'Our right to protest was chiseled away long before the Queen’s death, but we’ve only just noticed' ✍️ IanDunt for ipaperviews
The police have proved themselves utterly unable to exercise their discretion responsibly. The vigil over Sarah Everard, when they violently assaulted women gathering to mourn someone murdered by a police officer, demonstrated that once and for all.
The behaviour, for what it’s worth, is often unpleasant. Wandering into a crowd who are mourning the Queen with a placard saying “fuck imperialism” isn’t ideal, and that’s at the better end of the spectrum. In 2019, a woman was arrested under the Public Order Act and given a suspended three month jail sentence for shouting “shame on you, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” at people taking part in a Pride march.
That’s why the problem is bigger than police discretion. It’s about the threshold for intrusion on free expression. There should be no laws against causing someone alarm. It’s not that they’re badly written or improperly enforced. It’s that they should not exist. And even then, that threat cannot just be a generalised smudge of causation – the lazy statement that if we allow people to say unpleasant things then sometime in the future someone somewhere might be hurt. It should be a direct and immediate causal line. Someone is at that moment trying to stoke violent behaviour in a context in which violent behaviour is likely to take place.
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