It is not acceptable that what we saw on Sunday, de facto impunity for hate-filled activists to frighten people at places of intense emotional significance to them, is the new benchmark for civility
November 26, 2025 09:16
Last Sunday the Metropolitan Police was made aware of a protest in St John’s Wood by pro-Palestinian groups targeting a synagogue. Unfortunately, because Jews going to their place of worship were likely to behave themselves in the face of such blatant antisemitic intimidation, the police decided to facilitate it. You’ve read that correctly.
Police do have the powers to ban a protest from happening at a specific location if they believe it may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property, serious disruption to community life, or intimidation. They used those powers only weeks ago to Prevent a UKIP march through Tower Hamlets. In that case the Met deployed their strongest powers: imposed conditions under the Public Order Act 1986, Section 14(3), explicitly prohibiting any UKIP-affiliated participants from entering an entire London Borough on the day of the event.
Legislative powers vary slightly according to whether a protest is static or mobile. But this dances on the head of a pin, particularly when Sunday’s agitators were helpfully directed by officers to walk, many of them masked, to the synagogue where they proceeded to do everything possible to frighten and cower the local Jewish population who were holding a series of events, including for children.
In theory, the police had issued controls to the St John’s Wood protest which forbade assembly near the synagogue. In practice this happened anyway as protestors ignored them. This was a foreseeable risk that ought to have been met with robust enforcement. The very fact the Met were notified with as little time as possible to react was a clear indication of the intent of this group.
“Jews for Palestine” and “Palestine Pulse” had also encouraged their supporters on social media to “look visibly Jewish” (whatever that may mean). No doubt some of them were Jews, but the masked men with keffiyehs around their heads chanting antisemitic tropes such as “from the river to the sea” left Jews in the area in no doubt about the hateful intent behind this anti-Zionist mob.
So why was the police response so supine in the face of what they knew or should have known about this event? It’s not enough for the Met to play victim here. While they cannot unilaterally ban a march outright, the response to the UKIP event highlights a troubling inconsistency – one seemingly policed by the calculation that a persecuted minority, merely going about its lawful business, is unlikely to respond violently.
That cannot be the ethical basis for failing to protect Jews outside their place of worship. It is simply not acceptable that what we saw on Sunday, de facto impunity for hate-filled activists to frighten people at places of intense emotional significance to them, is the new benchmark for civility. We are only weeks from a deliberate mass casualty attack on a synagogue in Manchester that left two worshippers slaughtered. We are even closer to a decision based, it now appears, on fictional intelligence and pro-Palestinian pressure to ban Jews from coming to Birmingham to support their football team. The red lines are disappearing from view as they are trampled across by people who seem to act with gleeful disrespect for controls on their behaviour up to and including murder.
Even when the ring of tinfoil thrown up by the Met in St. John’s Wood was breached, there was a shameful paralysis by officers on the ground who, it is reported, didn’t want to “antagonise” the situation. I have quite a lot of sympathy for officers burned out by policing relentless protests in London for events that are happening thousands of miles away over which we have little control, poisoning our communities. But we must expect more than capitulation to people breaking the law in front of them with so little fear of consequences.
In these circumstances it is policing by logistics, not moral or physical courage that takes primacy. If cops had waded in and made perfectly defensible arrests under public order legislation it would have removed too many of them from the human barrier of hi-vis bodies they had to throw up around the synagogue to prevent it from being breached. Just imagine what those inside, with the memories of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation still fresh in their minds, would have been thinking.
I’m just back from a conference in Hungary where I visited a synagogue in Szeged, a city near the Serbian border. There were no guards, fences and no overt security. People like me could simply walk in off the street. It sometimes takes contrasts like this to remind us how far we have fallen when Jewish places of worship in the UK, if left unguarded, would in no time be vandalised or worse.
The law is set to be changed in the Crimes and Policing Bill, now under scrutiny in parliament, to lower the high bar for bans on protests outside places of worship and to equate static assemblies with protest marches for that purpose. But laws are useless without proper enforcement. The Met had more tools in its armoury to deal with the despicable behaviour of the mob last weekend. The fact it conspicuously failed to use them will be noticed by all the wrong people.
Professor Ian Acheson is a former senior civil servant in the Home Office
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