Police repression is a part of life now activists say after Quaker centre raid

On 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quaker’s meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

“It was a publicly advertised talk,” said Lia, 20, who attended the meeting. “It was a low turnout - six people in total.”

The women were sitting in a circle drinking tea when Lia looked up to see a large group of police pressed against the window.

“Their hats were tapping against the glass,” she told Middle East Eye. “Then, there was a big thud. They kicked down the door, and then the whole room was full of police.”

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The officers seized the women’s laptops and phones, and led them off one by one, some in handcuffs.

“None of us were resisting arrest,” Lia said.

Three of the women were taken to Bromley police station, the others to Kingston, where they were held incommunicado and interrogated in the middle of the night. 

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 stipulates that detainees are permitted an initial phone call, although this right may be delayed in cases relating to serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage.

It is a tactic increasingly deployed against pro-Palestine activists.

Simultaneously, police officers conducted overnight raids on their homes with the keys they confiscated from the arrestees. 

Ella Grace Taylor, another one of those arrested, said she came home to find her room ransacked.

“My bed was stripped. All my things were lying across the floor,” she told MEE.

“We were left this piece of paper that acknowledged they’d been there. It said in small print on the back: ‘If you want to know what's been taken, you have to come to the police station.’”

“We’ve all been having nightmares. When we hear a noise outside or a van go past, there is this sense of paranoia,” she added.

The police are still withholding the women’s phones, laptops and university coursework. 

A threshold's been crossed

According to Youth Demand, police conducted 12 raids targeting its activists over the last week. In addition to the six people detained at the Quaker centre, at least another five members of the group were arrested.

The group said that officers cited "Operation Vulcan" as the policing operation specifically targeting their supporters.

“It does feel like a threshold has been crossed,” said Quaker climate activist Charles Laurie, who is a member of the centre that was raided.

“There was a sign on the door that said, 'Youth Demand Meeting, please ring the bell', and they broke the door down”.

“They wanted to send a message more than they wanted to arrest people,” he added.

When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police told MEE that the arrests and raids were prompted by the group’s calls to "shut London down" over the month of April, using tactics including "swarming" and roadblocks.

They added that the women had been "plotting" the action.

"While we absolutely recognise the importance of the right to protest, we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality," the spokesperson added.

Youth Demand has called for a month of coordinated action in London to “Shut It Down for Palestine”, demanding the UK government halts its arms sales to Israel and raise over £1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) from the “super rich and fossil fuel elite to pay for damages to communities and countries most harmed by fossil fuel burning”. 

The Metropolitan Police said that five of the women have been released on bail and one will face no further action.

'Just a part of life now'

Since its inception, arrests and raids targeting Youth Demand activists have become routine.

”This kind of police repression is just part of life now,” Youth Demand spokesperson Chiara Sarti told MEE, noting that since the group was launched, its members have been targeted with 150 arrests.

The past year has seen a wide-ranging crackdown on peaceful protests, primarily targeting climate and pro-Palestine activists.

A slew of anti-protest legislation, including the Public Order Act 2023 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 have vastly expanded police powers, turbocharged arrests of protesters and criminalised public nuisance, which was previously a common law offence.

According to data from the Metropolitan Police, over 7,000 climate protesters have been arrested in the UK since 2019.

Analysis of the Metropolitan Police’s data by the police watchdog Netpol found that between 14 October 2023 and 31 March 2024, there were 305 arrests made at pro-Palestine protests, 89 of them counter-protesters.

Michel Forst, UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, said the UK is experiencing the biggest crackdown on peaceful protests since the 1930s.

The country now ranks the lowest in western Europe in the global free expression index.

A new report by Netpol found that aggressive policing tactics under new anti-protest laws have “grown so routine and so severe it now amounts to state repression”.

Not an escalation

As part of the crackdown, conspiracy charges are increasingly being used by police to preemptively conduct mass arrests of protesters.

Conspiracy, which is defined legally as two or more people agreeing to break the law, is not a standalone offence. Defendants are charged with conspiring to commit a particular offence, and the penalty is usually in line with that offence.

“This is not an escalation, it's increasingly commonplace,” Netpol spokesperson Kevin Blowe told MEE. “Police increasingly want to shut down protests before they even happen, rather than arresting people for what they’ve actually done.”

In June 2024, dozens of Youth Demand activists were preemptively arrested ahead of a planned protest at the state opening of parliament.

In August, 25 activists from the climate group Reclaim the Power (RTP) were rounded up ahead of a peaceful protest camp near Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire. 

The police stopped their vehicles and seized all their equipment, including wheelchair trackways, toilets and hearing loops. They were arrested under the Public Order Act 2023 for “public order offences relating to interference with key national infrastructure” and conspiracy to "lock on" - a tactic used by protesters that involves attaching themselves to other people, objects or buildings.

“It was completely unprecedented. Camps have been happening for almost 20 years at that point, and never had a camp being shut down with that scale of force before,” an RTP spokesperson told MEE. 

Weeks before the Youth Demand arrests, 15 of the arrestees were charged with “going equipped to lock on”.

“There was no device there that anyone could reasonably describe as a lock on,” the spokesperson told MEE. “Leaflets, string pliers are the devices they were considered to be able to lock on, as well as tent poles.”

The police poured £3m into the operation and deployed over 1,000 officers, drawn from nearly every constabulary in the country.

“The same day they were preparing this operation, there were huge numbers of riots threatening asylum seekers in their accommodation. But they're actually throwing potentially more resources in the region to shut down a peaceful climate camp than they were to protect asylum seekers from far-right riots," the spokesperson said.

According to Youth Demand, its supporters are being heavily targeted as they sit at the intersection between the Palestine solidarity and climate movements.

"Those are the big issues of the moment, and they're the ones the police, media and government are doing their best to shut down," Blowe said.

‘A wake-up call’

For Blowe, this intensifying crackdown is designed to have a "chilling effect", deterring people from engaging in peaceful protests.

"In some ways, fear is the point of the anti-protest legislation that has been introduced,” he said.

But the latest arrests seem to have had the opposite effect. Since Thursday, the number of people signing up to participate in Youth Demand’s "Shut It Down for Palestine" month of action has skyrocketed.

“It's not really deterring people from taking action at all because the key issues, which are the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the prospective environmental disaster, are still there. No amount of fear is going to stop that,” Blowe said.

Far from being cowed by their experience, Lia and Taylor’s resolve is unshaken.

“This is a wake-up call,” Taylor said. “The abuse of these powers to suppress people trying to take a stand against a corrupt system that doesn’t represent our best interests is nothing new… and we have to see this as what it is - an attempt to suppress what they know is working.

“We feel more resolved than ever that we are on the right track, and that these non-violent, disruptive, necessary actions are what it takes to make our government stand up and pay attention.”

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