When news broke over the weekend that two parents had been arrested at their home in Hertfordshire for criticising their child’s school too vigorously, you could be forgiven for thinking that policing in Britain couldn’t sink any lower. Unfortunately, you would be mistaken. Before we even had time to process one dystopian event, it emerged that a handful of supporters of a climate / anti-Israel group had been arrested by the Metropolitan Police at a Quaker Meeting House in central London on Thursday night.
Judging by the severity of the Met’s intervention, you might think the detainees were jihadists planning to blow up parliament or hijack an airplane. In fact, they were members of Youth Demand, an irritating but hardly terroristic organisation opposed to fossil fuels and the Jewish State. According to reports, six women, the youngest of which was 18, met at the Westminster Quaker Meeting House in St Martin’s Lane to plan ‘non-violent civil resistance’ in April. In London, in 2025, it seems that this kind of gathering is serious enough to warrant 20 Met officers, armed with tasers, to force their way into a building owned by a religious denomination committed to peace. All were handcuffed, while photos of the building show a cracked glass door and a broken lock. One of the women had her room in her university halls searched.
They were busted for ‘suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’. The Met have provided no detailed justification for the arrests, beyond alleging that the group plotted to ‘shut down’ the capital through ‘swarming’ and ‘road blocks’. In other words, they were arrested for precrime. This is the same authoritarian statute the Met used to suppress republican protests during the coronation of King Charles in 2023. Police accused campaign group Republic of possessing ‘locking on’ devices, used to chain people to railings and such. The Met had to apologise after it became clear these ‘devices’ were in fact straps used for holding together placards.
Youth Demand does indeed plan to ‘shut down London day after day after day’. That might sound troubling – or at the very least annoying. But, judging by their past efforts, these activists are barely capable of shutting down a high street for 10 minutes. To date, their greatest achievement has been covering a defenceless Picasso with a picture of a Palestinian mother and child at the National Gallery. Youth Demand’s month of campaigning is due to begin tonight in Bloomsbury, where the only people it will be ‘disrupting’ will be a handful of students, academics and second-hand booksellers.
There is no fundamental right to block roads and disrupt everyday life, of course. But, on some level, all protest is disruptive. That’s kind of the point. Plus, investigating and arresting peaceful protesters before they’ve even begun protesting can only have illiberal consequences, greenlighting spying and surveillance.
According to The Times, the officers involved in arresting Youth Demand also interrupted a life-drawing class and a private therapy session, the groups having also hired rooms from the Quakers on the night in question. One wonders if, when police barged into a room, only to encounter a naked model posing on a box, some of them felt as stupid as they now look to the rest of us.
It’s time for the police to stop interfering with our civil liberties – and get back to tackling actual crime.
Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.
