{"id":152220,"date":"2025-08-12T05:52:30","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T04:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/?p=152220"},"modified":"2025-09-04T07:14:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T06:14:20","slug":"do-the-uk-cops-want-the-ban-lifted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2025\/08\/12\/do-the-uk-cops-want-the-ban-lifted\/","title":{"rendered":"Do the UK cops <strong>want<\/strong> the ban lifted?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Blind man in wheelchair arrested at Palestine Action protest in London\" width=\"506\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bMgRYQa2V8I?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Am I overthinking things? Wouldn&#8217;t be the first time. I&#8217;ve heard Owen Jones, George Galloway, Kernow Damo &#8211; even Andrew Neil FFS! &#8211; voice disgust at the arrest of a blind disabled man. My step-daughter, a criminal law solicitor, phoned Sunday morning to ask\u00a0in incredulous tones why the police had made so many &#8216;bad optics&#8217; arrests.<\/p>\n<p>They couldn&#8217;t arrest everyone, I replied. My sense on the day, reinforced by subsequent corporate and social media footage, is that faced with so large a presence &#8211; at least 800 of us &#8211; they were making arbitrarily selected, <em>eeny meeny miny mo, <\/em>busts. But why the blind man in a wheelchair? Why the vicars and Quakers, the retired head teacher, the former magistrate, the army colonel? Why Moazzam Begg &#8211; let <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moazzam_Begg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>that one sink in<\/strong><\/a> for a moment &#8211; and so many elderly and infirm?<\/p>\n<p>I floated the idea they chose these to send a message: <em>&#8220;see? No one is\u00a0 immune&#8221;.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But what if the message was not to the ban defiers but the government which saddled them with with so unenviable and unachievable a task? I can&#8217;t track this down now but one Police Federation (cops&#8217; union) spokesman speaking anonymously questioned on practical grounds the wisdom of listing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation &#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-152224\" src=\"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/250811-independent.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"794\" height=\"348\" srcset=\"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/250811-independent.jpg 794w, https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/250811-independent-300x131.jpg 300w, https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/250811-independent-768x337.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 794px) 100vw, 794px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; while Crispin Flintoff, below in the best live-at-the-scene commentary I&#8217;ve viewed, says this at 16:58-18:44:<\/p>\n<h6 style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">I don&#8217;t understand what the police strategy was because &#8230; a guy who was arrested was released almost instantly. His bail condition was that he wasn&#8217;t allowed to protest on behalf of Palestine Action again, but that was it, right? I don&#8217;t think they even took him to a police station. So what were the police doing?<\/h6>\n<h6 style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">&#8230; Was it &#8211; as I hope &#8211; to prove that this is unenforceable, that you cannot arrest 500 people right? Did the police choose not to enforce it? That was my feeling. Maybe the police wanted to tell the politicians: <em>you&#8217;ve given us a law we can&#8217;t enforce.<\/em><\/h6>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"As it happened: the historic 9th August protest\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5ORIdFJVcRI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>What neither Crispin nor anyone else knew at the time is that the police would go on to make an all time record number of arrests: greater than in any of Britain&#8217;s many urban riots; greater than those which brought down Mrs Thatcher over her detested poll tax. But while his counts proved wildly premature, his underlying hypothesis shouldn&#8217;t be dismissed. It wouldn&#8217;t be the first time a jaded workforce applied <em>reductio absurdum<\/em> in action, sabotaging employer intent by carrying out orders to the letter with wilful disregard for the consequences. Could Starmer and his home secretary &#8211; both struggling on so many fronts, both recipients of Lobby largesse <span id='easy-footnote-1-152220' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2025\/08\/12\/do-the-uk-cops-want-the-ban-lifted\/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-152220' title='Palestine Action co-founder Huda Amorri has &lt;a href=&quot;https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2025\/08\/04\/151870\/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;won the right&lt;\/strong&gt;&lt;\/a&gt; to challenge the legality of banning her non violent direct action group. In an appeal to be heard in November, one of her arguments is that the government consulted groups known for Israeli sympathies &amp;#8211; including Israel owned Elbit Systems, which on British soil manufactures weapons used in the genocide &amp;#8211; but not one human rights organisation, far less Palestine Action.'><sup>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> &#8211; <em>really\u00a0 <\/em>have wanted millions of British households viewing on their screens a self-evidently peaceful protest leading to an army of uniformed bobbies bundling the coffin dodger and the wheelchaired into marked vans in front of the Mother of Parliaments?<\/p>\n<p>Just asking. <span id='easy-footnote-2-152220' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2025\/08\/12\/do-the-uk-cops-want-the-ban-lifted\/#easy-footnote-bottom-2-152220' title='It seems I may be guilty of (unconscious) plagiarism. Just had indignant email from elder daughter re &lt;del&gt;my&lt;\/del&gt; her &lt;em&gt;it&amp;#8217;s-the-cops-wot-want-the-ban-lifted\u00a0&lt;\/em&gt; thesis:&lt;\/p&gt;\n&lt;h6 style=&quot;padding-left: 40px;&quot;&gt;Hey, it was ME who suggested that! The idea didn&amp;#8217;t seem to have occurred to you until I threw it out there. You thought it was a chilling way for the police to signal that the law is the law and they will target anyone, with the intention of deterring potential protectors.&lt;\/h6&gt;\n&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t discount the latter either, Annie. Interesting times.'><sup>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"London March: Police Target Elderly Woman\" width=\"506\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zDGh9iYSb28?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am I overthinking things? Wouldn&#8217;t be the first time. I&#8217;ve heard Owen Jones, George Galloway, Kernow Damo &#8211; even Andrew Neil FFS! &#8211; voice disgust at the arrest of a blind disabled man. My step-daughter, a criminal law solicitor, phoned &#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2025\/08\/12\/do-the-uk-cops-want-the-ban-lifted\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-middle-east","category-politics-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152220"}],"version-history":[{"count":63,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153716,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152220\/revisions\/153716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}