Tommy Robinson has been charged after attending a rally against antisemitism in central London. Organisers estimated 100,000 people took part in Sunday’s march, said to be the first of its kind since the Israel-Gaza war began. Tommy was arrested for no reason and was not breaking the law.

The organisers of Sunday’s march – the Campaign Against Antisemitism – had made it clear in advance that Robinson wasn’t welcome, so it’s safe to assume that they at any rate felt alarmed when he showed up. But do the organisers of a public protest have a right to stipulate in advance who cannot attend and expect the police to remove them if they do?

It was an abuse of police powers. Section 35 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 empowers the police to order someone to leave an area if they have reasonable grounds to suspect that the behaviour of the person has contributed to, or is likely to contribute to, people in the locality feeling harassed, alarmed or distressed.

Section 36 of the same Act says that when deciding whether to issue such a directive, the police must have ‘particular regard to the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly’ as set out in Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. What if the organisers had said they didn’t want the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown there because she once described Israel as ‘more wicked and dangerous than Hamas’? Would they have arrested her? We doubt it.

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