Why you should oppose Labour’s ban on Al-Quds Day march

The Metropolitan police pushed for the Al-Quds Day ban (Picture: Guy Smallman)

The British state is intensifying its crackdown on the Palestine movement by banning the Al-Quds Day demonstration on Sunday.

You do not have to agree with the politics of the organisers—who support the Iranian regime—to oppose the ban. It is an attack on all of our democratic rights at a time when the British state has faced setbacks in its repression of Palestine activists.

Organisers of the annual march in solidarity with Palestinians will only be allowed to hold a static protest. Anyone who tries to march has been threatened with arrest—in a ban that will be in place for the next month.

Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood approved the request from the Metropolitan Police to ban the Al-Quds Day march. She claimed the action is needed “to prevent serious public disorder, due to the scale of the protest and multiple counter-protests, in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.”

The Labour courts minister, Sarah Sackman, had pressured police to take action. She accused the Al-Quds Day marchers of “calling for hate and hostility against this country”— and being “thoroughly anti-British” in an Islamophobic dog-whistle.

Sackman is in favour of hate and hostility so long as it is against people in other countries.

Last week she refused to call the US massacre of the Iranian school girls a war crime. And in 2024, at the height of Israel’s genocide and Starmer’s support for it, she said “the government had broadly got it right”.

The Al-Quds march has been threatened with counter-protests in the past from far-right groups. There is a possibility that it could be attacked by supporters of Donald Trump’s plans for “regime change” in Iran. The Met police says it does not take sides politically or “prefer one view over another”.

But on 13 September last year the same police force was happy to allow Nazi Tommy Robinson’s supporters to march through London, attacking and harassing anti-racists and bystanders. He is being allowed to march again in May on Nakba Day.

Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine. Al-Quds Day is an international day of solidarity with Palestinians established by Iran’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution. It has been marked in Britain for over 40 years.

The organisers of the march, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, have expressed their support for Iran’s regime.

Tying opposition to the West’s war on Iran to support for the repressive regime is disastrous. It is a barrier to building a broad movement against war and imperialism that mobilises the millions who oppose Trump and Starmer’s warmongering.

Socialist Worker is for the defeat of the US and Israel in the war—and we supported the protests in Iran earlier this year. US and Israeli bombs will not bring liberation to Iran any more than they did to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

But the ban is further evidence that the Labour government wants to shut down solidarity with the Palestinians. It is doing so while it supports Israel’s genocide and allows the US to use air bases in Britain to bomb Iran.

The state is taking anti-racist Kwabena Devonish to court next week on terrorism charges for a speech she gave in 2023.

It is hauling Ben Jamal, Chris Nineham, Alex Kenny and Sophie Bolt through the courts on public order charges.

The Teledyne Four were convicted for their actions at the Teledyne weapons factory in West Yorkshire.

The state is appealing the finding that its ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. This could see 2,700 people tried under the Terrorism Act for holding a written sign expressing support for the group.

Just last week the Met police raided a Quaker meeting house where the group Take Back Power were meeting for non-violent direct action training.

But the British state has not been getting its way on everything. It did lose the judicial review into the ban on Palestine Action—despite changing the judge at the last minute precisely to avoid such an outcome.

The Filton 24 group of Palestine activists—who’d been imprisoned without trial—were released on bail last month. They included those who had been on hunger strike earlier this year.

The British state is now hoping to get on the front foot by banning the Al-Quds Day march. The whole movement should stand against it.

The Stop the War Coalition has said, “It is not necessary to agree with all the politics of Al-Quds Day to know that this is an attack on Palestine and the anti-war movement.

“The Met police citing ‘high numbers of protesters and counter protestors coming together and the extreme tensions between different factions’ could potentially be used to ban any number of demonstrations where there are strongly opposing views.

“It’s impossible not to see this ban as part of a mounting campaign against those who stand against war and for a free Palestine.”