The Socialist Equality Party condemns the attack on the Youth Demand organisation and demands the release and dropping of all charges against its members and supporters arrested over last Thursday and Friday by London’s Metropolitan Police.
The raid on the group’s publicly advertised meeting at Westminster Quaker Meeting House, a little over half a mile from Downing Street, is a major escalation in the Starmer Labour government’s assault on democratic rights. Up to 30 police officers, some armed, smashed their way into the meeting at St Martin’s Lane, central London Thursday evening (March 27).
Police made six arrests of women attendees during the raid, on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, and a further five Youth Demand supporters at other locations, mostly their homes, on Friday. In total the police conducted 12 house raids within 20 hours.
According to a Sky News report Sunday, five of those arrested Thursday have been released on bail, with one reportedly facing no further action. The additional five arrested Friday have been released on bail.
Youth Demand, set-up in 2024, is an environmental and political activist group. Its Westminster meeting was to plan “non-violent civil resistance actions” in April. A statement issued by the group on Friday explained:
“At around 7:30pm yesterday, over 30 Metropolitan Police officers crashed into the Youth Demand Welcome Talk at the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster and arrested six people, including one attending their first ever welcome talk and a journalist… Police said that they were arresting people for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.”
After forcing their way into the Quaker’s building the police were confronted, as described by the Times, by “a group of women, aged between 18 and 38,” who “were sitting in a circle eating hummus and bread sticks”.
One of those arrested, Ella Grace-Taylor, aged 20, said the meeting had been discussing the 1963 peace march in the US against racial segregation in Alabama when they were alerted to “massive banging”. “Someone in the room saw a police officer through the window and two seconds later dozens of police swarmed. An officer grabbed my arm, turned me around to face the wall and placed me in handcuffs. Some of the others were sitting down, not doing anything, not resisting, and they were also put in cuffs.”
Following her arrest, Ella was held at a police station for than 12 hours and not allowed to telephone her parents or a solicitor. Her home was raided by police a few hours later. Ella added, “None of us slept”. “I came home at 6am and my bed was stripped and my neatly organised homework was strewn all over the floor.”
Police also confiscated possession of the arrested including laptops and phones. One of the arrested students had their dissertation, written in French, in their rucksack, which was seized.
Westminster Quakers Meeting House holds many regular events. The same evening rooms were being used, according to the Times, “for private counselling sessions and a life drawing class”. Even these rooms—which had nothing to do with the Youth Demand gathering—were searched by the cops.
Police broke into the Quaker Meeting House despite it being a place of religious worship. It is also home to two Quaker wardens.
Mal Woolford, an elder warden at the Westminster meeting house condemned the police operation as “ridiculously heavy-handed” and said officers “flooded the building”. He noted “Apparently, not all of them [targeted by the police] were even involved with the organisation; they were just curious, and they ended up in handcuffs.”
The Quakers have facilitated meeting rooms for environmental, peace groups and left-wing groups for well over a century. An official statement responded, “Quakers in Britain strongly condemned the violation of their place of worship,” as “a direct result of stricter protest laws removing virtually all routes to challenge the status quo.”
Police, “some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House.
“They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.”
Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, noted that up unto that evening, “No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory… This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.”
Since its formation, as part of an umbrella body—including Just Stop Oil, Assemble, and Robin Hood—Youth Demand has been subjected to a concerted state attack.
In April 2024, in protests at Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s genocide, Youth Demand members laid children’s shoes and hung a banner that said “Starmer stop the killing” outside his north London home—which was also surrounded with red hand prints. Three protesters, aged between 21 and 24 were found guilty at a trial in June of public order offences.
Two more members of the group were arrested the following month after spray-painting “180,000 killed” on the pavement in front of the Cenotaph near Downing Street.
Dozens more were arrested in London on the day of the State Opening of Parliament in July last year on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
This law was enacted under the previous Conservative government in June 2022, under section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. The Act created a new statutory offence of intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance, codifying and abolishing the old offence of common law public nuisance. Those convicted under Section 78 can face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Rabah Kherbane, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers noted in an article that just in the few months, “Since its introduction… the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] had by the end of 2022 issued at least 201 charges of statutory public nuisance aimed at individuals participating in protest action…
“The common law offence of public nuisance was traditionally, and frequently used to prosecute significant environmental offences. This included air pollution and the release of noxious substances by corporations or individuals that caused real harm to the general public.
“There is no irony lost in the fact the same offence in statutory form is now being zealously deployed to prosecute environmental protestors.”
What is now underway is the utilisation of the legislation to criminalise thought and break-up peaceful political activity before any action has even taken place—based only on a “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”—and all determined by the police.
The attack on Youth Demand follows just weeks after mass arrests at a March for Palestine demonstration in the capital and the persecution of its organisers in the Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The Starmer government has intensified the repression begun by the Tories against those opposed to war and austerity, particularly targeting left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist individuals and groups.
Workers and youth should study the Socialist Equality Party statement, “No to Starmer’s war and austerity government—fight for socialism!” published just three days before the youth group arrests. We explained: “War means the militarisation of the economy and gutting social spending on welfare, local services, education and the National Health Service and this cannot be carried out through democratic means. Like rearmament in the 1930s, war today will be accompanied by a shift to the dictatorial forms of rule pioneered by Trump in the US. This is prefigured by Starmer’s deploying police-state measures against those protesting the Gaza genocide.”