Politics Around the Kitchen Table
I spent last Thursday evening at home. There were a few of us – some friends, some family. We had an impromptu meal, a last-minute concoction with leftovers from the fridge. As we ate, we talked, debated, and consoled each other. There was discussion about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget, Peter Oswald’s Pilgrimage for Palestine and the ongoing bloodshed in Ghazzah. We talked about JSO’s ‘Hanging up the Hi-Viz Jackets’ announcement, Greenland, and the ominous arrest of Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk by US security services in Boston.
With energies drained, we turned to the past, walked back through time, keen to find examples of collective resistance. We spoke about episodes such as the 1984 Miners’ Strike, and the twenty-year peace camp at Greenham Common. We remembered speaking with Srdja Popovic, whose student movement helped topple Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, and meeting Gene Sharpe, a leading academic who was described as the ‘world’s foremost expert on nonviolent revolution.’ By now it was dark outside. The table was cleared, the dishwasher loaded. Friends waved goodbye, and I went to bed.
A few miles down the road, half a dozen people were in police custody.
Like me, they began their evening discussing the genocide in Ghazzah and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. They talked about the vulnerability of people living in the Global South, and the deteriorating climate crisis.
These concerned citizens gave up their evening to take stock of our fractured world and reflect on what could be done to change course. They never made it home that night.
The Meeting on St Martins Lane
The meeting time and venue had been posted widely on social media. This was an open gathering (you or I could have attended) organised by Youth Demand, a movement campaigning to end the genocide in Palestine.
By 6:30pm people started to arrive. It was a small group, and some of the attendees knew each other. There were two newcomers. People settled into seats and the discussion began.
“We are a civil resistance organisation. We hold Welcome Talks regularly, during which we cover the history of civil resistance around the world and in this country, the role it can play in effecting social change and why we have a responsibility practicing civil resistance when our government is complicit in a genocide” a Youth Demand spokesperson told me.
Thursday’s meeting was held at the four-storey Quaker Meeting House on St. Martin’s Lane, London. The Quakers have used the building since 1883 and services of worship are held there on Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Meeting rooms can be hired when not in use. Inside, rooms are plainly decorated – white walls with waist-high modest wooden panelling and functional parquet flooring. The building’s aesthetics are all about equality, peace, and harmony, the very values of the Quaker movement.
It is a shame no one told the Metropolitan Police, who at 7:15pm smashed through the front door and stormed the building.
“They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first,” said Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain.
Approximately 30 officers, some armed with tasers, moved through the building at speed. It was deliberately noisy and designed to intimidate. The officers entered the meeting room and advised all six attendees they were under arrest for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.’
Textbooks and House Raids
Lia, one of the six arrested, would later release a video about her detention. She speaks of the meeting being open to the public and well publicised, of her phone, laptop and bizarrely her notebook containing French coursework being taken as evidence. She was held in a police cell and interviewed at midnight. At 1am, the house she shares with four female students was raided. She ends the video by calling out the police for using scare tactics, and re-affirming her right to go to a public meeting.
Lia’s house wasn’t the only one to be raided.
“The people who were arrested at the meeting had their houses raided while they were in custody. At 2 a.m. the police went to the student halls where one of the arrestees lives, others had their parents’ houses raided during the early hours of Friday” shared the Youth Demand spokesperson.
By Friday morning, the six arrestees from the Quaker Meeting House had all been released pending further investigation. A further three arrests of Youth Demand supporters, stretching from Cambridge to Exeter, were made during the day. In the 24 hours ending Friday evening, police had raided a total of 12 homes.
Of the two newcomers to Thursday’s Welcome Talk, one is now assumed to have been a tabloid journalist.
On Friday evening Paul Parker released an official statement on behalf of the Quakers:
“Quakers support the right to nonviolent public protest, acting themselves from a deep moral imperative to stand up against injustice and for our planet. Many have taken nonviolent direct action over the centuries from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage and prison reform. No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory.”
It is also claimed that the police forcibly entered the living quarters of two Quaker officials, who reside at the Meeting House, during the raid on the building.
“It’s scattergun, no rhyme or reason. They [the police] had no legal justification whatsoever. It’s pure intimidation” commented the Youth Demand spokesperson on the police arrests.
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©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
