I don’t expect measured analysis from Suella Braverman, but even so I was taken aback this time last year when I heard that she had described the Palestine solidarity demos as “hate marches”. Earlier that week I had walked with my friends – some Jewish like me, some not – in a crowd of 500,000 others over Waterloo Bridge, and looked west down the Thames towards parliament, as a British Muslim girl of about eight years old led chants through a loudhailer: “Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry / We will never let you die.”

In many years of attending and reporting on protests, rallies, general strikes and riots, I have rarely experienced more orderly, peaceful, family-oriented mass gatherings than these demonstrations.

And yet Braverman wasn’t alone in her condemnation. As prime minister, Rishi Sunak warned that “mob rule is replacing democratic rule”, while Keir Starmer’s office sternly instructed its MPs and council leaders they must not, “under any circumstances” join the crowds calling for a ceasefire. In March this year, the “extremism adviser” John Woodcock, made the extraordinary proposal that MPs and councillors be banned from engaging with the protest organisers. Here, contrary to my experience, and that of hundreds of thousands of other peaceful protesters, was a crowd – sorry, a “mob” – that the establishment designated it toxic to be a part of.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, because our politics, media and pop culture have always been stacked with these myths – with people in power decrying mindless mobs, madding crowds, unthinking masses, stampeding hordes and herd mentalities. For our entire lives, we have been told that joining crowds robs us of our agency, our capacity for rational thought and our sense of self and propriety. Violence and moral turpitude spread like a contagion, overpowering every crowd member. In short, we........

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