor Winn, it destroyed him and he never fully recovered from the heartbreaking loss
The family of the businessman who Salt Path writer Raynor Winn allegedly stole £64,000 from have reacted furiously to her claim that it was just a mistake. Scandal-hit Winn has admitted she has 'deep regret' over mistakes made that led to allegations of the embezzlement from Martin Hemmings' business and her arrest. Mr Hemmings died before details of the missing money ever became public - and today friends of his widow said that the episode had 'destroyed him' while his daughter claimed he felt 'ripped off' and 'let down' by the best-selling author. Winn claimed she was working during a 'pressured time' when errors were being made across Mr Hemmings' estate agency business. She has denied allegations the financial dispute with ex-boss Mr Hemmings, who has since died, had any relation to the story told in The Salt Path. It follows days of backlash against Winn's 2018 memoir - which has been accused of not being as 'unflinchingly honest' as initially billed. Speaking from her remote Welsh cottage, Mr Hemmings' daughter Debbie said: 'He felt he was ripped off by her, which he was. 'My mum is still angry and frustrated by it as my dad was upset about it. 'He felt really let down by it all. 'But I don't feel angry any more as I have parked it. 'But I'm not sure my mum has.' A close friend of her mother Ros Hemmings told MailOnline that she and her late husband were 'saddened and very frustrated' that Winn - real name Sally Walker - had escaped any punishment for her alleged theft. 'On the other hand, at least they got the money back, said the friend. 'If things had gone differently, and Walker had not been able to come up with the money then she may have been prosecuted, probably would not have gone to jail and ended up doing community service. 'Then she'd have been repaying their money at some paltry rate such as £5 a week for the rest of her life. 'So although it wasn't a perfect solution, it was probably better than the alternative.' Winn has been accused of omitting key elements of her story in her account of losing her home before embarking on a 630-mile trek of the South West Coast Path. In the book, Winn said she and her husband Moth lost a fortune - and their 17th century farmhouse in Pwllheli, Wales - due to a bad investment in a friend's business. But an investigation carried out by The Observer uncovered allegations she had in fact embezzled £64,000 from Mr Hemmings' estate agents and was allegedly later arrested. A loan was then allegedly taken out to avoid prosecution and when this was not paid their home was sold, it has been claimed. Mr Hemmings' wife Ros told The Observer that the alleged embezzlement devastated her late husband. She said: 'It absolutely destroyed him because he was a very trusting, kind person.' Winn herself said in a statement: 'The dispute with Martin Hemmings, referred to in the Observer by his wife, is not the court case in The Salt Path. 'Nor did it result in us losing our home. Mr Hemmings is not Cooper. Mrs Hemmings is not in the book, nor is she a relative of someone who is. 'I worked for Martin Hemmings in the years before the economic crash of 2008. For me it was a pressured time. 'It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.' The author also said she had been left 'devastated' by accusations her husband's illness was fabricated. The Salt Path tells the story of how Moth was diagnosed with the terminal condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD), just after they had been made homeless. Questions have also been raised about Moth's debilitating illness - a rare neurological condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease, which is central to the book. The life expectancy for sufferers after diagnosis is around six to eight years, according to the NHS - however Moth has been living with the condition for 18 years with no apparent visible symptoms. Following an investigation into their backgrounds, The Observer said that Winn and Moth, previously went by their less flamboyant legal names, Sally and Tim Walker. And rather than being forced out of their home in rural Wales when an investment in a childhood friend's business went awry, as the book suggested, it is alleged that the property was repossessed after Winn stole tens of thousands of pounds from Mr Hemmings. When the couple failed to repay a loan taken out with a relative to repay the stolen money - agreed on terms that the police would not be further involved - they lost their home, it is claimed. Released in 2018, The Salt Path details the Winns' decision to embark on the South West Coast Path when they lose their home after investing a 'substantial sum' into a friend's business which ultimately failed. In the book, Winn writes: 'We lost. Lost the case. Lost the house.' The memoir then describes their subsequent walk to salvation, wild camping en route and living on around £40 per week, and is described as a 'life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world.' It prompted two sequels and the film adaptation, which was released in May, starring The X Files' Anderson and Isaacs, who recently starred in HBO's The White Lotus. The Winns posed for photographs alongside the actors on the red carpet in London at the film's premiere.
