30th Palestine demonstration, central London, 6th September. A police return to dissembling about protest numbers
The Police view of the 30th central London march for Palestine on 6th September: ‘the Palestine Coalition march attended by around 20,000 people’. This is the view of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart posted on Twitter. Tt suggests that Ms Smart was something rather less than that when studying mathematics at school.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign estimated around 200,000 marched.
It marks an interesting return to the police underestimating or as some might say lying about numbers on protests. This was a routine thing for the Met to do but around the time of the Iraq War they stopped noting that it isn’t really their job to count numbers on demonstrations.
There is clearly something about the 20K figure that resides in the archives of the official mind. It was also a figure used for the Chartist demonstration for the vote on Kennington Common on 10th April 1848 (actual size 60K to 100K plus) and it hasn’t aged well
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