Arrests at pro-Palestine protests in London attended by millions of people last year resulted in just 36 charges – despite attempts by senior politicians to label them as “mass extremism” and “openly criminal”.
The low number of actual arrests and prosecutions undermines the narrative, pushed by senior Tory leaders, that the protests are a danger to public safety. Home secretary James Cleverly said last week that the organisers possessed “real evil intent”, and his predecessor Suella Braverman today repeated her frequent calls for the weekly marches to be banned.
But despite the vast numbers of police deployed around the protests at a cost of £22m, officers appear only to have been able to find a handful of instances of wrongdoing. A number of charges were brought under the new Public Order Act while seven people were charged with assault and three with possession of a weapon.
