THE Metropolitan Police should apply to the Home Secretary to ban pro-Palestinian protest marches in London if cannot guarantee the safety of people on all sides, according to former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
She was commenting on the incident last week when Gideon Falter was threatened with arrest by police during a pro-Palestinian demonstration for being “openly Jewish”.
Braverman told GB News: “I think there's a crisis here really after six months of hundreds of thousands of people regularly taking to the streets to march.
“Now I don't object to the right to peaceful protest. But as we saw in this incident, and this is reflective of what's been going on for six months, these can no longer be described as peaceful marches.
“That the police themselves believe that there is a threat of anti-semitic violence, anti-semitic attack, what they did in that incident was to protect the right of the protesters to harass, intimidate, and behave in an anti-semitic way, and at the same time telling the innocent Jewish person that that person needs to give up their rights, that that person needs to stay away.
“That's striking the wrong balance when it comes to dealing with this situation.”
Challenged by Eamonn Holmes, who suggested that the police may have just been taking a practical approach to deal with the situation, she said: “What I'm suggesting is that the police, if they don't have the resources to keep the streets of London safe for everyone to enjoy, then they need to ban the march.
“That's up to the Met commissioner, to apply to the Home Secretary if he believes he doesn't have sufficient resources to enable public order to be maintained.
“He can do that. He's not done that. And also, what's horrendous about this, is that to be asking someone to stay away because of their ethnicity, because they're openly Jewish is a disgrace.“
She added: “There was abuse being shouted at him. There was anti-semitic language being used. That is all criminal.
“The police should be arresting those who are committing criminal offences, not allowing them the space to continue with their criminality and urging everybody else to stay out of the way. That's a totally wrong approach...
“My complaint is not against the individual officers on the ground. They're dealing with a really difficult situation and they're doing their best.
“This is about the orders that they are following and those come from the top and there's been a strategic failure here by Sir Mark Rowley. He has basically applied the same approach that the police apply to managing football crowds.
“And what they do then is they say, well, the larger group, we're going to choose that group and we're going to protect that larger group and any other smaller groups or individuals who come along, we're going to wave them on and tell them to stay away. You can't apply that approach to this issue.”
