Contribution
My Lords, I welcome the proposed legislation, in particular Clause 124 and Amendment 372, which would ban marches outside places of worship. Except, of course, it would not. It would empower a senior police officer to make a decision specifically if access to those places of worship is being denied to people who desire that access. So, the point the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, made about this meaning you cannot have any marches in London because London is full of places of worship would have been a good point, but it is only where there is going to be access—in other words, specific services—and it is only where a senior police officer makes that decision. I am not sure that that is right.
When there have been complaints about the terrible marches, which I will come on to in a minute, politicians have just put their hands up and said, “Terribly sorry, nothing we can do. It’s not down to us. It’s down to the police”. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in an excellent speech also made the point that we are piling on the legislation, but the police are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, as is. That is my reservation about some of this. It is perhaps for people with better legal abilities and experience than mine to think through how we might circumvent a situation where, for whatever reason and in whatever part of the country, the senior police officer is not taking the action that one might have hoped they would.
I speak also as president of Westminster Synagogue. Westminster Synagogue is on the corner of Rutland Gardens and Knightsbridge, not, as some people think, in the Palace of Westminster. We have had two marches past us recently, both on a Saturday. We negotiated with the police to ensure they did not pass on a Saturday morning, when we had services, but they did pass by us at lunchtime, so we had to abandon our community lunch events. We were told we had to leave the building before we had the lunch that we had planned.
On the second march, the demonstrators stopped some 20 metres away from our building and continued chanting while they stopped marching for some six minutes. It could be audibly heard from inside the building. I am sympathetic to the amendments that want to be specific about marches having be further away from the building than just in the area.
As your Lordships know, each and every one of the marches demonstrating about Gaza has contained vile, antisemitic slogans. These chants are not the sorts of chants we would have heard on British streets over many years, or indeed centuries, in marches by people wanting to express a view. These marches are populated by some calling for the extinction of Jewish life in Israel. On their call for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, I had to explain to my daughter, when we were in Manchester and heard these chants, that that meant the slaughter and eradication of Jews in Israel. Their chants for a global intifada, or even death to the IDF, are chilling.
I salute the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for his anti-apartheid work and his campaigning. I have also marched in campaigns on other issues, but neither of us has called for the eradication of a people. Shockingly, we know that the calls for the death of innocent Israeli and Jewish citizens were answered in Manchester on the holiest day of the Jewish year, and again on Bondi beach on another Jewish festival. Yet, they would do it again. We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot allow anything which accelerates the radicalisation of lone wolves, or even gangs, against our own citizens—and they are being radicalised by these chants.
Of course, many of the people on the marches are no more than useful idiots who have no idea what they are chanting for. When questioned—I have seen a video—about which river and which sea, they have no idea. But others know exactly what they are doing. They are trying to stir up community hate against the indigenous British Jewish population and anyone connected to the State of Israel, which they want destroyed, even to the point of an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill, as we discussed earlier. They are not a response to perceived, although mainly false, injustices in Gaza. We know that to be the case, because the protests started well before the IDF went into Gaza. In fact, the first one in the UK was on 8 October. That was well before any event took place in Gaza, but after the horrific crimes by Hamas in southern Israel.