We all have a right to protest but something’s gone rotten at the heart of recent protests

I’ve decided I might go on a protest march.

I want to rally a few hundred people – we’ll describe it as half a million to the media – to protest about protests.

Because, as much as supporting the right to protest is brandished as proof of an open democratic society, that Governments are usually big enough to accept that some people get angry with them, and accepting, in my opinion, marching has never achieved anything very much – something has gone very rotten within the ‘protest’ movement.

It’s like social media.

When those that did, started on Twitter, it was all rather gentle. For me that was fifteen years ago, before “Oi Gammon, read a book and educate yourself – you melt” substituted “I have to say I can’t agree with this, sorry… and here is, if I may, why”

Protests have featured, at intervals, in all my decades in journalism. In newsrooms, marches are like heat-waves, strikes, royal weddings, and elections – they have their own media language, and have been reported on in a similar way for years.

In the last decade, and especially the last two years three things have coalesced that seems to have warped everything.

First on the fringes of those genuinely concerned about the climate came groups who had a new view point – let’s call it ‘instant Gretafication’ – whereby they felt their cause was so clearly right, and so clearly unarguable, it justified doing almost anything against either those that thought it was wrong and argued against it, or just ordinary people who weren’t that fussed either way but seen as dumb sheep who needed to be ‘shaken awake’.

How useful it is in reality to the actual air we breath and how we generate power to take a day out of school, or sit in front of moving cars, or superglue your head to the A47, or gate crash a motorway I’m still not entirely sure but with all the certainty of the nineteenth century missionary this new breed decided the righteous end seemed to justify any means.

The apogee for me was a group of men – one in a tweed jacket – explaining like overenthusiastic preachers and people desperate to atone for all the privilege they had endured growing up, being unceremoniously hauled off the top of a tube train they were standing on – and thereby holding up- by angry builders who just wanted to get to work and earn a living.

I’d have bought flowers for the genteel lady who hosed down Just Stop Oil protestors who stormed that bastion of climate denial the….checks notes….Chelsea Flower Show!

The ‘upper crusties’, the Lily, Olivia, Joss and Robins became our home grown middle class cut glass, orators whilst chucking soup at paintings or paint on banks and all inspired by the moon-faced Swedish doom gremlin who asked how we all ‘dared’ steal her future.

But we all know what Greta Thunberg did next, and it stopped being quite so funny.

Because the second change was when Hamas attacked Israel, kidnapping and murdering both Jewish and Muslim civilians of all ages on Oct 7^th 2023.

Things shifted.

Remember, the Metropolitan Police were first contacted just before 1pm on that Saturday by a group called the Palestine Solidarity Campaign informing police of an intent to protest the next day in London. At the time of that call the attacks were still underway.

The polarisation of views was already massive, and many of the Corbynite influx to labour when he was leader who then jumped or were pushed by Kier Starmer when he wasn’t, felt everything they had said and been “witch hunted out” for was about to be proved right.

There was, and we shouldn’t ignore it, a lot of religious affiliation to the Palestinians from fellow Muslims, where the treatment of Uighurs, Syrian opposition, and the Rohinga had not sparked the same levels of anger.

As Israel defended itself, and then moved militarily into Gaza, with, let’s acknowledge, a horrific cost in human life, already entrenched views have dug in even deeper.

Now on our streets we see the same total conviction that one side is the sole perpetrator of evil and the other the completely innocent victim which early saw two women feel able to wear paraglider stickers celebrating the Hamas attacks, open anti-semitism displayed, and the carrying of flags in support of banned terrorist organisations.

The mixing of extreme climate based direct action and this specific war has seen children’s shoes left outside the British Prime Minister’s home, MPs abused in the street because they won’t chant about rivers and seas, or being forced to say the war is a genocide – which by the way politicians and protestors don’t and shouldn’t decide.

The third thing that has changed is the policing of protest.

I’ll say right now, I’ve always thought the police do a very difficult job and are largely decent people who run towards harm to protect others rather than tactically retreat as most of us would. The problem now is perception.

The police have suffered the same self inflicted problem that the Prime Minister has accepted about his first year in the job when he said last week: “We haven’t always told our story as well as we should,”

The inconsistent enforcement of Covid rules and a series of scandals, not least the crimes of officers Wayne Couzens and David Carrick haven’t helped, especially the awkwardly heavy handed handling of the protest vigil about the murder of Sarah Everard.

That mixture of over cooking it at some protests and seemingly disengaged at others, might not be entirely true but it created an image of two tier policing that if anything has been reinforced since.

I found myself baffled when in the Home Office I sat in meetings around the Gaza protests – that Suella Braverman had called ‘hate marches’, with some justification – where senior officers refuted suggestions that they’d been light touch and reiterated that politicians should not be involved in directing police activity. That was fine up to the point it missed the point by a mile.

What they didn’t seem to see was that it was the perception of turning a blind eye to things caught on camera, to war memorials climbed on and daubed in paint or slogans, ‘openly Jewish’ people being asked to ‘move on’ that was more damaging than what they were actually doing.

And so we’ve got to the point where two individuals with e-scooters think it fully justified, to breach the security of an RAF base – crime one, and embarrassing when the Government is trying to tout its commitment to war ‘readiness’ and increasing the UK’s defence – and spray red paint into the engines of two RAF planes, crime two.

I back the Home Secretary’s desire to ban Palestine Action, we should also pursue the group for the cost of repairs in this act of criminal damage – if not sabotage.

Such an act crosses so many red lines of ‘right to protest’ it has to be punished severely  and it should not be remotely controversial to see that and say that. And yet an army of keyboard warriors are already out there saying it’s worse supporting ‘genocide’ and applauding the derring-do of the spray painters.

Now the group, amplified by supporters like Guardian journalist Owen Jones, have called for a rally – or angry protest – outside Parliament tomorrow to oppose any attempt to ban them and support those thinking the ‘Brize Norton Job’ is nothing more than effective direct action.

I don’t and won’t advocate politicians deciding who can and cannot march or protest, but there needs to be a reset of the rules.

These rules need to feature in any Conservative policy reset. Some of this work was done in the last months of Government but like so many things, I admit, there was much more still to do.

It should be clear. You can protest here and here, you can’t split off and chase opponents down streets hurling abuse and threats of violence. If you are actually violent or cause criminal damage you get jailed, a criminal record and pursued for the costs of any damage. Quite apart from the fact the bill to taxpayers for policing the Gaza protests is staggering, you shouldn’t get to have the same protest every weekend.

Oh and – it should be obvious – you don’t risk your life or anybody else’s because of the cause.

The days of Emily Davison should stay firmly in the past. Even the ‘Greenham Common women’ chained themselves to the fence of an airbase, they had the sense not to breach it. I assume military personal guarding bases have rules of engagement that offer everything up to the use of lethal force. Police guarding Parliament do, and have used it.

The police also do have the powers they need for infringements that deserve less than that but they need not only to use them (which to be fair they have improved) but be seen to use them. The support for that, is in numbers that make the marcher numbers look miniscule.

And we need, and the Tories should champion this, to tell our story better. When someone here in the UK thinks carrying a sign with the Iranian leader on it and the words “be on the right side of history” is a perfectly normal opinion – or you lump in supporting the Houthis, ‘because Gaza’ – the right to protest has warped into something deeply, weirdly, wrong.

As I’ve said I would happily march in favour of tougher restrictions on protests, but then I’ve never seen one actually achieve its aim.