This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Police have launched a crackdown on activists previously linked to direct action protests before what is expected to be the largest anti-austerity demonstration of the year.

'This is not the Met police; they haven’t got the brains. I think there’s a political motivation' Lisa McKenzie, an activist with Class War

At least three activists arrested on suspicion of offences at earlier demonstrations have been handed fresh bail conditions forbidding them from attending the protest march on Saturday, sources have told the Guardian.

A fourth activist was arrested on suspicion of offences at an anti-gentrification protest in Brixton in April and released on bail under similar conditions. A fifth attended a police station voluntarily and was not arrested.

Officers are believed to be hunting two more.

Critics have accused the police of staging a politically motivated crackdown before more than 65,000 people are expected to gather in the City for a march against the government’s austerity agenda.

The moves by the Metropolitan police are being seen as an attempt to thwart direct action during the demonstration. In the past year, groups campaigning against austerity and the gentrification of London have gained widespread coverage with a number of stunts.

Lisa McKenzie, an activist with Class War, an anarchist group, said: “There seems to be a massive crackdown. There is some sort of political motivation behind all of this. This is not the Met police; they haven’t got the brains. I think there’s a political motivation to stop this wave of direct action going on all across the city.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The bail form issued by the Metropolitan police.

A spokesman for Liberty, the human rights group, said: “We have seen bail conditions abused by the police in the past to impede the right to protest of people neither charged nor convicted of a related criminal offence. The whole question of lengthy police bail when used as a restriction on protest and even on journalism needs urgent parliamentary attention.”

Police targeted activists from groups including the Brick Lane Debates, the London Black Revolutionaries and Squatters and Homeless Autonomy. The latter group have been behind a wave of occupations of empty buildings in central London.

Saturday’s march, organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, will begin outside the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street and end in a Parliament Square rally.

This week’s arrests follow an article in the last edition of the Mail on Sunday which accused activists of planning violent disruption to the march. The paper sent two reporters to a Brick Lane Debates meeting in Dalston, east London, where it said it uncovered a “riot plot” by activists who were planning to turn the peaceful demonstration “into a rampage”.

One of the arrested activists told the Guardian that the MoS story was mentioned in his interview with police. He was released without charge after being arrested on suspicion of violent disorder outside Downing Street during a demonstration in May.

Katya Nasim, a Brick Lane Debates activist who was named in the story, denied its allegations. She has made a complaint directly to the newspaper after it claimed she called for demonstrators to storm a stage set up for the rally.



“No one proposed at the meeting storming the stage,” said Nasim. “We welcome Saturday’s People’s Assembly demonstration, it looks set to be a massive expression of discontent.

“I think there’s a long history of the rightwing media misreporting and misrepresenting the left and leftwing campaigns. I think it’s politically motivated. In the runup to big demonstrations, it’s quite a classic scenario: the scaremongering in the media and the intimidation of activists.”

Arnie Hill, of the London Black Revolutionaries, who was mentioned in the same Mail on Sunday story, dismissed the newspaper’s implication that it had infiltrated a secret planning meeting of the far-left. “The meeting itself was a public meeting. It was not a conspiratorial meeting as they say,” he said. “All we were talking about was how to make the demonstration more effective.”

Hill said the paper had recycled untrue claims about his involvement in earlier protests. He has complained directly to the paper and is preparing to take up the issue with the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

Neither Nasim nor Hill were among those arrested.



The Metropolitan police said it did not comment on bail arrangements.



