Met Police: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Climbing on War Memorial Wasn’t Illegal

People stand to observe a two minute silence to commemorate Armistice Day at the Royal Artillery Memorial in London on Nov. 11, 2020. Ben Stansall/AFP

Pro-Palestinian protesters, who climbed a war memorial in central London on Wednesday did not break the law, the Metropolitan Police has reported.

A dispersal order was in place across parts of the City of Westminster on Wednesday evening, as groups of protesters were demonstrating outside the Houses of Parliament and around Hyde Park Corner.

The police issued a response after video footage of protesters climbing on the Royal Artillery Memorial surfaced online.

The authorities acknowledged that climbing or otherwise disrespecting a war memorial, which commemorates soldiers killed in the First World War, is “unacceptable.”

The police have “made every effort to prevent” such incidents in recent days, said the Met police statement.

“There is no law explicitly making it illegal to climb on a memorial so officers cannot automatically arrest, but they can intervene and make it clear the behaviour isn’t acceptable. The videos shared online show them doing that,” the police said.

Videos clips shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, appear to show some police officers present at the scene before the protesters had climbed the memorial.

However, according to the Met, the police officers regrettably were “not there quickly enough to prevent the protesters accessing the memorial.”

Police Powers

Reacting to the incident, the newly appointed Home Secretary James Cleverly said that the government will review the legislation around public order policing.

Speaking to LBC, Mr. Cleverly, who before the recent Cabinet reshuffle served as the foreign minister and had visited both the West Bank and Israel in the past few months, said: “I’m going to look at this in real detail–if the police need more powers to make sure that really deeply distasteful, provocative things like that do not happen for the public good, because of course this is about making sure it doesn’t stimulate violent action or any kind of violent responses, but if we need to take action specifically to give police more powers, we are looking at doing that.”

He added that it was “clearly wrong” and “deeply disrespectful” to climb on war memorials.

Having served in the Royal Artillery regiment himself, Mr. Cleverly assured the public he wouldn’t let his “personal feelings cloud his judgment.”

Mr. Cleverly’s predecessor, Suella Braverman, had criticised the police’s handling of recent pro-Palestinian protests in London. Her comments appeared in a Times article, not authorised by Downing Street.

Having branded the pro-Palestinian protesters as “hate marchers,” Ms. Braverman argued that the Met police were biased for allowing a protest on Armistice Day.

Her inflammatory rhetoric has been criticised by some for stoking up tensions and encouraging hundreds of self-styled “patriots” to turn up on Saturday, supposedly in order to protect the Cenotaph. In the event, they just ended up clashing with the police.

Under Ms. Braverman, the police were given emergency powers to counter violent or distressing behaviour at protests.

From May 3 police officers could stop and search protesters, and seize objects such as lock-on devices that may be used in the commission of a protest-related offence.

The Public Order Bill was enacted following climate protests in which activists attached themselves to roads, railings, other objects, or each other with glue or so-calling locking on devices to frustrate the police’s effort to remove them quickly.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said that Labour would “look at the legal framework” around the protection of war memorials. She called the Wednesday protest “totally awful.”

“Our war memorials need to be protected,” she told a policing conference in Westminster on Thursday.

Commenting on Ms. Braverman’s rhetoric, Ms. Cooper cautioned against a “spiral of disrespect between policing and between the Home Office ministers.”

The police should keep monitoring Islamophobic and antisemitic hate incidents, which fall under the criminal threshold, the shadow home secretary added.