LONDON (Palestine Foundation Information Center) “We strongly condemn police attempts to stop an agreed march for Palestine from protesting at the BBC on 18 January,” the Palestine Coalition organizations in the UK said in a statement on Friday.
It pointed out that “The route for the march was confirmed with the police nearly two months ago and as agreed with them, was publicly announced on 30 November. This route has only been used twice in the last 15 months of demonstrations and not since February 2024. With just over a week to go, the Metropolitan Police is reneging on the agreement and has stated its intention to prevent the protest from going ahead as planned.”
“The BBC is a major institution – it is a publicly-funded state broadcaster and is rightly accountable to the public. The police should not be misusing public order powers to shield the BBC from democratic scrutiny,” the statement elaborated.
It said, “The excuse offered by the police is that the march could cause disruption to a nearby synagogue which is not even on the march route. As the Met Police have acknowledged, there has not been a single incident of any threat to a synagogue attached to any of the marches. Any suggestion that pro-Palestine marches are somehow hostile to Jewish people ignores the fact that Jewish people have been joining the marches in their thousands.”
“The rights to protest and free speech are precious. It is not acceptable in a democratic society that, in the face of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, people should be barred from protesting at the BBC. We call on the police to drop their objections and allow the protest to go ahead as planned,” the statement concluded.
