Rishi Sunak’s crackdown on protests is misguided

“Out of the pscpscroad, please,” said a Metropolitan Police officer to a protester in Camden, a neighbourhood in north London. The protester, an older man with a long grey beard, had not been trying to stop the traffic. He had simply been distracted by crossing the road in misty rain while carrying a large banner that read “Do I look like an extremist?” and talking intently to the officer, who was being painstakingly courteous back. “Here we are chatting and you’re going to get run over,” he said, as he guided the man to the pavement.Pro-Palestinian protesters have marched through London most Saturdays since October, when Israel began bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a murderous attack by Hamas. The protests have varied in size, from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands. On March 2nd a crowd had assembled outside Mornington Crescent Tube station to march to a nearby branch of Barclays bank, which the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (), an activist group, claims has financial ties with suppliers of weapons to Israel. A representative checked that police, waiting in a van, knew the planned route. (He had submitted his plan to the Met online, he said, but wasn’t sure they had received it.)