Westminster Meeting House, photo Heather Martin

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The Raid on the Quakers Echoes Centuries of Persecution

by Phil Hall

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“When Quakers are raided, it’s not just a policing act—it’s the state attacking 400 years of moral witness.”
— Margaret Fell, Quaker historian (2024 interview).

On Thursday, 27 March 2025, around 7:30 PM, over 20 officers forcibly entered Westminster Quaker Meeting House in St Martin’s Lane, London, breaking the lock on the door and charging in. They arrested six people linked to Youth Demand on charges of “Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”. In fact five of those people were not members of Youth Demand—they were simply present to hear about the organisation’s plans for peaceful nonviolent protest against the genocide in Gaza and the use of fossil fuels.

Who is Youth Demand?

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Youth Demand is a direct-action group campaigning against UK-Israel trade and fossil fuel funding. Their past actions—such as blocking UCL and protesting at Starmer’s home—suggest nonviolent civil disobedience rather than violent disruption.

The raid on Quakers echoes centuries of persecution. When Quakers are raided, it’s not just a policing act—it’s the state attacking 400 years of moral witness, as noted by Quaker historian Margaret Fell in a 2024 interview. The raid red-flags UN warnings about the UK’s “shrinking space for peaceful protest”  and marks a shift from policing active protests to pre-emptive raids on people merely planning or discussing the possibility of organising protests.

Paul Parker, a Quaker Clerk, said that no one had been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory, calling it a “violent violation of a place of worship” and linking it to the broader criminalisation of protest in the UK. There is a precedent though: six people were arrested at Friends House, London, on 10 January 2024, during a meeting organised by Palestine Action, a group protesting arms sales to Israel. In that raid the police didn’t break down the doors, they waited until attendees had left the building before pouncing on them.

Quakers in Britain condemned the raid as “unprecedented” and a violation of freedom of assembly (Quakers in Britain, 2025).

Quakers can’t be smeared as “thugs”. Quakerism emerged from 17th-century England as an expression of practical, compassionate Christianity, and stubborn fairness. Historically, Quakers banned their members from slaveholding in 1758—50 years before Great Britain abolished the slave trade. Quaker women led suffragette marches. Quakers advocated for nuclear disarmament.

The Quakers in Palestine

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The Quakers have a long history in Palestine. They built the Ramallah Friends School. They have endorsed boycotts of Israeli settlements since 2011 (Quaker Council for European Affairs, 2011). They condemned the 2023 Gaza war as “collective punishment” (Quakers in Britain, 2023). However, Quakers do not universally support all Palestinian resistance groups—they emphasise nonviolent activism.

Quakers use the threshing process, to reach a decision. It is a method of discernment involving lengthy periods of testimony, moral auditing, and corporate debate before taking a stand. For example: they didn’t endorse BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) until 2011 after decades of deliberation (Quaker Faith & Practice, 2011). Before hosting Youth Demand, they verified the group’s commitment to nonviolence.

The charge levelled against the six young women requires proof of agreement to commit unlawful acts (R v. Jones, 2007 UKHL 16), yet it was applied to hypothetical disruptions. Traditionally, public nuisance requires actual harm, such as blocking an ambulance. The 2023 Public Order Act allows police to ban protests before they happen, raising concerns about prior restraint and excessive force (Liberty, 2023). Breaking into a registered place of worship may also violate the Human Rights Act 1998 (Article 9: Freedom of Religion) (ECHR, 1998).

The Quaker History of Persecution and Resistance

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Quakers strongly recall the historical memory of persecution: 15,000 Quakers were imprisoned between 1650 and 1689. Quakers were banned from preaching. In 1668 William Penn was arrested for preaching and when the jury acquitted him, the government arrested the jury. In 1783 Quakers were expelled from Parliament for refusing oaths (History of Parliament, 1783). In the 1830s, anti-slavery activism led to raids on Quaker safehouses. In 1916, conscientious objectors were sent to brutal work camps. In 1980s, Quakers protested nuclear weapons and in the 2000s Quakers opposed the Iraq War.

Youth Demand was vetted before it was allowed to use a room in the meeting house. If it was allowed to use the Quaker Meeting House it is an organisation roughly in alignment with Quaker Principles (Quaker Faith and Practice). Youth Demand emphasises nonviolent resistance.

Quaker Peace Testimony

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Quakers have held protests of a similar kind in times of crisis. For example, read Helen Stephen’s 1984 statement defending her protest at Faslane submarine base:

I do not wish to deny that on April 4th, the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, I was inside the Faslane Submarine Base, and that I was there as a deliberate act. However, I pled guilty to the charges because had I done otherwise I would have been guilty of far greater crimes against my conscience and against humanity.

If I may, I would like to outline very briefly the reasons for so acting, not so much as mitigation of guilt, but rather as a declaration of intent, for as long as those bases remain, I must continue to act as my conscience guides.

My charge is that I entered a protected area without authority or permission. My claim is that I had authority – the authority of my Christian conviction that a gospel of love cannot be defended by the threatened annihilation of millions of innocent people. It can never be morally right to use these ghastly weapons at any time, whether first, or as unthinkable retaliation after we ourselves are doomed.

I acted also with the authority of the nameless millions dying of starvation now because we choose to spend £11.5 billion on Trident whilst a child dies every 15 seconds.

I am further authorised by my 13-year-old Vietnamese god-daughter whose guardian I am. She was adopted and brought to Scotland to take her away from the unspeakable horror of the Vietnam war. If all that I have done is to bring her closer to the nuclear holocaust, I stand convicted by her of the most cynical inhumanity.

I am charged under an Act giving control and disposal of land to the Queen, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, the Commons assembled in Parliament and eventually the Secretary of State. I believe the world is God’s creation. This beautiful, delicate world in all its infinite wonder is threatened with extinction. That to me is blasphemy.

And so, out of love, love of my god-daughter, love of my world, I had to act. If I see that base at Faslane as morally wrong and against my deepest convictions – as wrong as the gas chambers of Auschwitz, as wrong as the deliberate starvation of children – then by keeping silent, I condone what goes on there.

On April 4th, I made a choice. I chose to create the dream of another way. My only crime is not working hard enough, or long enough, or soon enough towards the fulfilment of the dream. If my actions were a crime, then I am guilty.

Helen Steven, 1984“ (Quaker Faith & Practice, 1984).

As a result of this drastic action taken by the police at the instigation of the labour government of Keir Starmer where a Quaker sanctuary was violated for the first time in 400 years, there is now a serious cause for concern among Quakers and in British society as a whole. The incident was widely and prominently reported in almost every media outlet large and small, except by the British state broadcaster, the BBC. The BBC downplayed the Westminster raid. Quakers are likely to file a judicial review, as they did in 2024 for the Palestine Action arrests. The raid has deepened disillusionment with a government that seems to have lost its moral compass, and that is now obviously prioritising military spending over social welfare.

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Phil Hall was born into an ANC family in South Africa. The family was forced into exile in 1963 after his mother was imprisoned and his father banned. They relocated to East Africa, where his parents continued their activism and journalism. In 1975, after a period living in India, they journeyed overland back to the UK, eventually settling in Brighton.

Phil pursued a broad education, studying Russian, Spanish, politics, economics, literature, linguistics, and English grammar and phonology. His path led him to live and study in Spain, the USSR, in Ukraine, and later in Mexico, where he married and started a family. Over the next decade, Phil and his partner balanced activism with work before relocating to the UK—a move initially intended to be permanent.

However, professional opportunities took him to Saudi Arabia and then the UAE, where he spent ten years before returning to the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in Britain, he founded Ars Notoria Magazine and, alongside fellow humane socialist Paul Halas, launched AN Editions, a small venture dedicated to publishing thoughtful, progressive and exciting new books.