The New Dark Age

A South Wales activist who is facing charges including stalking, harassment and criminal damage has told Netpol she believes Pontypridd MP Alex Davies-Jones, now a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice, has weaponised the police and court system to intimidate her.

During the general election campaign, Ayeshah Nashua’s home was raided by South Wales Police not long after she posted a 20-second video on Instagram in which Davies-Jones, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, denies on camera having abstained on the vote in November 2023 for a ceasefire in Gaza. The video cuts to evidence that her vote was indeed recorded as an abstention.

Nashua denies harassing Davies-Jones and says that the full video of their interaction proves it:

“I had met Alex Davies-Jones while she was canvassing and I filmed the conversation where she insisted she didn’t abstain, when public record shows that she did. The conversation was not friendly, but it was not particularly heated either.”

Nashua has also been charged with stalking the MP but says their only prior meeting was running into each other later on the same day because Davies-Jones happened to be canvassing on the street in front of her home.

“Just 2 hours after posting the video, over a dozen police officers swarmed my door and windows, with several male officers trying to climb in through open windows. I was not dressed when they knocked, and I asked them for a few minutes to get dressed, and they threatened to break the door down. When I let them in (it later turned out they did not have a warrant), I was not allowed to change and was manhandled excessively for ‘resisting’.”

“The bail conditions I was put under forbade me from posting on social media about Alex Davies-Jones or the investigation, and enforced homelessness on my housemate, who was arrested alongside me and banned from associating with me in any capacity as we were considered “too dangerous” to be together. My housemate, a trans person of colour, is now having to sofa surf until our bail conditions run out.”

“South Wales Police have also stepped up a campaign of harassment against me. Officers turned up to my home to hand deliver a letter after I said that I was experiencing PTSD from the raid, and followed me around Cardiff. I feel isolated and unsafe in my own home because I spoke up during election season about my MP’s voting record.”

“It is unfathomable to me that Alex Davies Jones considered herself “unsafe” because of an instagram video, when she has inflicted real violence on myself and my housemate – even now I still have finger-print shaped bruises on my arms – not to mention the fact that there are 2 million displaced Palestinians who are experiencing an imminent threat of torture and death due to the government Alex Davies-Jones is part of. I am deeply concerned about what this means for Arab women like me, and especially those who are pro-Palestine or pushing to hold MP’s accountable for their policy decisions.”

Netpol’s report “In Our Millions: the policing of resistance in Britain against Israeli genocide in Palestine” documents numerous cases of pro-Palestine activists facing repressive policing and restrictive bail conditions. The report found the policing of the pro-Palestine protests was heavily influenced by media and government pressure to ‘crackdown’ on protest, with numerous examples of racist and Islamophobic policing.

Specific concerns have also been raised about South Wales Police’s approach to local protests, after numerous reports of police assaulting demonstrators and harassing legal observers. The report also documents a similar case involving an MP, in which a 67-year-old activist in Cornwall had their house raided by police and was charged with criminal damage after attaching a printout of the death toll in Gaza to their MP’s constituency office door.

Read the “In Our Millions Report” now.

IMAGE: screenshot from the BBC News website, 16 November 2023,

 "How did my MP vote on Gaza ceasefire?"