British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to cancel the rally planned for this coming Saturday, Nov. 11 for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Saturday rallies have become weekly events, with tens of thousands of participants if not more. Sunak’s excuse is that Nov. 11 is Armistice Day, celebrated as the day World War I ended, and people gather at the Cenotaph war memorial. Sunak is claiming to be worried that demonstrators might deface the memorial, and that it would be “provocative and disrespectful” of those attending the memorial.
The London police do not agree. “The laws created by Parliament are clear,” Mark Rowley, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Service in London, said in a statement on Nov. 7. “There is no absolute power to ban protest, therefore there will be a protest this weekend.”
