Apropos of my last post I find this story on the Beeb…
Pressure on police over protest
Police are coming under political pressure to explain why no arrests were made during demonstrations in which protesters chanted threatening slogans.
The protests on Friday in London over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad saw slogans and placards glorifying the 7 July London bombings.
Shadow Attorney General Dominic Grieve questioned why no-one was arrested.
Two things of note here.
First, notice this reference “The protests… saw slogans and placards glorifying the 7 July London bombings.”
See, what was I just saying about spin, political capital and illiberal anti-terror legislation.
The other point is in direct response to Dominic Grieve’s ‘something must be done’ rhetoric and can be found in the Met’s response to it:
A Met Police spokeswoman said: “We have stated that arrests if necessary will be made at the most appropriate time.
“This should not be seen as a sign of a lack of activity of the Met Police.
“Specialist officers were deployed on both days’ demonstration to record any potential event should it be needed at any point in the future.”
“Specialist officers were deployed” translates into ‘We had Special Branch, MI5 and MI6 watching the buggers and are now tracing everyone on the march to see if we can turn up any potential links or leads to known or suspected terrorists, so we’re not going to nicking anyone until we’re sure it won’t screw-up any rather more important lines of enquiry.’
In other words, Dominic, don’t be such a thick twat!
True, but if the Met are going to make themselves playthings for Labour’s political agenda you can’t blame others for trying.
Charles Clarke today in the Commons : “Incident’s like we saw on Friday remind us of the need to have the correct laws in place, including the government’s proposal to outlaw glorifying terrorism…”. (That’s paraphrased – just saw it on Ch4 news but haven’t found a link yet.) He said that just after he said that any arrests relating to the protests would be a matter for the police.
He does apparently know that incitement to violence is already illegal then. As someone said this week (memory failure, sorry) , New Labour feel that the main purpose of parliament is to “send a message”.
I’d suggest they use emails for that like everyone else and use parliament for the creation of necessary and workable legislation.
I suppose they’d say I’m stuck in the past and don’t understand politics in the media age. Idiots.