Hugh Muir in the Guardian (links mine): 

One feels for our MPs. Mocked, unloved - they need support just to drag themselves into work. Luckily they have Black Rod and Scotland Yard to help them out. After weeks of amicable discussions, the Met has told the organisers of the Stop The War event scheduled for next Monday that they cannot march towards parliament from Trafalgar Square because if they did, it might stop MPs getting to the Commons. This relies on use of the sessional order which is ratified by the Commons each year, but dates back to 1839. The ban would cover Parliament Square, parts of Waterloo, the Strand, Piccadilly and Leicester Square, as it must. MPs travel in from all points of the compass. They need protecting. For all that, figures such as Tony Benn, the comedian Mark Thomas and musician Brian Eno say they will march on regardless; and to those who find that disturbing they offer this gesture. Any MP who says, “I’m lost and I’m frightened and I need to get to work”, will be gently escorted through the melee and deposited at St Stephen’s Gate. They could also join the march, of course. It will be going the right way.

So, I was perhaps a little hasty in saying that the ban has no legal basis.  Given Tony Blair’s legacy of eroded civil liberties, I checked the recent laws; I didn’t check the authoritarian legislation of a Parliament for whom only around 1 in 7 males and no females were allowed to vote.  The government can give certain orders to the Metropolitan police in the aim of guaranteeing MPs with access to Parliament - interestingly, there’s a 2003 Select Committee report complaining that these orders would be likely unenforcable, but the modifications to the powers of arrest in the SOCPA 2005 laws may have given it some teeth.  Slippery buggers, aren’t they?

But, as Mark Thomas says,

This is rather a ham-fisted attempt to prevent us from demonstrating. What they (the government and police) do is up to them. We will just ignore them and we have the moral and logical high-ground.

When the government tries to prevent the people from influencing their fate, the people are left with two choices: surrender, or disobey.  The first option only makes sense when there is a realistic threat of lethal crackdown by the forces of order, and I don’t believe that that threat exists - not yet, anyway, not for large groups with a high proportion of white non-Muslim Britons.  With meaningful legal dissent now out of the question, we are left with no real alternatives to civil disobedience.  There’s a precedent anyway, and a very recent one.  Barely a month has passed since the Prison Officers’ Association’s national strike; when the government tried to ban it, they were told to stuff their injunction up their arse.

In George Galloway’s estimation, “the government [was] responsible for this action, and any consequences that [might have flowed] from it, and no one else“.  The injunction left the prison officers with no legal way of halting the government’s catastrophic and unpopular privatisation reforms, and must therefore be held responsible for the illegality of their actions.  When left with the choice between despair and disobedience, no-one must be compelled to choose despair.  That principle applies in Palestine, it applies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it applies in Parliament Square.  If they want us to cease our disobedience, the powers that be need to give us a third option.  One exists and, conveniently enough, it also begins with a d: democracy.  Unfortunately, the word is used a lot more widely than the principle, and until this changes we need to disobey, and disobey, and disobey (it might even prevent a war).  The more they cut us out of decision-making, the more their authority over us becomes meaningless.

See you on Monday.