The Met have allowed pro-Palestine protestors to run riot in Westminster

The Metropolitan Police is more frightened of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is of the Metropolitan Police. This is the central fact of life in the public order debate today – and does much to explain the context of Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s decision to break with long established Parliamentary convention in order to avert large scale threats to MPs. 

The Speaker’s reasoning should puncture the Panglossian narrative of the Met and of other forces that the Palestine protests are largely peaceful. The truth is that these outwardly orderly marches are based on a discourse of threat – to which the Met responds by effectively ‘taking the knee’. 

Senior officers fear that if they do not allow these protests to go ahead, with relatively minor qualifications, there will be chaos – and even radicalisation. They remember, for example, Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber of 2017, was first spotted at a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside No.