On the Ground at London’s Latest Mass-Arrest Spectacle

By Tiernan Cannon  |  September 10, 2025 | 11:08am
Photo by Tiernan Cannon
Palestine United Kingdom
On the Ground at London’s Latest Mass-Arrest Spectacle

September 8, 2025, was an odd day in London Town. It began as most Saturdays now tend to: with a mass demonstration of tens of thousands of people opposing the British-backed annihilation of Gaza. By the time it ended, many hundreds of peaceful protestors, a significant proportion of whom were elderly folk perched on camping chairs, had been dragged away by their hands and feet by troops of police officers in high-vis jackets, bundled into riot vans, and taken away to a nearby prisoner reception point for processing. Their alleged crime was the holding of a sign that read, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action,” or some variation of it. They were arrested on suspicion of supporting a terrorist organization.

Photo by Tiernan Cannon

In July earlier this year, Keir Starmer’s Labour government proscribed the non-violent protest group Palestine Action, after a number of its members allegedly vandalized a couple of Royal Air Force aircraft housed within Britain’s RAF Brize Norton base. Brize Norton is where flights have set off on their way to a British base in Cyprus, which, in turn, is where British reconnaissance flights have been launched to fly over Gaza, gathering information on the people below even as Israel’s genocide grinds on. Palestine Action characterized its actions as an attempt to prevent genocide and war crimes, but, following its proscription, it is now considered to be a terrorist organization alongside groups like Al Qa’ida, Boko Haram and ISIS, despite the fact that Palestine Action does not advocate for violence. The British government, meanwhile, continues to support Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

A very visible swathe of the public opposes Palestine Action’s designation as a terrorist organization, and they are protesting the decision by openly supporting the group—in the full understanding that they may be arrested for it and potentially imprisoned for up to 14 years. These people, mostly on the older side, but by no means exclusively so, poured into Parliament Square on Saturday for a demonstration organized by the Defend Our Juries group, sat themselves on the grass under the beaming sun and the shadow of Big Ben, held their signs up, and awaited patiently their arrest, as swarms of officers busily buzzed through the crowd of non-sign-holding protestors who had formed a protective mass around their sign-carrying comrades. It was, perhaps, the strangest spectacle I have ever witnessed.

Photo by Tiernan Cannon

The police presence was almighty around Parliament Square, with reportedly 2,500 officers deployed to deal with these allegedly terror-sympathizing hordes of sign-carriers sitting quietly on the lawn, eating sandwiches. The police operation was vast—some of the cops appeared to have been directed to London from other areas of the U.K., such as Yorkshire and Wales, while live facial recognition technology was pointed menacingly at the protestors—and it must have required a great deal of coordination and resources. Some of the officers were equipped with batons. Others with Tasers. Some of them cracked jokes with each other to ease the tension of what was unfolding. Others looked rattled and confused. They were neither respected nor feared by the hundreds of citizens dressed in keffiyehs that were staring them down.

Photo by Tiernan Cannon

The police appeared to target younger sign-holders during the early stages of the day, but Parliament Square is large and cops were sweeping in from every corner, so it is possible I missed older people being nabbed. What I personally witnessed was wave after wave of police officers forming grotesque conga lines, sometimes with one hand on the shoulder of the cop in front, snaking their way through the crowd, selecting younger sign-holders on an apparently arbitrary basis, reading them their rights, gathering them up by the arms and legs, and carrying them away towards a police-lined barricade, where they were dropped off and delivered into the back of police vans.

The reason they had to carry these people was because, once selected, they typically went limp as they were led away, ensuring the maximum number of officers would be needed to make an individual arrest, which, indeed, ensured the day moved very, very slowly. It was tiring, monotonous work for the police, and, for some individuals, it must have been deeply humiliating, too. They were shouted at and berated: “Shame! Shame on you!” They were mocked: “Oh, thank you, officer. You’re so brave. I feel so much safer now.” They were laughed at. One wonders what passing tourists, excited to see the famous Big Ben and Palace of Westminster, made of the ridiculous spectacle as it played out before them.

The prospect of violence felt close at moments during the cagey earlier stages of this strange jamboree. Some officers visibly shrank into themselves with the disgust that greeted their activities, but others reacted with rage. When protestors got too close to these particular officers, they would lash out, shoving people back, throwing wild swipes and kicks, and menacingly waving cameras in people’s faces—many protestors, in turn, waved their own phone cameras into their faces. It was these more impulsive cops, almost always younger, white and male, who felt to me most likely to spark a dangerous incident. I was shoved by one of them myself, as I got close to film an arrest. “Do that again!” he shouted to someone beside me who’d shoved him back, almost as if he was a drunken reveler squaring up to someone outside a bar on a rowdy Saturday night.

The hours drew on. The police, tightly choreographed, swept in and out of the crowd in packs, clustering around individual protestors who, inevitably, went limp, dragging on the proceedings. The sun began to set. Elderly sign-holders, while still smiling cheerily and snacking on bananas handed out by volunteers, began to moan of their boredom and discomfort, having been sat on the lawn for several hours by this stage, awaiting their inevitable arrest which had not yet come. The sense of chaos that had defined the earlier hours dissipated, and the sheer strangeness of what was happening became palpable. What were we witnessing here? This immense waste of public resources. This grand exercise in futility. Nobody—not the protestors, nor the police, nor the politicians—can truly believe these people are genuinely sympathetic to terrorism. Yet arrested they were all the same.

“Law’s the Law, Mate”

As the sky dimmed, the police formed a vast ring around the lawn upon which the sign-holders sat. They periodically took a step forward every few minutes, their human chain enclosing protestors more tightly together—though they allowed people to squeeze past if they wanted to. Passions were less fiery by this point, and people began to engage with the officers more calmly. I, at one point, asked one if he felt at all strange about all of this. “About what?” he scoffed. “About arresting a load of grannies and grandads sitting quietly on the grass.” He laughed. “The law’s the law, mate.” I responded, “but what if the law is unjust?” He paused. Shook his head a few times. Smiled. “Law’s the law.”

Photo by Tiernan Cannon

This particular officer, it must be said, did not give the impression of being the sharpest tool in the box. It seems unlikely that he will reflect much on what happened on Saturday—though I implore the man to prove me wrong. But there were others that you have to imagine will have been affected by what they were forced to do. I spoke with another, a fellow Irishman—“So you’re working for the oppressor now?” a protestor beside me joked, and, to be fair to him, the cop laughed—and, while he obviously did not say anything remotely critical of the task he and his colleagues were conducting, he did strike me as a more thoughtful type beneath the uniform. What did he think when he eventually got to go home to reflect on the day?

The day before Saturday’s demonstration, Novara Media published a report in which anonymous Met police officers admitted to feelings of shame about their enforcement of the Palestine Action ban. It is unclear how widespread this view is within the force, but it seems fair to guess that those officers are not alone. Some cops will mindlessly follow orders—“Law’s the law, mate”—others will lash out—“Do that again!”—but some of them will surely reflect on what they are now being ordered to do. They know that genocide is wrong. That Britain’s participation in genocide is wrong. That arresting people for peacefully protesting genocide is wrong. Their motivations to join the force may genuinely once have been to help people, but now, as they arrest grannies en masse, they must doubt that they are truly doing so.

How do those officers feel knowing that soon, as another demonstration rolls around, they’re going to have to do this all over again? Might some of them refuse? This could be a serious problem for the Labour government. By proscribing Palestine Action, and thus forcing the police to arrest anyone suspected of supporting the group, the government has potentially created a crisis of state legitimacy. Citizens are not accepting this abuse of power, and, eventually, maybe some police officers won’t, either.

One of the most moving things I saw on Saturday came as a man sat limp on the ground, surrounded by a group of police officers, quietly awaiting his arrest. Protestors, in turn, ringed around the cops, and one woman stood before them and began to admonish them with furious poise and eloquence. She spoke of the depravity of police violence in the United Kingdom. She spoke of the dehumanization of migrants in the country. She spoke, most movingly, of Sarah Everard, the young woman who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by an off-duty police officer in 2021. The officer who did it, Wayne Couzens, had been accused of several sexual assaults in the years before he murdered Everard, but the system had nonetheless allowed him to serve, and it was with the power that his role afforded him that he was able to target Everard. When a vigil was later held in the wake of Everard’s murder, an expression of collective grief and anger from women fed up with male violence in the country, they were attacked by the police—an act of obscene state violence that this woman at Saturday’s protest claimed to have seen with her own eyes. It was impossible, watching her speak so furiously of police violence against women, not to be drawn to a younger female officer who stood before her, staring blankly ahead, refusing to meet the woman’s gaze, waiting for it all to end.

This protest against the proscription of Palestine Action may snowball into a wider revolt against the police and the government’s abuse of power. Starmer’s government has badly misread the public mood, and people do not seem to be backing down. They are so angry about British complicity in the Gaza genocide and this government’s authoritarian, yet politically inept, attempt to roll back the right to protest. One of two things will now happen, because the present situation is surely untenable. Either the government will be forced to change its stance on Palestine Action, or it will begin to take even more authoritarian measures against those it deems to support it. The latter approach may well be the more likely, given that, early last week, five spokespeople from the Defend Our Juries campaign were arrested in their homes, which, naturally, did not garner the same level of public attention as all the grannies and granddads being dragged away from a public square and thrown into riot vans. Perhaps the state will seek slyer tactics like this as it works through the mess it’s created? Time will tell.

The arrests continued as the day wilted—890 would be made in total, considerably less than the 1,500 sign-carriers that are believed to have been present that day. The chimes of Big Ben rang ominously every hour. The mood, as night fell, became tired and weird. A group of young women beside me ran through the names of their friends, trying to tot up who among them had been arrested and who had not. Has anyone seen Tania? No, she’d been taken earlier. Laura? I think she’s gone, too. Around them the police continued their macabre maneuvers, selecting the remaining sign-holders, the older ones now, sweeping them away to waiting police vans. The calls of shame continued to be directed at the cops, as they lifted frail, older bodies away from the scene, while applause was given to those who’d allowed themselves to be taken. As one older white woman was carried away, a group of South Asian girls, apparently in their late teens, called gratefully after her, “Thank you, aunty!” She smiled as she was heaved towards a riot van. She will be charged as a supporter of terrorism.

 
Join the discussion...