Defending the right to protest means defending it for everyone

Earlier this week the UK government approved a request from the Metropolitan Police to ban the al-Quds Day march. The Met requested the ban due to safety concerns. They also said the march’s organisers were “supportive of the Iranian regime”. We have issue here, not with any of these suggestions, but rather with the idea that they are grounds enough for an outright ban, which can easily then be used against others later.

Al-Quds Day – named after the Arabic word for Jerusalem – was first held in Iran shortly after the 1979 Revolution. It was created by the then leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to show Iran’s solidarity with Palestinians and to emphasise Jerusalem’s importance to Muslims. Events for the day, which is now held worldwide, typically on the last Friday of Ramadan, are often accompanied by venomous anti-Zionist and anti-Israel sentiment. The London march – which has taken place for many years now – is organised by the UK al-Quds Committee, which comprises several organisations, with the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) playing a central role.

The organisers insist the event is peaceful. In the past, however, the Met say there have been “arrests for supporting terrorist organisations and antisemitic hate crimes”.

Whether the march would be more violent than other protests is impossible to say. What is certainly true, however, is the connection to Iran. Some of those involved do not hide their admiration for the Iranian regime. The IHRC recently described Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former leader of Iran killed in an Israeli/US airstrike two weeks ago, as a leader who “resisted oppression and stood on the right side of history”. This about someone who presided over the brutal massacre of tens of thousands of protesting Iranian citizens this year alone.

Yet it is not illegal in this country to express support for the Iranian government. It may be deeply distasteful, but distasteful and illegal are not the same thing.

Levels of violence are also difficult to predict and all protests inevitably carry risks. At the march organised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson in September 2025, 26 police officers were injured while policing a demonstration that brought 150,000 people onto the streets of central London. Twenty-four people were arrested. It was likely clear in advance that there would be some violence, but the march still went ahead. Ultimately, we have laws in place to criminalise violence and to legislate against incitement and hate speech. These laws aren’t suspended during protests and they should be used and are used.

This is the first time a march has been banned in London since 2012, and a static protest will take place instead. The Metropolitan Police have been keen to emphasise that the decision was not taken lightly: the Commissioner Mark Rowley says that he recognises the importance of the right to protest and freedom of speech. We can only hope this ban is as unique as he and the government say.

Unfortunately, the broader atmosphere provides little reassurance. Successive laws in the UK have chipped away at the right to protest. And now we have more and more instances of the “heckler’s veto”, a situation in which any group can shut down an event simply by citing a threat of disorder. A film about the far right was cancelled at the Southbank Centre in 2024, for example, because of fears of violence from extremists; Maccabi football fans were banned from an Aston Villa game citing safety (it later transpired the evidence was manipulated). It’s a slippery slope here, where banning one event on safety grounds creates a precedent to ban more.

It’s useful to look to history here for other examples. Perhaps no better is Skokie. In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America – a group of self-styled Nazis – planned a march through Skokie, a town near Chicago. Skokie was home to around 40,500 Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors. When the town denied the group a permit, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stepped in. One of their lawyers, a Jewish man named David Goldberger, chose to represent the Nazis on free speech grounds. The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in ACLU’s favour. The march was permitted.

In the end, it was a pathetic affair. The Nazis moved their demonstration from Skokie to Chicago. Around 20 members turned up for a rally that lasted barely 10 minutes. They were met by roughly 2,000 counter-protesters. With hindsight, most agree it was the right decision to allow the march. The Nazis were allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights, but they failed to persuade anyone of their message. Nor were they granted the underdog status they might have exploited to attract sympathy and support. At the time though, ACLU’s position was deeply unpopular. Many were outraged that the principle of free speech was being evoked in the name of Nazism. ACLU lost members. It was not an easy case to fight.

Today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. Across the political spectrum and across the world, people are marching – some for causes that align closely with universal human rights and others that do not. In some instances, the causes being championed are in fact in direct opposition to freedom of expression.

More worrying still, illiberal causes are increasingly being cloaked in the language of human rights and social justice. Some protest movements borrow the vocabulary of tolerance while aligning themselves with groups or regimes that have little regard for it. A report released this month even exposed several UK charities as having links to the Iranian regime. Some protests don’t even hide the language of hate and instead seek to justify it in the name of an otherwise worthy cause.

We must be clear-eyed about the nature of certain protests. But we can still argue that they should be allowed to go ahead. As with Skokie, it is often better to allow people their moment in the open – where their views can be scrutinised and challenged, and policed when they do cross a legal threshold – than pre-emptively stopping them altogether.

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