Tag Archives: Religion

Backlash continues over police raid on Quaker Meeting House

Posted on by symonhill

Churches Together in England (CTE) have become the latest organisation to criticise the police raid on Westminster Quaker Meeting House.

CTE are a bit late to the party, given that a full two weeks passed between the raid on 27th March and the CTE statement on 10th April. Nonetheless, given that CTE includes Christians with such a range of views, and that as a body it’s not exactly known for progressive positions, the statement is very welcome.

CTE have asked for a meeting with the Metropolitan Police and called for “an appropriate review by the police and its accountability structures”. While police “accountability structures” are weak to the point of barely existing, it would be interesting to see what comes out of a meeting between CTE, the Quakers and the Metropolitan Police.

If you’re not yet aware of this incident: at least 20 police broke down the door of Westminster Quaker Meeting House on the evening of 27th March. They swarmed through the building and arrested six young women attending a welcome talk by the nonviolent protest group Youth Demand.

Police also entered the other rooms in the building, including a room being used by a life drawing class and – staggeringly – a room hosting a private counselling session.

Youth Demand is not a Quaker group. However, they share with many Quakers a commitment to nonviolent direct action, in this case over climate change and war in Gaza.

Quaker Meetings were frequently broken up by the authorities in the seventeenth century. Now as then a place of worship has been attacked by violent representatives of the state seeking to stop peaceful people from acting on their conscience.

There has been coverage of the Meeting House raid in many places, including on the front page of the Sunday Times on 30th March. Personally I have written about it for the Morning Star and for Premier Christianity.

Other critics of the police raid on the Meeting House include Christian Aid, the Green Party, several MPs and members of the House of Lords and even Jacob Rees-Mogg.

The much shorter list of people who have refused to condemn or even question the raid includes Yvette Cooper, the Labour Home Secretary.

Police raid Quaker place of worship hosting campaign group’s welcome talk

Posted on by symonhill

On Thursday 27th March, at least 20 police officers broke down the door of a place of worship in central London and arrested young people who belong to a peaceful protest group.

New anti-protest laws have in recent years allowed the police to become ever more heavy-handed and anti-democratic in their approach to protest. Raids on people who are planning direct action – and not even doing it – have become more common.

Nonetheless, the police attack on Westminster Quaker Meeting House (pictured right) is particularly alarming for several reasons.

Firstly, the event was described by Youth Demand as a “welcome talk“ that was “publicly advertised”, to discuss protests against the genocide in Gaza. In other words, this event was open to anyone. That includes people with no experience of taking part in, or even talking about, civil disobedience or direct action. Anybody who went along out of interest may very likely be frightened of attending any political meeting again. This is police intimidation.

Secondly, it seems you can now be raided for having conversations about actions that you might take. Given that this was a welcome meeting, it is disingenuous for the police to imply that everyone there was in the middle of some sort of high-level planning of mass disruption. The police comment given to the media focused on what “Youth Demand have stated” their intentions to be. This is very different to everyone present being intent on taking part in such things. Given that the police raided other Youth Demand members’ homes in London and Exeter, it seems that they were attempting not only to arrest certain members of Youth Demand but also to intimidate all the others.

Thirdly, the police have raided a place of worship. Apologists for the police have been quick to jump on social media and point out that the people arrested were not Quakers (or at least, probably not Quakers). This is irrelevant. Quakers have a strong theology of not separating the “sacred” and the “secular”, so they do not believe their buildings to be more sacred than other places. This is also irrelevant, however. Religious groups expect their buildings to be places of safety and welcome; those who visit them should be able to expect this (speaking personally, Westminster Quaker Meeting House was a great place of welcome and community to me after I nervously moved to London 20 years ago). Westminster Quaker Meeting House is also the home of two Quaker wardens, who have now experienced the violation of their home by the police.

The police are clearly abandoning the sort of sensitivity and caution that might once have made them reluctant to break into a place of worship. A statement from Quakers in Britain described the incident as “an aggressive violation of our place of worship”.

Of course, this whole incident cannot be understood without the context of the genocide in Gaza, which is enabled by Keir Starmer’s government. Like the Tory government before them, they are happy to arm Israeli troops killing civilians in Gaza and Saudi troops killing civilians in Yemen – and many other vicious regimes around the world. The young people arrested in Westminster Quaker Meeting House were not planning violence. They were seeking to resist violence.

This police raid seems fairly clearly to be an attempt to deter people from taking part in Youth Demand’s upcoming protests. For this reason if for no other, let’s make sure we support them! Tessa, a member of Youth Demand speaking outside Bromley Police Station yesterday insisted that “this blatant act of intimidation by the Met Police” would not stop them.

Among other things, it is vital that religious groups condemn the police’s behaviour and their violation of free speech, freedom of assembly and religious liberty. This time it was a Quaker Meeting House. Next time it could be a church, mosque, temple or synagogue.