On 15 March, penned onto the Albert Embankment with a camera in my hand, I watched a group of men close in and try trap me for some unknown purpose. It was Al Quds Day and I was a recognised Zionist. The Metropolitan Police had banned the associated march for the first time since 2012, confined it to a static assembly, and, reportedly for the first time in London protest policing history, used the Thames itself as a physical line between the demonstration and a Stop the Hate counter-protest on the opposite bank. The whole operation demanded roughly a thousand officers, and incidentally, a couple of boats.
Whilst distracted by the actions of those who opposed my presence, among the speakers I did not personally note that day was Bobby Vylan, the stage name of Pascal Robinson-Foster, frontman of the band Bob Vylan. He addressed the crowd and led it through the six words he had made internationally notorious nine months earlier: “Death, death to the IDF.” He had first tried a longer version at Alexandra Palace in May 2025, then delivered the compressed, chantable line to a live BBC stream at Glastonbury on 28 June, to a field reportedly holding some two hundred Palestinian flags. Avon and Somerset Police investigated; in December, they closed the case. No charge.
This week the Met reached the same conclusion about the Embankment repeat. The Telegraph reported on 27 August that Robinson-Foster would face no further action, after early CPS advice found insufficient basis to proceed. His reaction on X had the tone of a man known for bravado: “After 5 months of ‘investigating’, the Met Police have decided to NFA me for the same thing their mates Avon and Somerset Police couldn’t bring a charge about.” Twice, in two forces, over two performances of the same words: no charge either time.
Eight months before the Embankment repeat, a smaller and far less filmed version of the same confrontation played out on the pavement outside the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, where the band was playing a gig. A Palestine Coalition demonstration supporting the show met a Stop the Hate counter-protest opposing it, held either side of the road outside the venue under Section 14 conditions. One man was arrested and later charged, in the Met’s own words, with directing chants of “death to the IDF” towards a group of Jewish people outside the concert. He is alleged to have repeated the chant, and others, several times that evening, all of it charged as one night outside one venue. His trial is listed for 5 April 2027.
The gap between these outcomes is not obviously personal. Stirring up racial or religious hatred, under Part III of the 1986 Act, requires a group defined by race or religion; the IDF is neither, and a court has to work to collapse a military organisation into the nationality of the people who serve in it. Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has put the evidential problem plainly: “It’s quite hard to show off the back of saying ‘Death to the IDF’ that he intended people in the audience to hate Jews”. That is despite what he calls “an exceptionally strong link between Jews and that country.” Professor David Mead frames it as an unresolved fork: is the chant aimed at “the Israeli military, or Israelis as a people more broadly?” For most Israelis, conscripted in their youth to later see the same of their own children, that distinction will read as academic. It is nonetheless the one the statute draws. The lower-bar alternative, offences under Section 4A or Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, requires someone within sight or hearing of the words, likely to be distressed by them.
That is the element a stadium field and a cordoned riverside protest both managed to avoid, while a shared public highway outside a gig was not. Weeks after disclosing the Kentish Town charge, the Met announced that organisers would, for the first time, be made responsible for speakers’ hate speech at future protests, and that it was reviewing with the CPS “language… previously advised [as not meeting] the threshold”. An acknowledgment, in effect, of the gap it kept running into.
None of this requires bad faith on the Met’s part, or a plan on Robinson-Foster’s. Everything is explainable by a comparison of reach, not culpability. Robinson-Foster is documented saying the words on number occasions, including at Alexandra Palace, Glastonbury, Amsterdam, and the Embankment. Each performed or broadcast to a crowd in the thousands, one to a live, nationally watched BBC stream; the phrase has since acquired its own Wikipedia entry. His own public response to the Glastonbury backlash was to mock “crying” critics rather than dispute what the words meant.
The Kentish Town defendant is alleged to have repeated the same six words, that single night, a number of times, on a small loudhailer. He reached, cumulatively, a demonstration of dozens on one residential street. But the Kentish Town defendant had clearly defined victims, which Robison-Foster did not..
If the harm the law exists to address is the spread of a chant calling for the deaths of people who are, for most Israelis, their children or themselves, it is not obvious that the more repetitive but contained allegation did more of that harm than the far less repeated but internationally amplified fact. That the defendant with the smaller reach is the one facing trial, while the man whose performances actually spread the phrase abroad has been cleared twice and gained rather than lost from it, looks less like a corrupt system than a badly drawn one.
The Public Order Act is highlighted as measuring proximity, not scale: it catches a chant however few times it was said, provided somebody was standing close enough to be frightened by it, and lets the same words through however many times repeated, provided the crowd chanting back is large enough, sympathetic enough, or simply on the right side of a river.
The gap between impact and proximity leaves one wondering if the real problem is a weakness in the law. Chanting for the death of anyone is distinctly uncivilised, an invasive cultural meme that should be resisted rather than absorbed. If not, whose death shall be heralded next, leaving one wondering, when shall it be my own fair turn.
More from the author:
X: @fatdafevy YouTube: @Ultracrepidarian-w8b7w
If you enjoyed this content please consider helping his future content: buymeacoffee.com/theultracrepidarian