Don’t Mention The Children

74-Year-Old man arrested for reading a poem by Michael Rosen

By naming children killed by Israel, Bill Williamson broke Britain’s unwritten law: that some atrocities must never be spoken aloud

On a grey Saturday afternoon in Dunoon, a sleepy town on the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll, 74-year-old Bill Williamson stood outside the Burgh Hall with a loudspeaker in one hand and a poem in the other. For two and a half years he had done this. Week after week, rain or shine, he and a small group of fellow activists held their vigil for Palestine—two hours of banners, chants, and, twice each vigil, Williamson’s recitation of a short poem by Michael Rosen.

Watch the video of Michael Rosen’s poem arranged by Save the Children UK here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tENn0dTF2eY

It took ninety seconds to read. Ninety seconds to name the unnameable. And on the Fourth of July, as Williamson reached the halfway mark, a police constable tried to snatch the paper from his hands.

What happened next reveals something darkening in Britain’s public life: the criminalisation not merely of protest, but of the act of witnessing itself. Williamson was arrested for “threatening and abusive behaviour”—not for blocking a road, not for intimidation, not for violence, but for reading aloud a poem about dead children. That the children were Palestinian and the killers Israeli appears, by any reasonable reading of the facts, to be the decisive element.

The poem in question, Don’t Mention the Children, was written by Rosen in 2014 after the Israeli Broadcasting Authority banned a radio advertisement by the human rights organisation B’Tselem. The ad was devastating in its simplicity: it listed the names of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s bombing of Gaza that summer. The Authority ruled it “politically controversial.” Rosen, a Jewish writer whose own relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, responded with verses that have since become a quiet anthem for those who refuse to let the victims of Gaza become mere statistics.

Williamson had read it perhaps two hundred times. But on this particular Saturday, police told him he was “causing fear and alarm”. They slapped handcuffs on a pensioner, locked him in a van for an hour, and demanded his personal details. When he refused, they de-arrested him—only for three officers to appear at his home three days later to inform his wife he had been “reported to the courts”. The Procurator Fiscal will now decide whether a septuagenarian poem-reader will stand trial.

There is a question here that no police spokesperson has adequately answered. Fear and alarm to whom? The vigil took place in the same location every week. The poem was the same ninety-second recitation Williamson had performed since 2023. The loudspeaker was unremarkable. What changed was not the conduct, but the context: Britain’s accelerating campaign to shield Israel from public scrutiny as the International Court of Justice weighs charges of genocide, and as the UK government continues to supply weapons used in the devastation of Gaza.

The language of “fear and alarm” is borrowed from Section 38 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010, legislation designed to address genuine public disorder. Its deployment against a pensioner reading poetry about children killed by a British ally represents a grotesque dilation of police power. The officers who arrested Williamson were not responding to a public complaint—The National’s reporting makes clear the intervention was initiated by police themselves. They were, rather, asserting a more encompassing authority: the power to determine which dead children may be spoken of in a British town centre, and which must remain unmentionable.

This is not an isolated case. Across the United Kingdom, the machinery of the state has been repurposed to suppress Palestine solidarity. Students have been suspended. Academics investigated. Protesters jailed for holding signs. Charities stripped of funding. The pattern is consistent and deliberate: not the impartial enforcement of public order, but the weaponisation of administrative and criminal processes to make support for Palestinian human rights costly, frightening, and legally hazardous.

The British government’s complicity in Israel’s assault on Gaza is by now well-documented—continued arms exports despite Foreign Office legal advice that there is a clear risk of violations of international humanitarian law; the blocking of ICC arrest warrants; the repeated parroting of Israeli military claims in parliamentary statements. What the Williamson case illuminates is the domestic corollary: a state so invested in its alliance with Israel that it will arrest its own citizens rather than permit them to speak of Palestinian children’s names aloud.

There is a particular cruelty in choosing Michael Rosen’s poem as the object of suppression. Rosen wrote it because he understood, with the intimacy of family memory, what happens when states decide which deaths may be mourned and which must be forgotten. The Israeli Broadcasting Authority banned B’Tselem’s advertisement for the same reason British police now seek to criminalise its recitation: because naming the dead makes them real, and making them real makes the killing impossible to deny.

Bill Williamson is not a threat to public order. He is a threat to the comfortable silence Britain requires in order to continue its support for a devastating military campaign. His arrest was not about fear and alarm. It was about enforcing a political taboo—the same taboo that has made “genocide” a dangerous word to apply to Gaza, that has turned humanitarian aid workers into enemies of the state, that has placed the discharge of moral witness squarely within the crosshairs of criminal law.

The Procurator Fiscal now holds a file on a 74-year-old man who stood in a Scottish town and read a poem. If prosecution follows, it will not be Williamson who stands trial, but the capacity of a liberal democracy to tolerate dissent in the face of atrocity. And if the case is quietly dropped—as such cases often are, once the intimidation has been achieved—then the message will have been delivered all the same: mention the children, and the state will come for you.

This is not policing. It is political enforcement, dressed in the language of public safety. And it asks a question no democracy should have to answer: When the reading of a poem becomes a crime, what has the state itself become?

Sources:

• The National – Scottish pro-Palestine activist arrested ‘for reading poem about Gaza’
• Inkl – Scottish pro-Palestine activist arrested ‘for reading poem threateningly’
• Proletarian Poetry – “Don’t Mention the Children” by Michael Rosen
• Instagram – Michael Rosen “Don’t Mention the Children”
• YouTube – A poem for the children of Gaza, by Michael Rosen