Counter-protest group boycotts PSC march over ‘police-managed pen’ restrictions

Stop the Hate accuses Met of using its presence to confine and suppress Jewish protesters

Stop the Hate UK has announced it will not mount an official counter-protest at this weekend’s national march organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). The group said the move is “a refusal, not a withdrawal”, accusing the Metropolitan Police of using its attendance to justify increasingly restrictive measures on Jewish demonstrators.

In a statement released on Thursday, the group said Jewish counter-protesters had been repeatedly forced into a police-designated “Jewpen” – an isolated pen surrounded by a widening “sterile area” that pushes them further from the route of pro-Palestinian marches. Stop the Hate said the arrangement “violates our Article 11 rights to freedom of assembly” and is now being used as a “pretext to arrest unaffiliated Jewish activists elsewhere along the route”.

The group claimed officers had adopted “two-tier policing”, alleging that stringent restrictions apply to Jewish protesters while pro-Palestinian marches “receive extraordinary leniency”, despite what they described as “consistent hate speech and disorder”. They compared the situation to the Met’s decision to ban elements of a farmers’ demonstration and prohibit a UKIP march, while “refusing to enforce conditions” on anti-Israel protests outside St John’s Wood synagogue earlier this week.

Police next to protestors outside St John’s Wood synagogue (Credit: Twitter/@Habibi_UK)

Stop the Hate said it would not “legitimise a system that corrals us for convenience”, announcing it would withdraw its official presence in order to remove the designated area that police “rely on to contain Jewish voices.” Instead, the group urged supporters to demonstrate “wherever you choose, freely and lawfully, without being forced into a police-managed pen”.

The organisation insisted the decision was “a reassertion of our democratic rights, not an abandonment of them”, adding: “Jewish Londoners must be allowed to stand against antisemitism without being kettled, sidelined, or silenced.”