Palestine Action
It was reported on 7th September that the Metropolitan Police were saying that 890 people had been arrested the previous day at a demonstration against the ban on the group Palestine Action in London on Saturday.
The police claimed that 17 were arrested for assaults on police officers “after the protest turned violent”, but the majority of the arrests were for supporting a proscribed group under the Terrorism Act.
However, event organisers said that the Met Police were making “false claims” about violence and that instead protesters were “peacefully defying the ban”.
It was also noted that, “the government proscribed Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation in July, making membership of or support of the group a criminal offence, the former punishable by up to 14 years in prison”.
Meanwhile it was also reported on 4th October that another 500 or so people had been arrested during protests supporting the proscribed group Palestine Action.
It was further noted that, “organisers of the protest, Defend Our Juries, said 1,000 people attended the event to “oppose genocide and the Palestine Action ban”.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed that altogether 492 people had been arrested, with the eldest being 89 and the youngest 18. According to the Met, 297 remained in custody while the rest had been bailed.
The campaigning of Gandhi
Peaceful protest has a long and honourable record going back centuries, but in the modern context, it probably begins with the work of Mahatma Gandhi in India during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Inspired by the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament, Gandhi developed a way of campaigning called satyagraha, meaning ‘truth force’, which relied on standing up to injustice, but without resorting to violence. Gandhi first used this method in South Africa and on returning to India on 9th January 1915, he then used the same method successfully to free his native India from British rule.
Jarrow Crusade during the same time
At about the same time as Gandhi was campaigning peacefully in India, another group of men much closer to home were also using wholly peaceful means to raise awareness of their situation. I refer, of course, to the 200 Jarrow marchers who walked to London in October 1936 in the Jarrow Crusade. By walking the 275 miles to the nation’s capital they were able to make the country aware of the fact that unemployment in the Tyneside town was at least 70%, due to the recent closures of both the town’s mine and Jarrow’s Palmer’s shipyard and to ask for the government to help Sir John Jarvis to set up a steelworks in the town to provide employment.
And despite the fact that the men famously received nothing more from the government than a cup of tea and even had their dole money stopped for the duration of the work, because they were allegedly not available for (non-existent) work for three weeks, I would still say that, like Gandhi, they also won.
Within three years of the march war between Britain and Germany had broken out and at the end of that long conflict the people of the country thought long and hard about what kind of government they wanted to help take them forward. It was then that they remembered the Jarrow Crusaders and, determined not to go back to the bad old days of the 1930’s, they voted in the Labour government of Clement Attlee, which was committed to full employment.
Gandhi influences Martin Luther King
To return to Gandhi, even after his untimely death in 1948, he went on to be a huge influence on those struggling against injustice, perhaps most notably on the American Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, who was honoured by Newcastle University on 14th November 1967 . Having become a leader of civil rights protests in the southern town of Montgomery, Dr King tried to work out how he could use his deep Christian faith to help free black people in the USA from prejudice and discrimination.
It was to Gandhi that he turned to develop his own non-violent, peaceful form of protest as in his own words, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method”. Again, it was a success as great changes were made in the US with the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Act in 1965.
Fridays for the Future 2019
Perhaps the most famous form of peaceful protest in recent decades were the widespread Fridays for the Future Climate protests in 2019. These were a series of worldwide protests including school strikes in this country by teenage school pupils , which had begun the previous year when Swedish school pupil Greta Thunberg staged her own school strike in Stockholm, claiming that it was no use learning things at school, if there her generation were to have no future because of the Climate Crisis. Again peaceful protest could be deemed a success, with for example the UK government declaring a Climate Emergency in 2019 and the issue rising briefly to the top of the political agenda.
Peaceful protest is uniquely powerful
Of course, it is sadly true that peaceful protest is not always successful, as evidenced by brutal crackdowns on peaceful protests in Burma in 2007and Iran in 2009, among numerous other examples.
However, peaceful protests can still be said to be uniquely powerful, in that they are not aimed at anybody, but rather they are aimed at overturning a particular injustice. In this way they can be especially influential, by helping those opposing the protestors to change their mind and see things differently.
As the great advocate of peaceful protest Martin Luther King Jr, put it so eloquently, “nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals .” and “love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Peaceful protest rarely succeeds overnight. However, it is a very successful method if maintained over a long time, as was done by people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps the Home Secretary Shaban Mahmood might like to reflect on that, as she is faced with what to do about Palestine Action. After all, you can imprison peaceful protestors, or even in more extreme cases kill them, but you can’t kill an idea.
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