When news broke over the weekend that two parents had been arrested at their home in Hertfordshire for criticising their child’s school too vigorously, you could be forgiven for thinking that policing in Britain couldn’t sink any lower. Unfortunately, you would be mistaken. Before we even had time to process one dystopian event, it emerged that a handful of supporters of a climate / anti-Israel group had been arrested by the Metropolitan Police at a Quaker Meeting House in central London on Thursday night.

Judging by the severity of the Met’s intervention, you might think the detainees were jihadists planning to blow up parliament or hijack an airplane. In fact, they were members of Youth Demand, an irritating but hardly terroristic organisation opposed to fossil fuels and the Jewish State. According to reports, six women, the youngest of which was 18, met at the Westminster Quaker Meeting House in St Martin’s Lane to plan ‘non-violent civil resistance’ in April. In London, in 2025, it seems that this kind of gathering is serious enough to warrant 20 Met officers, armed with tasers, to force their way into a building owned by a religious denomination committed to peace. All were handcuffed, while photos of the building show a cracked glass door and a broken lock. One of the women had her room in her university halls searched.

They were busted for ‘suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’. The Met have provided no detailed justification for the arrests, beyond alleging that the group plotted to ‘shut down’ the capital through ‘swarming’ and ‘road blocks’. In other words, they were arrested for precrime. This is the same authoritarian statute the Met used to suppress republican protests during the coronation of King Charles in 2023. Police accused campaign group Republic of possessing ‘locking on’ devices, used to chain people to railings and such. The Met had to apologise after it became clear these ‘devices’ were in fact straps used for holding together placards.