UK’s police-state descent continues as even the separate words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Action’ now banned in the same sentence Among the slew of more than a hundred arrests y…
“One of the officers was taken to hospital with injuries to her back and has since been discharged, while the other officer received medical treatment at the scene after being struck on the back of his legs.”
If you’re going to take direct action, then you do so and if the police turn up you get arrested and go through the system; that’s kind of the traditional “British way” of doing direct action - it’s still pretty polite. So the six arrested here sound like right arseholes, Samuel Corner not the least (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20l0vzpn1mo). Having said that, I can’t read “assaulted people with sledgehammers” without conjuring up images of life-threatening and life-changing injuries. So I think that whilst he’s a knob, this sounds like a scuffle rather than the picture that immediately springs to mind. I guess there’ll be more detail in November.
That being said: that was a year ago. The recent prohibition immediately followed someone spray-painting some planes, and that’s the thing in the public mind. I think most people associate that sort of thing with chucking soup over the frame of a painting - there’s not been a direct line drawn in the media between the burglary last August and the recent activities. I don’t think there’s been a claim of further assaults by P.A. or that it’s their general MO. Certainly the thing that hit the press recently appeared to be “victimless” in that regard (we’d have heard about it otherwise).
So the public outrage is at the outlawing of an organisation that probably summons a mental image of the Campbell Soup brigade rather than a kneecapping; that and some well-publicised awkward policing is what is behind the protests. I don’t think that anyone protesting this would be anything but appalled at thuggery.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnnje4wlro
“One of the officers was taken to hospital with injuries to her back and has since been discharged, while the other officer received medical treatment at the scene after being struck on the back of his legs.”
If you’re going to take direct action, then you do so and if the police turn up you get arrested and go through the system; that’s kind of the traditional “British way” of doing direct action - it’s still pretty polite. So the six arrested here sound like right arseholes, Samuel Corner not the least (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20l0vzpn1mo). Having said that, I can’t read “assaulted people with sledgehammers” without conjuring up images of life-threatening and life-changing injuries. So I think that whilst he’s a knob, this sounds like a scuffle rather than the picture that immediately springs to mind. I guess there’ll be more detail in November.
That being said: that was a year ago. The recent prohibition immediately followed someone spray-painting some planes, and that’s the thing in the public mind. I think most people associate that sort of thing with chucking soup over the frame of a painting - there’s not been a direct line drawn in the media between the burglary last August and the recent activities. I don’t think there’s been a claim of further assaults by P.A. or that it’s their general MO. Certainly the thing that hit the press recently appeared to be “victimless” in that regard (we’d have heard about it otherwise).
So the public outrage is at the outlawing of an organisation that probably summons a mental image of the Campbell Soup brigade rather than a kneecapping; that and some well-publicised awkward policing is what is behind the protests. I don’t think that anyone protesting this would be anything but appalled at thuggery.