“Trampling on the memory of The Few: Pro-Palestine thugs spark fury as they stamp on poppies and clamber over Battle of Britain memorial as march descends”
This headline in the Daily Mail – published in lockstep with pieces by The Jewish Chronicle and GB News – cynically insinuates that members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) deliberately decided to vandalise and trample on the memory of World War Two veterans during the pro-Palestine demonstration on 10 October.
These hysterical smears have been taken up and propagated by scores of online reactionaries and far-right bot accounts, hoping to whip up hatred against ‘unpatriotic’, ‘thuggish’ young people, for whom nothing is sacred.
But nothing could be further from the truth. The RCP’s bloc was marching peacefully when one of our members was pulled out of the crowd for the ‘crime’ of wearing a face covering. They were then smashed into a Battle of Britain memorial by a swarm of angry police officers.
There is a mountain of video evidence available documenting this. The police were the ones trampling all over the wreaths laid at the base of the memorial as they pushed, kicked, and shoved our comrades – causing concussions, cuts, and broken ribs.
But why let facts get in the way of a good story?
here you can see them grab two protestors, and march them TOWARDS the memorial. I had friends who were shoved by the police into the memorial. the police behaved like violent thugs to try and intimidate the palestine movement. https://t.co/RmbCTcxm5K
— hi im frak (@FrankHigson1) October 10, 2026
The Daily Mail quotes one man who says that it is “disgusting” to see communist flags all over a World War Two memorial. “It is a huge lack of respect to Britain and our parents and grandparents who fought for freedom they are now enjoying,” he explains.
This is an incredible statement. Might we remind the Daily Mail’s journalists that it was the unimaginable heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet working class which – at the cost of 27 million dead – single-handedly defeated Nazi Germany!
Even Winston Churchill himself was forced to concede this. “Future generations”, he wrote in 1945, “will acknowledge their debt to the Red Army as unreservedly as do we who have lived to witness these proud achievements”.
And let’s not forget that it was the Daily Mail which in 1934 infamously published a spirited defence of fascism by its then-owner and great-grandfather of current owner, Viscount Rothermere, under the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’.
Moreover, those honest British soldiers who fought in World War Two, many of them socialists and communists, did not do so in order to defend statues or memorials – and certainly not so that future British governments could appease and indulge warmongering, genocidal regimes abroad.
Many of them paid the ultimate sacrifice in the belief that they were fighting for freedom: to defend democratic rights like the right to assemble, protest, and speak freely.
Who was exercising those hard-won rights on 10 October? And who was ‘trampling’ all over them?
