The latest pro-Palestine march in central London has once again seen the Metropolitan Police come in for criticism for leading Tory MPs and members of the public.
Protesters calling for a ceasefire were videoed clambering on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner above wreaths of poppies, less than a week since Remembrance Day.
A clip circulating on X, formerly Twitter, shows a pro-Palestine demonstrator climbing on the First World War memorial as a police officer tries to tell him to come down. However, no attempt at an arrest was made.
The video, which has been viewed on the social media platform more than five million times, shows an officer in a blue high-vis jacket calling on the protester to get off the memorial, while another protester can be seen much further up the statue waving a Palestinian flag.
As the officer remonstrates with the protester, someone out of shot can be heard shouting “brother, that’s disrespectful”, to which the yob appears to reply “yeah it is, that’s why I done [sic]”.
The Met has since insisted it is powerless to arrest protesters for climbing on statues, however the new Home Secretary James Cleverly told LBC he was considering legislation to prevent the offensive behaviour from taking place again.
The MP for Braintree, who himself served in the Royal Artillery: “We’re going to look at this. We are absolutely determined to look at this. [Veterans minister] Johnny Mercer, a former gunner officer – the Royal Artillery was my regiment as well, that’s my regimental memorial.”
The Home Secretary told LBC: “I’m not going to let my personal feelings cloud my judgment on this but it is clearly wrong, and the police have said that they recognise it is deeply disrespectful for people to climb on war memorials.
“We have made a commitment to review the legislation around public order policing.
“If the police – and 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.”
The march took place on Wednesday as MPs voted on whether or not to back a ceasefire in the Middle East, however it was only organised the day before.
