GOODBYE JUST STOP OIL... HELLO YOUTH DEMAND

A radical, more militant breed of protest group is threatening to shut down London this summer. So who are they, and what do they want?

- Kate Wills

At the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster on a Thursday evening, there's an unusual buzz among the normally tranquil parquet floors and soft lighting. About 40 people, most of them in their twenties, accessorise their baggy clothes and directional haircuts with black-and-white keffiyeh scarves. A few people pass around leaflets and stickers, cups of tea. It could be a student networking night, or a freshers week social. Instead it's an event for Youth Demand, a protest group which has threatened to “shut down” London this summer, in what they are calling “the biggest sustained wave of resistance for Palestine the UK has seen”.

And they're not going to do it quietly. They've already spray-painted Labour HQ red, laid body bags outside David Lammy’s door and staged a “dirty protest” by appearing to defecate in the lake at Rishi Sunak’s £2 million manor house in Yorkshire. Oliver Clegg, who “issued code brown”, grew up in Cambridge and attended Hills Road Sixth Form College, where alumni include the late author Sir Martin Amis and Pink Floyd bandmates Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. Many of the protest group (including Clegg, after this stunt) have been arrested and some have been given suspended prison sentences. They are vehemently anti-government, stating that their focus is on “making the Labour Party’s f***ery clear by exposing their complicity in genocide: the Palestinian genocide and the global genocide from burning fossil fuels”.

Their more aggressive and direct tactics are not at play at this meeting. But there’s nervous tension in the air. Last time Youth Demand held a public meeting in this spot, dozens of police officers armed with Tasers broke down the door and arrested everyone present. Ella Taylor, 20, a student at Mountview drama school in Peckham, was one of six people arrested on “suspicion of conspiring to cause public nuisance”. She called it “state repression”.