When 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos addressed last Saturday’s London peace rally for Palestine he confronted some upside-down thinking, and turned it the right way up.

“These are NOT hate marches”, he said, “Quite the opposite! These are NOT no-go areas for Jews…Quite the opposite! A majority of Jews of the world do NOT support Israeli policy…Quite the opposite!”

A good number of Lib Dems attend these Palestine marches each month. We all know the misconceptions spread by journalists and politicians. Few have attended a march, yet they’re happy to label them extremist, pro-Hamas, hate-led, and often predict arrests.

This is tosh. Stephen Kapos is right. These family-friendly, hope-filled events bring together people of goodwill from every race, belief and background, the largest single group being the Jewish contingent. Relations with the police are friendly. I personally haven’t heard racist words or hostility. We are there to protest against genocide and apartheid. To stop arms sales to Israel and find solutions for peace. There is a strong sense of a shared humanity. Is this is considered hate marching? Were the 1980s demos against South African apartheid hate marches? Is it really so radical to show compassion for a suffering people badly let down by the British for more than a century?

The Palestine protest last Saturday (16th May) was probably the most controversial under this Labour government, and it’s worth examining why. Because it was crystal clear that the smearing was coming from – or being supported by – the Prime Minister and the head of London’s Metropolitan Police. In a city proud of its protest rights and traditions this was quite a shocker.

Here’s what happened. May 15 marks the Anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (‘catastrophe’), when half the Arab population of Palestine were expelled by Jews establishing the state of Israel. So the march organisers (Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War Coalition) requested their date from the Met Police early, in December 2025.

No more was heard until March, when the Met informed the PSC/STW that rallying rights in the area round Parliament (the Palestine march’s usual route) had instead been granted to Tommy Robinson and his activists. On the same day! They were actually giving a platform to a far-right nationalist group intent on expelling Muslims from Britain, fighting Islam and inciting civil war (race hate by all definitions and the antithesis of a peace march), and giving them the prime route in London! The pro-Palestine route was sidelined to Kensington-to-Pall Mall.

What’s more, both Starmer and Met Chief Mark Rowley, in an unprecedented blurring of policing and politicising, started publicly misinforming people about the Palestine rally, threatening to curtail or ban it and suggesting it made London unsafe. Rowley even accused the march organisers of choosing march routes near synagogues (totally defamatory) and made the scurrilous claim that the marches were (despite their inclusion of hundreds of Jews) antisemitic.

Further articles are needed to explore who was pushing Rowley into the political arena in this way, and what Keir Starmer’s agenda was. Suffice to say, their messages spread widely via our mischievous right-wing media, playing on people’s fears. “Met to send 4,000 officers to police rival protests” screamed a BBC headline well before the march. The story below told of the police calling for dogs, drones and armoured vehicles “preparing for potential violence and hate speech crimes across two protests.” No mention that it was the police who’d arranged to have both marches the same day.

Would that Rowley and Starmer, and all journalists or MPs on their bandwagon, had actually attended the 200,000-strong Palestine peace march. They could then have spoken with the Jews, the mothers with children, and those who’d travelled far to call for a halt to violence in the Middle East. They could have seen for themselves the usual goodwill and order.

Meanwhile, the vile anti-Muslim rhetoric and insults driving and emanating from the smaller (60,000-attendee) Robinson rally – and the astonishing lack of outrage from government ministers – again needs attention separately. That ‘Unite the Kingdom’ event certainly highlighted the government’s tendency to discriminate between different types of race hate. Whereas ALL race hate is abhorrent to Lib Dems, isn’t it?

Back to Saturday’s Palestine Peace March. If anyone has any doubt how far the state has now encroached on our free speech rights, and on the independence of the police and our media, this is an excellent model to look at.

With all the post-election discussions about fit-for-purpose Lib Dem policies, let’s urge our MPs to be far more vocal in defending our own civil liberties – as well as those of the Palestinian people whom Britain has let down repeatedly for so many years, and who are suffering intolerably.

Let’s also consider what more we members could do to protect these rights while we can. In Stephen Kapos’s words on Saturday, “we must steadfastly resist and stop the direction of travel towards violent authoritarianism now”. And what are liberals for if we’re not engaged at times like this?