Pro-Palestine march will be one of UK’s biggest ever protests, organisers predict

The organisers of the pro-Palestine march due to take place on Armistice Day believe “hundreds of thousands” of people will turn out for what they say will be one of Britain’s biggest days of mass protests after the row over whether the event would be banned.

Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a lead organiser of the protests, said he understood that people would be travelling from all over the UK to march on Saturday from Park Lane towards the US embassy in south west London.

On a stage set up near where Nine Elms becomes Battersea Park Road, speeches will be made by the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the actors Juliet Stevenson and Maxine Peake, and the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot, among others.

“We think it is going to be huge”, Jamal said.

There is little doubt among senior officers that there will be flashpoints at various times through Saturday, with concerns about the risk of groups splintering off from the main march to make trouble, or that far-right groups could seek to exploit the occasion.

The organisers’ request for two end points for the march, in order to alleviate the pressure on their 500 stewards, was declined on Thursday, although they remained confident that the event would still pass off peacefully.

People are being asked to assemble at about midday on Saturday at Park Lane before starting the march at 12.45pm. The route goespast Grosvenor Place and Victoria, then over Vauxhall Road and on to Nine Elms and past the US embassy. Marchers will be asked to disperse at 4pm.

The Met police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has triggered the mutual aid system under which 1,000 officers are being called up from outside London, and public order units and other response sections of the Met have had leave cancelled.

Rowley has said he is keeping a close eye on any new intelligence that suggests there are new grounds for seeking a banning order from the home secretary under section 13 of the 1986 Public Order Act.

As with similar previous protests, the march will have conditions imposed upon it under section 12 of the act, meaning that any protesters who diverge from the agreed route from Hyde Park could be liable to a fine of up to £2,500.

Rishi Sunak said he has been assured by Rowley that the Met would be able to avoid “serious public disorder”, with the government seemingly happy to pin blame on Britain’s most senior police chief in the event of disaster.

The march has been organised by a coalition of groups: the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War and CND.

The chief steward of the protest, Chris Nineham of Stop the War, had the same role for the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest against the invasion of Iraq. He will be directing a team of 500 volunteer stewards on Saturday.

Since Hamas triggered the war with Israel on 7 October by killing 1,400 people and taking approximately 240 hostages, there has been a series of marches and assemblies in London and around the UK calling for a ceasefire. The largest attracted 100,000 people, according to police.

Nineham said: “This will be far and away the biggest of these series of demonstrations. I know it’s going to be a lot bigger than that. Just one coach agency in the north of England has booked 250 coaches for the demo. That’s just one agency.”

He said a complicating factor was that people would not be able to congregate in Hyde Park because of the Winter Wonderland event.

Nineham also raised concerns about the government’s rhetoric making it more likely that there could be trouble on the margins of the protest, with the founder of the English Defence League among those on the far right seeking to mobilise supporters into central London.

“I think both politically and practically we’re operating in difficult circumstances”, Nineham said. “Partly because, obviously, the government is trying to demonise us and telling lies about haters and stirring up, quite deliberately, opposition to us and that has been their call in a way, some kind of call to arms, that has actually been answered by Tommy Robinson.”

Jamal said many of the stewards were highly experienced. “You never know what the response is going to be, but when we organised the first one we had about, our estimate is, 150,000 people turned up so we are in the terrain of very, very big responses and that means a huge logistical exercise with lots of regular liaison [with the police] to make sure that that can all take place”, he said.

The UK’s former top counter-terrorism officer Neil Basu, a close friend of Rowley, said there had been remarkably few arrests at previous marches but that the home secretary, Suella Braverman, had made it more likely that there could be significant disturbances by claiming the police applied “double standards” in their treatment of the far right and the pro-Palestine “mobs”.

Basu said that it should be possible to differentiate between those who support Hamas, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and “people who want to support innocent people, who do not support terrorists”.

He told the BBC: “I’m looking at how many people have been arrested for exactly the kind of hate that I’ve just described, compared to the number of people who haven’t …

“When you look at the proportions, those marches are not full of hateful [people], and she [Braverman] uses the term Islamist. As the head of counter-terrorism, we use that word to describe people who have perverted Islam into a political ideology to support a terrorist cause. You’re not telling me that hundreds of thousands of people who have marched, are supporting that cause.”