The BBC, amongst others, has reported that “the Metropolitan Police has expressed "regret" over the arrests of six anti-monarchy protesters on Coronation day.”
As they note:
Republic chief executive Graham Smith, who was among the group, said he has now received a personal apology from police officers.
He said he did not accept the apology and would take legal action after no charges were brought against him.
Elaborating on their statement of regret the BBC noted that:
The Met also confirmed it had used a controversial new law to detain the group.
I do not believe the police. Politely, they are asking us to believe in yet more fairytales if they expect us to think that these arrests were a mistake.
They announced zero tolerance of protest in advance of the coronation.
They got new powers enacted days in advance of the coronation to arrest without reason.
Republic had been completely open and honest about their intentions, I know. I get their emails. And so there was no new “intelligence” for the police to act on to justify their actions, as they and those seeking to excuse them (Ed Balls, I am looking at you) claimed. There was just a police conspiracy to appease Suella Braverman by showing zero tolerance that backfired spectacularly in both the UK and around the world.
And now they have not only had to eat humble pie, because their actions were so obviously unjustified and unjustifiable - because not only was the protest peaceful but there was never a conspiracy that it should be anything else - but they have now paved the way for rightful demands that use of this law be restricted until such time as it can be repealed.
The only impediment to that happening is Labour's support for these laws - which looks most especially crass now, but that I expect that to change Keir Starmer's position
And why do I care so much? Because if they start with restricting the right to protest then not long after they will come for those who write what they disagree with. That's why. And I still don't trust them not to do so.
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Things have developed a sorry pass now in the UK where FPTP appears to be undermining British democracy and preventing its development. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer already knew they’d proscribed the Republic Group when spokespersons for the party made the following statement :-
“Labour officials argue that a refusal to commit to repeal does not necessarily imply support for a measure, or a veto on action, just a refusal to overly tie the party’s hands after an election.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/08/labour-urged-to-say-whether-it-would-scrap-new-anti-protest-laws
“Labour MPs have spoken out in the run-up to the coronation against party rule changes that prevent constituency branches from affiliating with an anti-monarchy group.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/04/labour-mps-attack-party-rule-changes-curbing-links-with-anti-monarchy-group-republic
This Labour Party no longer bears any features or policies for which I might be prepared to vote. It’s becoming even more right-leaning than Blair’s government – and as for Wilson ‘s? When I was a student, we used to ask ‘which twin (Wilson/Heath – shows how long ago!) is the Tory?’ Even Heath would be too left-wing for the current Labour Party!
“the Metropolitan Police has expressed “regret” over the arrests of six anti-monarchy protesters on Coronation day.”, they went on to say
“evenin’ all – sadly we did not ‘ave enough officers on duty to arrest all the people we would have liked to arrest but this short coming will be remedied in the near future when we will be able to arrest loadsof naughty people, keep them for a short while and then release them”
The interview had to be stopped at this point because the Plod spokesman broke down into tears……..of laughter.
The plods – there to make the Uk safe for…………the Uk establishment & people wearing funny clothes.
Have you noticed Uk peasants, how burglaries, theft, vandalism etc is ignored by the plods? that’s cos your law and order priorities are not the plods law & order priorities.
Plods, part of the system to make the Uk an increasingly shitty and undemocratic place.
On a more serious note: worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5yXwCLPgNY
(all to do with the police and false arrests – like being in Russia isn’t it?)
I note that Mike Wright interviewed in this YouTube video says journalists were arrested by the Met Police on Saturday. He also points out that on the UK’s doorstep is Southern Ireland (Eire) which is known world wide as the Republic of Ireland and that language is important Republic should be labelled as a pro-republican group not an anti-monarchy group.
I note the Guardian is taking the Labour Party statement at face value today and not mentioning that Starmer had previously proscribed the Republic group along with many other organisations:-
“Labour says ‘something has gone wrong’ over arrest of coronation protesters”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/09/labour-says-something-has-gone-wrong-over-met-police-arrest-of-coronation-protesters
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/04/labour-mps-attack-party-rule-changes-curbing-links-with-anti-monarchy-group-republic
Here’s Ian Tresman’s list of the groups Starmer has proscribed constituency parties affiliating to without NEC approval previously posted on Funding The Future:-
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Stop the War Coalition
Republic
London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign
Jewish Voice for Labour
Somalis for Labour
Sikhs for Labour
All African Women’s Group
Health Campaigns Together
The Campaign Against Climate Change
Trade Union Group
Peace and Justice Project
Nothing like starting Charles Reign badly is there.
I suggest that if the powers that be want to abolish the monarchy they are going the right way about it.
I’ve got to say it but how typically British to be so polite in denying somebody something.
Manners have always mattered more than principles in this country.
But what is the apology for? It seems so ‘upper-class’ – ‘Awfully sorry old chap but I just need people to think that there is no alternative. i’m sure that you understand’.
You’ve gone on record, many times, saying it’s OK to be intolerant of the intolerant. And I agree. Why, then, are you supporting a group, where 6 people were going to do their best to spoil the Coronation event for thousands of others? I know you agree with Republic, broadly, but I think the principle above should apply.
They weren’t intolerant
They were expressing an opinion
Those seeking to silence them were the intolerant
There were thousands of people wanting to watch the Coronation processions. Why should anti-monarchists want to spoil their pleasure in the occasion, because they disagree with the views of these people. Have the watchers no right to hold their views?
If the Republic group had done whatever they wanted to do, probably the only thing that would have happened was that they would have been laughed at. The outcome could have been worse in so many ways, but we’ll never know.
And your definition of intolerance worries me. We need to be intolerant of some of the ways people we agree with express their views, as well as the same thing when we disagree, I think.
You di know the protest did go ahead, don’t you?
No one laughed at them.
So, what sense does your comment make in that context?
And why were some arrested and then apologised to?
Why not address what happened, not your fantasy?
“6 people were going to do their best to spoil the Coronation event for thousands of others”.
If this was, for example – a teddy bear’s picnic – you would have a fair point. But it wasn’t (although some of the participants insisted on wearing bits of bear).
It was the formal and ritualised appointment of the UK’s head of state. It was a political event. Millions of people disagree that the head of the Windsor family should be the UK’s head of state & given that the Uk is a democracy, these people have a right to disagree with this political event and publically show their disapproval. If you and other royalists want to turn a political event into a bloody fancy dress garden party – that’s your problem. I guess you are also happy that the nation/taxpayers/you hosed circa £150m at this charade whilst children go to school hungry – & let’s not forget the pillock with the crown is worth billions – he could have dug into his own pocket and funded it himself.
Why? Because the issue of the Coronation is itself a contested issue; and our democracy is a messy, argumentative, disputatious space. We do not live in Disneyworld. Britain is not a fairy tale. It is untidy, and the untidiness is real. It is the fairy tale that is fake. It is really quite obvious. You can of course have a coronation; but it comes, and presents itself, whatever you wish as Britain really is; warts and all. That is the reality of a living democracy.
Could we be less disputatious and more at ease with ourselves? Yes, if we had a Government that served everyone, and not a Chumocracy; a Government that worked to fix the cost of living crisis, for everybody; that understood monetary economics, debt and inflation instead of botching it all; that had not created a disastrous energy market that has exacerbated our economic problems and placed much of the population in financial difficulty; that cared about homelessness and built homes with building regulations we could trust; that more than doubled the national debt since 2008, but has failed to use the resources to invest, and presides over a decayed, failing infrastructure; that has no growth, no productivity success, but presided over sharply falling living standards; that has failed the NHS, wrecked the critical public services, created strikes among the least militant work forces in Britain; and in an unstable world, with a major war in Europe for the first time in 75 years – the Government has seriously depleted our investment in defence through gross under investment. We are in a catastrophic mess, compounded by Brexit; for which there is no alternative solution to match it, and presided over by a succession of dismally incompetent Conservative Governments. We are failing on climate change …. and I could go on; and on; and on. But we have successive Conservative Governments that have failed us badly; now for nearly fifteen years of decline and fall.
There is the reality, not a complete description, but bad enough perhaps, for you to catch the drift. You cannot cover up all the consequent angst and disbelief of the population, post-covid with the wave of a magic wand and an ostentatious fairy tale, an animated fantasy. The British tell themselves that the whole world wishes they had our system. They don’t. It is for the world just another passing spectacle; a glamorous curiosity. Our Commonwealth is shrinking; announcements of imminent disentanglement from the Crown by our Caribbean brethern are taking place, even within hours of the coronation’s end. And there resides a British history that is no fairy tale for anyone with Caribbean ancestry.
It is also worth reflecting that there is a strange paradox at the heart of the fairy-tale: the splendour and grandeur of the Crown always sits a little uneasily with the loftier aspirations of service, humility and modesty at any time; still less in times like these. This is a circle not easily squared. Splendeur, pomp, pageantry, jewelled Crowns and rich garments displayed to the populace; was more persuasive as an exercise of substance at a time when ‘The King’s Touch’ still had resonance for a credulous public – three hundred years ago; more thoughtful, humbler, self-effacing and realistic aspirations should now count for more; but it seems do not. What we want instead is flag-waving, and over-hyped hysteria led by the inanities of the Daily Mail or Telegraph.
THEY, our self appointed masters, have gone utterly and totally deranged.
We are now living in a fully fascist state and moving towards an openly nazi mindset with the same aims of the original, by the process of the proverbial slow boiled frog, over the last 25 years. Yes it has been brewing that long. Longer. It has been planned well before that. It’s happening all across the Collective West, it has to be seen in that context to realise that our political establishment and their backers are in lockstep.
That should be obvious now to these waking up to say ‘how did we get here?’ The cancel culture and Orwellian rewriting of actual history of less than a century ago is breathtaking. That actual Nazi defeat at the hands of the Red Army has been cancelled today. When it was celebrated by us as allies then and up until just a few years ago. Across Europe such laws and repression are being enacted on peoples memories and respect for their ancestral sacrifices that defeated that Nazi plan
Yes first they came … etc
Yes lights of conscience are going out all across Europe , AGAIN.
It didn’t happen without warning, I could see it from my lowly vantage why haven’t others?
Are they complicit? Did they expect to benefit? And be left alone?
Or are they just too close to the narrative trees to see the propaganda forest?
The Coronation was a damp (literally) squib in the U.K.
I didn’t see many windows decorated or Union Jack bunting.
A lot less than the dead queens jubilee last year!
Us Brits are DONE with a unelected head of state.
The supposed oath of fealty equally fell flat.
There are many pissed off about Camilla getting a crown!
People remember Diana. They believe she has been erased, I heard a phrase that she was just a ‘brood mare ‘ – from a supposed royalist!
Do we really need to have a Revolution to be heard?
I’d rather not, because it will perforce be violent, which will lead to even more repression and entrenchment of the ‘with Nazi us or Commie them’, ‘the enemy within ‘ ‘king and country’ etc such button pushing memes by the ever more desperate and decrepit status quo; the establishment Old and New who are the only ones who are living comfortably in this now austerity destroyed country .
We do not want to go to war.
We don’t want to love nazism by design or ignorance.
We just want to live a human life in this world along with the rest of the billions of humanity.
Not just a Golden Billion in a Collective Waste.
Who’s going to tell THEM?
Thank you for saying the seemingly unsayable about the long journey we have taken towards the rewriting of the history of the defeat of Nazism and arriving in our fully fascist state.
Similarly, I didn’t read anywhere that it was peacetime censorship to prevent the British (and much of the European and US) public from making up their own minds about Ukraine by removing access to RT, Sputnik and various other media outlets. It was allowed to happen without protest because anyone voicing objection to that censorship knew they would not be praised for supporting democratic freedom of speech, freedom to publish and freedom to dissent from the dominant narrative. Instead they would be vilified as Putin apologists. That’s how the erosion of these rights is perpetrated. Disallow principled discourse on censorship and characterise it as support for the content of the publication.
And now we see the same pattern happening across the board.
“THEY, our self appointed masters, have gone utterly and totally deranged.”
Nope – they know what they are doing. There will be a couple of slaps on the wrist for the Metropolitan Thug-Force, the gold commander will be told “job well done but keep your head down for a week or so” and things will settle back into the same old etc. The Vile-tories knew exactly what they were doing & you can be sure that there will be celebrations by vile-sunak & Co:
a) for the “good” result re protest suppression (there will be some minor adjustments – enough to pacify the mainstream meeja – but of no consequence)
b) the good result in the local elections where circa 20 – 25% of people were turned away (we will never know the exact number because no tally was kept of people asked if they had formal ID in voting queues – and who departed before they could be officially told to bugger -off
c) the right to strike that has an impact, has been abolished (this has yet to work its way through the system).
d) Liebore is now vile-tory & will change nothing of the above – we know that cos they said so – twice.
Unless things change, (violent) revolution is inevitable. Probably presaged by rising levels of violence as people start to take direct action – because the vile-tories and vile-Liebore have left open no other options. Adding, not my view by the way but that of MI5, who in the 1990s forecast the main threat to civil order was… the middle classes who as I write are increasingly being screwed (& that’s before A.I. comes on the scene and evicerates a whole pile of middle class jobs).
My view is that the police reaction was more than “just a police conspiracy to appease Suella Braverman”. It was a deeply ingrained deference to Authority in the form of Royalty, which neatly demonstrates another facet of the UK’s undemocratic “democracy”. We are encouraged to think we have a parliamentary democracy, indeed we’re told regularly that it it is the Mother of Parliaments – the oldest and finest parliamentary democracy in the world, but we have an elective dictatorship thanks to FPTP. Any party elected with a substantial majority can do as it pleases regardless of international law, treaties, blatant injustices etc.
But in addition, we have the Monarchy which we’re encouraged to believe has no role in UK politics, but we know that’s not true: aside from their admin role of signing new Bills into Law, both the late Queen and the “new” King have interfered in legislation passing through the Commons when it might have an impact on their properties and interests. Is there any formally defined restriction of this right, or could they, if they so wished, interfere in matters not directly affecting their interests/properties? The overwhelming tone of most PR about the Monarchy in the mainstream media is just deference; much of it is no better than fawning adoration. This attitude of deference towards the Monarchy permeates all arms of the state like the military, the police etc, so it should be no surprise that the Met were determined to prevent even the mildest form of protest on Saturday, and no surprise that our elective dictatorship had obligingly introduced the law changes to facilitate the Met’s actions.
Whaur’s yer democracy noo?
When even Tory MPs are objecting to the arrests, Labour ought to realise that they are really on the wrong side here.
Agreed
Republic is quite a well-known organisation with a particular style.
Their spokesman Graham Smith is professional, articulate, educated. Because there have been a lot of royal events lately, he’s known as such from the telly. So the Met have shot themselves in the foot here because they arrested someone who middle-England can relate to.
But the law remains.
When it gets used against people of colour, scruffy hippy-types, people with northern accents, working-class people etc, the general attitude from the British public will be compliant. (That is, if we hear about such arrests at all, which they won’t.) People will be like Ed Balls – “Aaahhhh well, the police must have had good reasons to stop THOSE protests”
These initial invisible assumptions about people, which NONE of us are proof against, are already allowing increasing repression in different ways in this country.
Accepted
This is why this is bad law
Hang on, let me get my head round this (just been watching the Mike Wright interview):
The Night Stars (volunteers handing out rape alarms) is a programme run by Westminster City Council in conjunction with the Met. – so, all one team; right?
Met.’s head of media was a Mail journalist; Mail reported details of a supposed plot – said their source was the Met. Met. then blame their action on news of planned plot as reported in … er … the Mail. So, all one team; right?
Sound like a less-than-opaque strategy?
Now throw into the mix this story of a peaceful pro EU march and rally planned in east Devon – the details are embodied in this article:
https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/fascism-time-to-believe-the-evidence-of-our-eyes-and-ears-as-the-good-chap-model-disintegrates/
… in a nutshell: Police ignored all applications for permission to run it, tried chasing but impossible to make contact, so march was cancelled. Once it’s too late the Police profess misunderstanding.
It isn’t just London – this is Exeter. How many others around the country?
Thanks. Good points and questions.
Dissent is now by permission only.
How long before blogging is by licence only?