The Far Right 'Hate Marchers' Whipped Up By Suella Braverman

It turned out that the real threat to Remembrance came from the very far-right thugs legitimised by the Home Secretary

So after days of Suella Braverman handwringing about ‘Hate Marchers’ threatening the sanctity of the Remembrance weekend, the real threat to it came from the very far-right mob she personally helped to whip up.

The Metropolitan Police on Saturday faced repeated violence from what they described as “counter protesters”, but which were in reality far-right thugs. 

These thugs, which initially gathered in Whitehall to “protect” the cenotaph from a march that was never planned to pass it in the first place, quickly turned their attention to the very police officers who Braverman just days ago accused of “playing favourites” with the left. 

“There is a remembrance event underway at the Cenotaph,” the Met Police tweeted on Saturday afternoon.

“Officers have… faced unacceptable violence, including people throwing missiles and a metal barrier.

"Those using violence made no effort to use the pavement, which is open along the full length of Whitehall on one side, in order to watch the event taking place. They were solely intent on confronting officers.”

The violence also spilled out across central London, with Met officers coming under repeated attack from far-right groups and football hooligans chanting “England til I die”.

All of this was highly predictable, and indeed was widely predicted from the very moment that the Home Secretary first sought to create a moral panic over the latest protest conducted by pro-Palestinian marchers.

So how did we get here and what, if any, consequences will there be for the violent scenes seen in London today?

---

Glorifying Hatred

Working as I do in Westminster there is rarely a day that passes without some sort of protest, of varying scale, taking place in the area. Sometimes it is difficult to immediately identify the cause of each protest, the vast majority of which go ahead without serious incident and indeed without even being noticed. Indeed the perennial complaint from protest groups is normally about their protest being ignored by politicians and the media.

Today’s march was different. Far from being ignored, the Government and supportive media outlets immediately sought to inflame a culture wat about what they described as a “provocative” protest designed to “desecrate poppy day”.

“The hate marchers need to understand that decent British people have had enough of these displays of thuggish intimidation and extremism,” Braverman tweeted on Monday.

In the end the real “thuggish intimidation and extremism” came largely not from the pro-Palestinian protesters singled out by Braverman, but from the mobs of far-right thugs whose thuggish actions her words helped to inspire.

Now this is not to say that there were not some legitimate concerns about today’s main protest.

It was precisely because previous protests had included some hateful anti-semitic messaging from some protesters, with members of London’s Jewish community feeling intimidated as a result, that it was imperative that today’s protest was managed carefully and that politicians and major media outlets did everything they could to dampen down tensions.

Instead they largely did the opposite. Braverman repeatedly branded the many thousands of protesters “hate marchers”, while writing an opinion piece berating the police for failing to ban the march. Meanwhile Braverman-supporting media organisations did all they could to talk up the possibility of violence and hatred being sparked by pro-Palestinian marchers.

As a result the Met did eventually impose a ban on the Palestine march entering Whitehall (something that was not planned in any case) while refusing to enforce the same conditions on the so-called ‘counter protesters’. The result was the violent clashes seen on Whitehall today.

Most of this was likely avoidable. Had it not been for the excessive attention given to today’s protest, it is unlikely it would have proven such a high-profile target for far-right groups and it is unlikely that we would have seen anything like the sort of ugly scenes we saw across the city today.

The blame for that should lie squarely with the Government but also with those media outlets which sought to deliberately inflame tensions on this issue, to the point of indulging in outright racism.

So will any lessons be learned from this?

Sadly it seems unlikely. As long as we have a Government whose main priority is to whip up divisions within society, rather than to reduce them, then the sorts of ugly scenes we saw in central London today will only be repeated.

Hatred and extremism must always be guarded against and where protesters themselves do indulge in it then it is right that they face the full force of the law.

Yet when politicians use this as an excuse not only to restrict the right to protest, but to actively create the conditions where hatred, extremism and violence can flourish, then all of us are ultimately put at risk.