Harry Stopes

Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as mayor, has promised to build fifty thousand affordable homes over the next thirteen years. This would be a doubling of the rate at which they were built between 2016 and 2023, an impressive feat in the abstract, but not enough to address the scale of the problem, especially if few are offered for social rent. 

Police violence against demonstrators isn’t new. What is distinct in the Palestine case, however, is the consistent and cumulative use of almost weekly violence for more than two years, in service of a cause central to the German state. The Berlin government has repeatedly shown its willingness to break the law to suppress Palestine activism.

Free movement is a foundational right of EU citizens. When expelling a citizen of another member state on the grounds of public security (the other possible grounds are public health and public policy), the expelling state must show that the citizen represents ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’. This is, or should be, a very high bar. A Polish citizen, Kasia Wlaszczyk, and two Irish citizens, Roberta Murray and Shane O’Brien, currently living in Berlin, have been ordered to leave Germany by 21 April or be deported, along with Cooper Longbottom, an American holding a student visa. All are active in the Palestine solidarity movement. None has any criminal convictions.

On Friday morning, three dozen people gathered outside the Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development in Berlin to demand a permanent end to German funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The protest was organised by the Deutsch-Israelische-Gesellschaft, which is funded in part by the German foreign ministry. The DIG president, Volker Beck, a former Green Party member of the Bundestag, gave an interview to journalists from Die Welt. Another organiser was handing out laminated placards.

The common law doctrine of joint enterprise allows for the conviction of ‘secondary parties’ to a crime committed by another, ‘principal’ offender: both the getaway driver and the man who points the shotgun in the teller’s face are guilty of bank robbery. In April 2022, the civil liberties organisation Liberty, acting on behalf of the campaigning organisation JENGbA, took the Crown Prosecution Service to court, arguing that in practice the doctrine is racist – a view supported by a large body of academic research. In February the CPS began a pilot scheme monitoring joint enterprise prosecutions for homicide and attempted homicide in six regions, including London, the North West and the West Midlands. The results were released in September.