OVER 450,000 marched for a Gaza ceasefire in London at the weekend, standing up to increasingly shrill demands that the demonstrations be banned.

The huge mass of people proceeded peacefully to the agreed rally point outside the US embassy. 

At the rally, concluded movingly with beautiful singing from Welsh singer-songwriter Charlotte Church, crowds listened to an all-women platform chosen to honour International Women’s Day the day before. 

Their voices for peace and humanity contrasted starkly with a week of calls from men in high places, amplified by our obsequious mass media, for police to crack down harder on the peace movement and politicians commit not to engage with it. 

The problem facing unelected bullies like John Woodcock (the government’s adviser on political violence, which has been entirely absent from these demos) and Robin Simcox (the adviser on a rather partisan conception of “extremism”) is that nobody who has encountered this peace movement — and the combined figure for national and local actions will be in the millions — will believe in the bogeyman they conjure up. 

There is nothing hateful or intimidating about these marches, and with the Prime Minister himself trying to scaremonger about threats to democracy from political Islam it is vital we shout the truth from the rooftops: the movement in solidarity with Palestine is multicultural, welcoming, proudly of the left.

This week we will learn more about government plans to exclude groups it considers extremist from public life. 

Communities Secretary Michael Gove, tasked with drawing up guidelines for a crackdown on organisations deemed to “undermine liberal democracy,” has alarmed even Tory MPs because of the potential consequences for free speech. 

But we cannot leave it to MPs to protect our freedoms from this government. This parliament has waved through successively more authoritarian policing laws, all of which the Labour so-called opposition says it will keep on the statute books. 

When it comes to censorship, Labour has been even quicker than the Tories to demand the “wrong” narratives be taken off air and was first to demand bans on foreign-owned media outlets like RT for spreading “disinformation,” revealing a patronising contempt for ordinary people’s ability to make up their own minds.

Most Tories who raise a hue and cry over freedom of speech view this very selectively, opposing “woke” policing of debate at universities while promoting restrictions on Palestine solidarity at the very same institutions.

Much of the left has displayed similar double standards, admittedly. That only underlines the importance now of consistent opposition to the British state — whether administered by the Conservatives or Labour — defining what forms of political expression are acceptable and which are “extremist” for opposing “liberal democracy.”

The politicians posing as democracy’s defenders are its most serious enemies. They are the ones trying to rid us of time-honoured rights — in the name, moreover, of shielding political decision-makers from public opinion, which is overwhelmingly for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Gove’s explicit mission, to suppress organisations which oppose the British political system, logically extends to delegitimisation of socialist and communist politics even if the current, in Britain largely fictitious, target is political Islam. Keir Starmer’s Labour, since it has prioritised the delegitimisation of its own socialist members for the last four years, will be no less dangerous on this score.

And further limitations on protests — such as longer mandatory warning periods — would affect not just the peace movement, but the kind of spontaneous feminist mobilisations against police violence that followed the murder of Sarah Everard, or the national demonstration trade unions are committed to in the event of a union or union member being penalised under the new anti-strike laws.

The Palestine solidarity movement is on the front line right now, but the whole of the left faces debilitation unless we can forge a united resistance.