The Metropolitan police will be asked to explain to the home secretary why they failed to take action against demonstrators who chanted about “jihad” in London at the weekend, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, has said.
Suella Braverman is to meet the force’s commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, after video footage from a rally on Saturday organised by the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir showed a man talking about Palestine and asking what the solution was, before the word “jihad” was heard.
The Met said “jihad” had numerous meanings and it believed, after consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), that no offence had been committed.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir rally was separate from a much larger pro-Palestine rally of about 100,000 people in London.
Harper told Times Radio: “I saw those clips of that chanting at the weekend. I, along with many people, would have been disturbed by it. The home secretary will make it clear that the government thinks the full force of the law should be used. The police are operationally independent, which I think is appropriate, and they will have to explain the reasons for the decisions they have taken.”
Questioned again about the matter on Sky News, Harper said the police had the ability to use toughened public order laws, and “also have the full range of counter-terrorism powers available to them”.
“We urge them to use the full force of the law. But rightly in our country, they are operationally independent – they don’t follow the instructions of politicians.”
Earlier, Britain’s former head of counter-terrorism told the Guardian the government was aware of gaps in the law that would allow words such as “jihad” to be shouted at rallies, but it had not acted to close them so it was not the fault of the police.
Neil Basu, who was formerly Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer and an assistant commissioner in the Met, said the government had been advised of the gaps.
In 2021, a report on tackling extremism, co-authored by Rowley before he was head of the Met, told the government laws should be toughened, with the conclusions supported by counter-terrorism policing.
The report for the Commission on Countering Extremism, which advises the government, warned of a “gaping chasm” in laws allowing “extremists to operate with impunity”.
In 2023, a report on the Manchester bombings revealed the home secretary was still considering the findings of the extremism report.
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Sir John Saunders, who chaired the inquiry and inquests into the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings, urged the government to hurry up and said: “I recommend that such consideration be given as a matter of urgency.”
Basu said his message to ministers was: “Your eyes were opened to the glaring anomaly in the law. You did not take it up at the time and it is worth revisiting. The report from the Commission for Countering Extremism in 2021 pointed out a series of gaps in the law.
“For the government and ministers to attack the Met is thus unjustified. The police need support at this challenging time. If the government don’t like the law, it can change it, as it has been asked to do.”
The Met had specialist lawyers in counter-terrorism law from the CPS in its control room monitoring the protests alongside police commanders on Saturday.
