On 5th March, Metropolitan Police forced their way into a place of worship and arrested a total of fifteen people, including two legal observers, who were attending a non-violence training session at Westminster Quaker Meeting House.
This police raid took place nearly a year after a similar action which drew condemnation and concern from faith groups at the time. None of the young people arrested at that time were ever charged with anything.
On this occasion, police were very quick to issue a statement referencing plans publicised by Take Back Power for a series of Robin Hood-style performative protest actions, openly removing food from huge corporate supermarkets and redistributing it to the poor. Describing this as conspiracy to commit theft, police said they had “no choice but to act”.
Caroline Nursey, the Clerk of Westminster Meeting House, said: “The Met’s own statement shows that they were aware that the meeting was for training in nonviolent direct action, so this raid and the indiscriminate arrest of everyone present is shocking overreach.”
Oliver Robertson, head of witness and worship for Quakers in Britain, said: “Quakers don’t think people should walk into a shop and take whatever they want. But we do support peaceful nonviolent direct action, including symbolic acts that draw attention to injustice, which is increasingly under threat as successive governments restrict our right to protest.”
Activists and Quaker representatives challenge the claim that the meeting was anything other than a training session in non-violence, and describe the raid as heavy-handed, unnecessary and misinformed.
At yesterday’s protest, around 200 people took part in a silent Quaker meeting of worship outside the New Scotland Yard headquarters of the Metropolitan Police.
Quakers place love at the centre of all their actions, and have a 370-year history of non-violently standing up against injustice and inequality. Recording Clerk of Quakers In Britain, Paul Parker, highlighted the irony that a repressive new Crime and Policing Bill proceeding through Parliament at the moment professes to offer protection to places of worship by banning protest, but that Quakers feel threatened by the way police and state are currently addressing public order issues.
