It is false for the Met to equate Tommy Robinson with the peaceful Nakba marchers

For decades, Nakba Day has marked a painful and deeply political moment for Palestinians around the world. The annual commemoration marks the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. 

Today, this catastrophe continues to shape Palestinian life and identity, along with the struggle for justice. 

In London, Nakba demonstrations have long brought together Palestinians, trade unionists, faith leaders, students and human rights campaigners in peaceful mass marches through the capital.

The Metropolitan Police know this. The annual demonstration is neither spontaneous nor unpredictable; it is a recurring civic and political event, one that has been coordinated with police for years.

That is why the Met’s handling of this year’s march is not simply an operational failure. It is a political statement about whose protests, and voices, are acceptable in Britain.

Despite being informed as early as last December that a coalition of Palestinian groups intended to hold their annual Nakba Day march on 16 May, the Met approved a far-right “Unite the Kingdom” mobilisation in central London on the same day, and then restricted the Palestine march’s access to Westminster. 

When I contacted the Met police for a comment, they responded by saying: "discussions with other groups had been ongoing since October. We don’t operate a ‘first come, first served’ approach so timing of first contact is not a relevant factor in our decision making."

They further added: "The Met does not and cannot allocate or reserve parts of central London to any organisation or cause. A protest group cannot expect exclusive access to areas of the city, and no group has a greater claim than any other to a particular location. We routinely use Public Order Act conditions to shape protest routes, assembly points, start and finish times."

The Met insists that "no group has a greater claim than any other to a particular location." By that logic, the decision to route Unite the Kingdom to Parliament Square, while directing the Nakba to the periphery requires an explanation the Met has not provided.

When the outcome favours one side, the principle of equal treatment becomes a shield for unequal practice. The Met cannot simultaneously claim neutrality and then, given the evidence, deliver asymmetric results.

More than 32 MPs and peers, alongside 180 public figures, have accused police of openly favouring the nationalist rally. This is not a scheduling conflict; it is a political choice made by the Met, with a clear message about who belongs near the seat of power and is thus legitimate.

False equivalence

What makes the Met’s framing especially damning is the language in its own official news release, which directs organisers of Unite the Kingdom to “ensure that all content displayed and broadcast … does not include content that is likely to stir up racial or religious hatred”. 

The Met then applies an identical condition to the Nakba march. The implication is unmistakable: the Met deems both demonstrations to carry an equivalent risk of hate speech. 

This is not operational neutrality. It is a false equivalence, and a politically loaded one.

The record makes this equivalence indefensible. The Palestine Coalition has organised more than 35 large protests since October 2023, featuring hundreds of speakers, none of whom have been arrested for hate speech at any of these events. 

Applying hate-speech warnings to a movement with an impeccable track record, while placing it alongside a rally with a documented history of incitement, is not even-handedness. It is a deliberate association of Palestinian solidarity with extremism.

Unite the Kingdom’s record requires no interpretation. At its September 2025 rally, crowds chanted “send them home” and called for the eviction of “Islam from Europe”. Videos circulated of men directing abusive chants at women, with a woman of colour reportedly chased through the streets, and a Palestinian flag destroyed on stage. 

At least 26 police officers were injured and two dozen arrests were made. And yet the Met chose not to deploy facial recognition technology at that rally, while announcing its use for this weekend’s demonstrations. This is the movement it now treats as the moral equivalent of a peaceful annual commemoration of Palestinian dispossession.

The policing operation itself broadcasts the bias. The Met announced that 4,000 officers would be deployed this weekend, with the operation costing around £4.5 million ($6m). For most people reading headlines dominated by costs, helicopters and surveillance technology, the instinctive assumption - an impression almost certainly created by design - is that pro-Palestine demonstrators are themselves a major public order threat.

Symbolism of space

The symbolism of space matters enormously. Westminster is not just another London postcode. Allowing a nationalist mobilisation to occupy Whitehall and Parliament Square, while directing the Nakba march elsewhere, sends an unmistakable message: Palestinian grief and political demands must be managed at the margins - demoted if not silenced - while nationalist xenophobic forces are granted proximity to the heart of state power.

This sits within a broader institutional context that demands scrutiny of the Met. A review last November found that racism within the force was not incidental, but maintained by “institutional design”, alongside an entrenched culture of misogyny. 

Meanwhile, 36 parliamentarians, led by Jeremy Corbyn, have written to Met Commissioner Mark Rowley, demanding that he retract claims made in public that the Palestinian coalition intended to march past a synagogue. In fact, the coalition’s first proposed route, which ran from Embankment to Whitehall and did not pass any synagogues, was rejected because the Met had already allocated the political centre of London to Tommy Robinson and Unite the Kingdom.

True neutrality does not mean treating every movement identically regardless of context, history or political character. Democratic policing requires the ability to distinguish between a movement with 35 peaceful marches to its name, and one associated with xenophobic chanting, racial hostility and documented violence. 

Procedural equality stripped of moral context does not produce fairness. It produces the cover of legitimacy for one side and the shadow of suspicion over the other.; it produces cover, and arguably legitimation, of one side over the other.

Let us be precise about what has happened here. The Met gave the political heart of London to a far-right movement whose supporters chanted “send them home”. It applied hate speech conditions to a Palestinian commemoration that has never once produced a hate-speech arrest. 

That is not neutrality. It is a choice. And choices like this do not merely fail democracy. They make unmistakably clear whose democratic rights are being upheld and whose are being curtailed.