Transcription
DON'T CARE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL LAW. Care only for your duty to Allah.
For many years, we were told that nothing could be done. We were assured that the British people had no choice but to watch as the streets of our capital were given over year after year to those who openly celebrated causes and regimes that stand against everything this country has long represented. They said the law would not permit it. They said politics made it impossible. And no one embodied that argument more completely than the mayor of London himself, Sadik Khn. For nearly a decade, he has presided over this city and somehow managed to make many Londoners feel like strangers in their own home.
Well, something has now changed. And I want you to understand precisely what it means. Because the mainstream media will treat it as a minor footnote, a temporary measure, a response to exceptional circumstances. But I believe this is more significant than that. It is the first clear sign that the British people are beginning to push back and that the push is starting to work. If you value clear and honest talk on these matters, please subscribe.
Let us go back to the beginning. For 40 years, the Alkud's Day March has passed through the streets of London. Every year during Ramadan, thousands would gather in the center of our capital. They told us it was about Palestine, about justice and solidarity. But we have seen what actually appeared on those marches. Hezbollah flags waved openly, chants calling for the destruction of Israel, placards that many ordinary British people found deeply disturbing. The organizers, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, present themselves as a respectable human rights body. Yet, this is an organization with welldocumented ties to the Iranian regime. A regime that has executed thousands of its own citizens, stones women, hangs gay men, and has continued, even in recent years, to crush protests with lethal force.
Year after year, this march was permitted. It was policed at considerable expense to the British taxpayer and whenever anyone suggested it should be stopped the answer was always the same. The law does not allow it. You cannot ban a peaceful protest. It was a fair point in principle. The difficulty was that the march had repeatedly led to arrests for supporting prescribed terrorist organizations. Yet still it continued and at the center of the defense of these events stood Sadi Khn. When the London Assembly passed a unanimous motion in 2017 condemning the march, the mayor's response was that it could not be banned so long as it remained within the law. The elected representatives of London had spoken. The mayor, it seemed, preferred to look the other way.
Now, remember that phrase, "within the parameters of the law," because it is about to become important. In March of this year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Roelly, went to the Home Office. He asked that the march be banned outright, not merely restricted, but prohibited under the rarely used powers of section 13 of the Public Order Act. The last time those powers were invoked was in 2012. The decision required the personal approval of the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary, Shabbana Mahmood, herself a Muslim woman, examined the intelligence, considered the situation with Iran, and gave her approval. "Having carefully and thoroughly considered the risk, the risk assessment presented to me by the Metropolitan Police, I am satisfied that an order under section 13 is necessary. It bans marches but not static demonstrations in relation to Al Kud's day."
The march that Sadi Khan had spent 9 years saying could not be stopped was stopped in a single afternoon without his permission, without even needing to consult him. The mayor was informed as procedure requires. He issued a brief statement about the importance of the right to protest. He did not throw himself in front of the decision, and in that quiet acceptance, one saw something revealing. For years, he had insisted nothing could be done. Now, it had been done without him. He simply had not wished to be the one to face the consequences.
This is the truth about Sadi Khan. He has governed London as though one community alone mattered: the working-class communities of outer London, the Jewish communities of North London, the moderate Muslims who are as uneasy with extremism as anyone else. These groups have been managed rather than represented.
Of course, some will say this ban was only about Iran, not about Islam. They will point to the current geopolitical situation and argue that in an ordinary year, it would never have happened. There is some truth in the timing, but the intelligence that justified the ban, the arrests, the links to the Iranian regime, the history of anti-semitic incidents, none of that was new. The police had known it for years. What had been missing was the political will. And that is the real significance of what happened in March 2026.
When the state decides it wishes to protect British values, it possesses the tools to do so. Section 13 of the Public Order Act has existed since 1986. It was used against the English Defence League in 2012. Then it lay unused for 14 years. Not because there was no cause, but because politicians feared the headlines.
This is not an isolated event. It is part of a larger pattern. Across the country, people are beginning to speak more openly about concerns that were once declared unsayable. In Manchester, Britain First held a march calling for mass deportations. I do not endorse every aspect of that movement, but one must ask why ordinary people, not fanatics, not neo-Nazis, but ordinary men and women, felt they had to take to the streets. The establishment prefers to call them racists and move on. It does not ask what drove them there. It does not acknowledge that for 30 years they were told mass immigration was economically necessary and culturally enriching and that any unease was mere prejudice. They watched their towns change beyond recognition and were told the problem was their noticing.
Reform UK has done something remarkable in this context. Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage or the party, it has made it possible for these concerns to be expressed at the ballot box rather than only on the street. A party polling at 24% is now openly calling for a burka ban, for Sharia courts to be made illegal, and for the Muslim Brotherhood to be proscribed. Policies that would have been considered beyond the pale only a few years ago are now part of mainstream political debate. The Overton window has shifted. What the British public is prepared to say out loud has changed and no amount of accusations of racism is going to shift it back.
Let me be clear about one thing. There have been attacks on mosques. There have been incidents of anti-Muslim hatred. I condemn them without reservation. British Muslims who wish simply to live peacefully, to raise their families and practice their faith are not the enemy. They never have been. The difficulty has always been with the ideology, the extremism, the foreign-funded radicalism that has sometimes used Muslim communities as cover for views that most ordinary British Muslims find as troubling as the rest of us do. Moderate Muslims have been ill-served by politicians like Sadiq Khan who have behaved as though the community speaks with one voice and that the loudest, most radical voice must always be heard first. The result has been a pressure cooker. Legitimate concerns were suppressed and when concerns are suppressed they do not disappear. They find other outlets.
What the banning of the Al Quds march represents is a first cautious step towards managing that pressure properly. It draws a line. It says that some things will not be permitted on the streets of our capital because they are incompatible with British values and because they inflame tensions that end up harming everyone, including the communities they claim to represent. The Islamic Human Rights Commission responded predictably by blaming the Zionist lobby. That is an anti-semitic trope dressed up in political language. It tells us everything we need to know about their priorities. The organization remains under investigation by the Charity Commission. Its links to the Iranian regime are not seriously disputed. Yet for 40 years, it was allowed to lead one of the most prominent marches in the British calendar with police protection paid for by British taxpayers. That world needed to change.
Will the ban hold? The organizers say they will challenge it in court. I have no doubt they will try, and they will have the best lawyers. But even if the legal challenge succeeds, something important has already happened. The precedent has been set. The political will has been shown. It has been demonstrated that when the state chooses to act, it can act. The tools exist. The question has always been whether those holding the tools have the courage to use them. I am cautiously optimistic.
A generation of politicians is beginning to realize that the old calculations no longer apply. The quiet majority has found its voice in the Brexit referendum, in the rise of Reform, in polling that shows consistent majorities for stronger immigration controls and for honest discussion about the compatibility of certain ideologies with British life. Britain's patience has been extraordinary. It has been rewarded belatedly and imperfectly, but it has been rewarded. A march that should never have become a 40-year tradition has been stopped. A mayor who believed his position unassailable has been reminded that the machinery of the British state does not require his blessing to do the right thing.
There is more work to be done. There are mosques where doctrines incompatible with British law are still preached. There are areas where the police enter only with caution. There are Sharia councils operating in the shadows. These are documented problems. They require serious answers, not more diversity officers and awareness campaigns. But in March 2026, the British state made a choice. It looked at a 40-year practice of allowing extremism to parade as politics and said, "Not this year, not this March, not in our city." Sadi Khan could not stop it. He was not even asked to try. The British public had spoken through pressure, through elections, through persistent, patient insistence that enough was enough. And this time, someone listened.
Now that it has been done once, it will be harder to justify inaction the next time, and there will be a next time. Many more such decisions await. The lesson of March 2026 is simple. The British public have been right about this for a long time. They were right that some things should not be tolerated in the name of tolerance. They were right that a multicultural society needs shared values, not the polite fiction that all values are equal. They were right that one can respect individuals of every background while insisting that certain ideologies are incompatible with the free and open society that generations of British men and women have defended. They were right. And Britain is slowly, belatedly, beginning to catch up with its own people. This is not the end of the story. It is barely the beginning. But after 40 years, a beginning feels like a very good place to start. If this resonates with you, please subscribe.