As the Met bruised in

Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers – some armed with tasers – broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza. (Non-violence is a prerequisite for meeting in a Quaker building.) The raid took in therapy classes and life-drawing sessions running in the same building; police went on to raid the student accommodation of some of the arrested women. None has been charged.

Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, objected to the ‘aggressive violation of our place of worship’. ‘No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,’ he said (police harassment of nonconformist meetings was a common experience of the pre-parliamentary labour movement). Police sources have stressed that the raid did not take place during a worship meeting, and that the women arrested had simply hired the space; the distinction does nothing to diminish the sense of violation. The raid ‘shows what happens when a society criminalises protest’, Parker said.

The Met’s statement makes a distinction between the right to protest and activity that ‘crosses the line’ into ‘serious disruption’, citing Youth Demand’s ‘intention to “shut down” London’. Such shutdowns, unless achieved by sheer mass of people, tend to be sporadic and relatively constrained in scope. Deliberate road-blocking and go-slow marches have been a tool in the repertoire of climate activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.

Distinctions between ‘legitimate protest’ and ‘extreme action’ are favoured by both police and politicians, who enjoy paying lip-service to vague British traditions of free dissent while ruling any but the most notional act of protest beyond the pale. The standard Labour ministerial line is that any historic act of struggle was noble and necessary – indeed, they would have manned the barricades themselves – but modern equivalents are the preserve of malcontents and malefactors who deserve a good truncheon or tasering. Perfectly orderly streets, superintended by facial recognition and CCTV, are a policeman’s fantasy, and the preserve of autocracies: citizens of a democracy should be able to express their political revulsion in public.

It has been a long time since London was truly ‘shut down’ by protest, perhaps not since the J18 Carnival Against Capital in 1999. The police action last week recalls the raids, with drawn tasers, of squatted buildings before and after the G20 demo in 2009, for which detained protesters were eventually awarded thousands in compensation for wrongful arrest. But these are memories of a vanished world. New legal restrictions on protest – including powers to search without reasonable suspicion, a statutory public nuisance offence and prevention orders – arrived in a brace of controversial bills passed during the long death rattle of the last Conservative government, though its Labour successor shows no interest in repealing them. They have fundamentally changed the landscape for political protest in the UK.

The protest provisions in the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 were specifically targeted against Just Stop Oil and other climate activists. Under the new statutory public nuisance offence, Roger Hallam, the abrasive (and frequently correct) founder of JSO, was sentenced to five years for discussing a planned airport protest on a Zoom call. JSO recently declared its campaign of controversial direct action over, citing the government’s moratorium on new oil and gas licences as a victory. Another reason may be the number of protesters serving time in already overcrowded prisons. The old common law offence of public nuisance, once used to prosecute major polluters, has been transformed into a tool for the imprisonment of environmental defenders. Yet as society accelerates towards climate breakdown, forms of protest that seek to jam the machine – to pull an emergency brake – are bound to recur.

There is no right of sanctuary in the UK, but there is still something profoundly disturbing about a police raid on a religious building. The British state has typically preferred surveillance, containment and subversion to the more obviously illiberal messiness of outright repression. That it didn’t interrupt an act of worship is hardly a defence: many Quakers see their religious conviction and social activism – which includes providing a welcoming space for the fostering of conscience – as a seamless garment.

The contrast between the thuggish Met and the Quakers of popular imagination has fuelled much of the outrage. Pacific, temperate, egalitarian, avowedly non-violent, the epitome of unimpeachable, quietist radicalism: if the police can do this to the Quakers, what could they do to you?

There’s a touch of condescension in this argument, however useful it is in making clear that one needn’t be guilty to feel the shot-lined glove of the Met. Quakers are a pillar of radical politics in the UK. Their unwavering commitment to peace and non-violence sometimes earns them the derision of fellow travellers peddling dreams of the grand soir or the Winter Palace newly aflame. Too slow. Too idealistic. Yet no less, and often more, than the sectaries of the Marxist left, many have willingly risked imprisonment for protest action. Abolitionism, suffrage, anti-war and anti-nuclear activism, and the fostering of the early workers’ movement are frequently cited strands of their history, sometimes evoked by the British state –in the Life in the UK test for those seeking citizenship, for instance – when it wants to feel good about itself.

Plenty of people have hated the Quakers though. They preserve something of the countercultural strangeness of early Christianity. In a society as class-dominated as Britain, egalitarian behaviour can appear as insolence (‘friend’ is a subversive term of address when it replaces ‘sir’). A suspicion lurks that, as with some other creeds of the English Revolution, disregard for unjust laws and pursuit of the ‘inner light’ might lapse into antinomianism. There is something unsettling about those who refuse to compromise their conscience; the kindly but unyielding commitment of the Quakers can be unnerving.

As the Met bruised into the meeting house, they will have passed one of the famous Quaker peace posters from the 1940s: ‘In fear, re-arm. In faith, disarm. Be not afraid.’ It underlines how strange and challenging the politics of faith can be for those who do not share it. But it is also notable for its willingness to name fear as our motive condition. Fear is general throughout British politics. It animates the government and the press, which inculcates a bitter mistrust among the public, who fear losing more of their diminishing share. The government is afraid of of its own people, its crumbling support, of the punitive powers of the wealthy, and what it imagines to be unshakable prejudices to which it must pander. It knows, under the spin, that its policies – on climate and Gaza, as on war, social security and disability – are unjust. Fear is often the background condition of the beneficiaries of injustice. Fear proclaims that empty streets and silent compliance are the price of freedom.

At the Old Bailey, a mile or so east of the raided meeting house, a plaque celebrates a famous case from Quaker history. Two street preachers were arrested in 1670 for unlawful assembly. The jury refused to convict; the judge, infuriated, locked the jurors up, fining them for contempt of court. Pleas to a higher court established the principle that a jury could not be punished for returning an ‘incorrect’ judgment. The plaque, and some modern activism, celebrates this as a ‘right’ of juries to acquit according to their conscience. A recent attempt to remind jurors of the precedent, especially in climate cases where judges heavily constrain defendants’ ability to talk about the climate crisis, provoked another protracted court battle. (The activist concerned was, of course, supported by Quakers.)

It’s dubious to call jury equity a right, rather than a power available to juries. And it isn’t an intrinsically progressive phenomenon: the power used to acquit fugitive slaves in the US was also used to acquit the architects of lynchings. Wisdom might caution against being too quick to jettison the rule of law, however partial and imperfect it is. Yet it might also observe that we are in a moment of judicial and police overreach, sponsored by those in power without distinction of party.

The women arrested at the Youth Demand meeting were not Quakers. Yet their willingness to link the impacts of climate catastrophe with the occupation, dispossession and slaughter of Palestinians shares the Quakers’ insistent recognition of the absolute equality and dignity of all human beings. The refusal of individuals to compromise the voice of conscience, whether in a jury or on the street, or blocking a convoy, or occupying a factory, is a final bulwark against flagrantly unjust laws. Youth Demand have reported an upsurge of interest in their activism.