UK
Defend the right to protest! – Lobby Parliament on 17th March
By Celie Hanson, PSC Campaigns Officer
Israel’s project to erase Palestinians along with their history, culture, and their liberation struggle, extends globally to using its allies to repress Palestinian voices and those speaking up for Palestinian rights around the world. Despite this, here in Britain the solidarity movement has continued to grow exponentially in the face of the government’s attempts to crush it in order to maintain its complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide.
Most recently, the government has tabled an extreme measure to the Crime and Policing Bill – currently being railroaded through parliament – to give police new powers to effectively ban protests based on their ‘cumulative disruption.’ That is why, as part of the ‘Defend our Right to Protest’ campaign, PSC is jointly holding a mass lobby of parliament with civil society organisations and trade unions on Tuesday 17 March 2026.
The mass lobby builds on the statement organised by PSC earlier this month, that brought together over 45 civil society organisations to oppose these latest proposals. The wide-range of signatories, from the TUC to Liberty to Greenpeace, shows a vast and united front against the government’s plans. They join more than 100 legal experts and lawyers, over 100 MPs, and Peers in the House of Lords who are all demanding the government withdraw its extreme proposal.
This draconian attack follows a succession of illiberal anti-protest laws – which the government’s own committee on human rights has repeatedly warned against – and its disgraceful use of anti-terror legislation to label direct action as terrorism, prosecuting performance artists, and criminalising protesters. If this new proposal becomes law, an anti-racist march could be blocked from Whitehall because of a previous farmers’ protest, or a pride march restricted because a far-right demonstration was recently held in the same town.
We know that Britain’s democratic system itself is the outcome of successive waves of protest – the civil rights movement, the campaign for women’s suffrage and the movement against apartheid in South Africa all relied on the ‘cumulative’ impact of repeated protests over many years. Ongoing protests are needed to target the pillars of British complicity in Israel’s unconscionable violence.
It is grotesque that the government is attempting to present its latest bid to shield itself and Israel from accountability as protection for vulnerable groups. As Amnesty International UK has already pointed out, legal provisions rightly already exist to protect people from violence and actions where the purpose is to intimidate. Yet far-right protests directly outside asylum hotels, which threaten and harass those inside, have been consistently permitted by police. Far-right mobilisations such as the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration, at which violence against the public and police was widespread and openly advocated from the demonstration platform, have also been facilitated.
These repressive measures will not make anyone safer – instead, they could be used by this, or any future government, to stamp out protests altogether. Taking inspiration from the resilience of the Palestinian people, we know that the best way to fight repression is to keep on campaigning. Join us for our mass lobby of parliament on Tuesday 17 March 2025 to demand your MP uphold our fundamental democratic rights.
- You can read more about PSC’s ‘Defend our Right to Protest’ campaign, including their March 17th joint lobby day, here.
- You can follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Bluesky and TikTok.
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