I was one of the women arrested at a Quaker meeting house. Why?

The right to protest is a cornerstone of democracy, writes Jen Kennedy. So why was I, a student journalist covering a Youth Demand event, detained for 16 hours?

On Thursday evening, the Metropolitan Police arrested six women at a meeting of Youth Demand in a Quaker meeting house in central London. I was one of those women.

I am not a member of the climate and pro-Palestine group or any other activist groups. I am a 25-year-old student journalist. It was meant to be a quiet night of research. Instead, I spent the night in a cell in Bromley Police Station.

According to a post on Youth Demand’s Instagram page, this meeting would introduce their plan to “shut down London” in April in what the protest group are calling their “biggest ever campaign of civil disobedience”. I’d gone, undercover, to the Westminster Quaker Meeting House hoping to find out new information.

I didn't know anyone in the group – I just saw the post advertising the meeting on the group's Instagram page and thought it would make a good story. I was hoping to find out more about the planned protests in April that they'd been advertising online – the "month of civil disobedience" and roadblocks. The meeting time and location were all publicly advertised on a post on Youth Demand's Instagram: anyone could go along. Presumably, the police found it, too.

So, I walked in at around 7pm, fresh from a day at university. Inside, I found a group of young women sitting in a circle, holding cups of tea and custard creams.

Ten minutes later, a speech by young activist on climate change and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was interrupted by loud bangs on the door.

The activist had begun by talking about passing the 1.5 degree climate target and the possibility of even reaching 3 degrees, and then spoke about children dying in Gaza. Another activist had just said that she was going to explain their protest plans in April when the Met arrived – but she hadn't even got into any specifics, yet. She said they would be non-violent, but disruptive – and compared them to protests that took place in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s.

Soon after, more than 20 uniformed police officers – some armed with Tasers – burst into the room and we were arrested on “suspicion of conspiring to cause public nuisance”. My items, including my phone, laptop and camera, were seized.

That night, the Met didn’t find dangerous radicals. They found young women worrying about the world – and decided that was threat enough. These women were a young mother away from her 13-month-old baby for the first time, me (a reporter) and others guilty only of earnest debate. There were no weapons. Just biscuits and idealism.

Held in a cell at Bromley Police Station for 16 hours, I was denied even a single phone call – not even to my mother, who was having a retirement lunch, which I never arrived at. During this time, officers raided my student halls at 2am, startling my fasting flatmate during her Ramadan meal.

The justification? The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which recast peaceful protest as “public nuisance”. This statutory offence criminalises actions that “cause serious harm to the public” as well as “some forms of peaceful protest”.

What this incident highlights is that the Metropolitan Police are cracking down on civil protests. The right to protest, and to organise protests, is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.

But this isn’t an isolated misstep. A previous accusation of over-policing was levelled at Met at protests following the vigil for Sarah Everard, who was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021. There was also particular criticism this year regarding their policing of pro-Palestine protests.

Even after my release without charge, I have not received an apology.

Paul Parker of the Quakers put it best: “Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials underpin democracy.” But when the state treats conversation as conspiracy, what’s left of that freedom?