The march for Palestine was peaceful and the police did their job admirably - Yorkshire Post Letters

I am an eye-witness to "what transpired in London over the weekend", and it was not as portrayed in the letter from Robert Booth of Huddersfield, which you published in The Yorkshire Post, November 18.

At the peace march for Palestine on November 11, the Police were a relaxed but professional presence along the route of the Palestine support march. The 300,000 or more marchers were mostly "loyal Brits", to copy Robert's phrase - some religious, others not, some jewish, others not, Brits of every age and skin colour, some even ginger-haired like me, and many parents with babies in pushchairs and young children.

It was a sensible and restrained march, all of us showing support for the people of Gaza and other parts of Palestine who have suffered atrociously since the idea of re-settling jewish people into the Middle East took hold from 1918 onwards and particularly from 1948 onwards but never as atrociously as right now under Israeli revenge-bombing.

We pro-Palestine marchers were not "assembled troublemakers" and nobody needed to "protect their own country" from us (it's our country too, I hope people would try to remember).

The people causing trouble were those claiming to "defend the cenotaph" - horrible right-wing thugs trying to get in the headlines to convince people like Robert that the Police were somehow on the wrong side.

During their heroic defence of the cenotaph there were no other persons anywhere near them with any intention of doing any harm, not to the cenotaph and not to anything or anyone else.

All of it a nasty, cynical, dishonest publicity stunt. The Police calmly supervised a peaceful march of hundreds of thousands showing support to the downtrodden; and they did their job in preventing a mob from occupying a respected public monument.

Robert closes his letter by saying that the Police have betrayed the (now-sacked) former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman.

Can I remind him that the Police serve the public, not the Home Secretary. On this occasion they seem to have served the public rather well, in my view - unlike the rabble-rousing former Home Secretary who was following a very dangerous path, to which she will likely return next time the Tories are looking for a new leader.

Robert calls for "the squabbling in our country to be stopped" - squabbling is at the heart of democracy. We shouldn't look to stop it, but to learn from each other and to find compromises that we can all live with.