The situation with regarding freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully assemble is pretty bad in the UK. Sometimes it is the state doing the silencing with the legal and justice systems but other forms of silencing are done by employers and various activists sometimes deploying the hecklers veto and shutting down debates by disturbing these debates and to make them impossible to continue.
For years we in Britain have had to put up with a situation where, for example, women opposed to the gender identity cult and Lesbians who believe in human biology have for a long while had to meet in conditions of secrecy for fear of assault from trans rights activists (TRA). Meetings of women who hold views that others dislike, such as hostility to the ideology of gender identity, have on occasion been targeted by TRA’s some of whom are nasty, violent and with a strong whiff of misogyny about them. On at least one occasion to my knowledge women meeting to speak of the issue of Trans had to barricade themselves into the venue that they are meeting in as TRA’s violently banged on the windows and the doors. On other occasions police have had to escort women out of pubs where they have fled to escape aggressive TRA’s following street meetings of women opposed to the gender identity cult.
But it’s not just women and feminists who find that they cannot peacefully and lawfully meet to discuss the politics of the day. Conservatives, of a variety of types, are often faced with loud and obnoxious left wing counter protestors whenever and wherever they meet. These leftists, who sometimes seem to believe that they are just about to re-enact the Battle of Cable Street, turn up and shout moronic abuse at anyone who wishes to speak or hear speeches about migration, the welfare system and social conservative matters. On the vast majority of these situations the police do a reasonable job of keeping the left wing fraggles out of their opponents hair because after all the left do also have a right to peacefully assemble just as those from the political right should be able to do. It’s just that they should assemble with the least impact on those others, the left’s opponents, who are also lawfully meeting and on the general public.
But on some occasions as with the story below, the police do not remove the violent left wingers who wish to disturb and disrupt meetings of their opponents and by doing so therefore permit the deployment of the hecklers veto by leftist groups. In short the Metropolitan Police, the main force for the London area, played a major part in shutting down a meeting of conservatives in a pub by letting the violent leftists just do their thing.
This is a live story and more details will no doubt come out. However here is what I know or have picked up so far.
A night or two ago Peter North, the political commentator who posts under the name of Northern Variant on the X platform was to give a speech in a London pub to an audience made up of members and supporters of the socially conservative Traditional Britain Group. Mr North, who is a member of the very migration critical Homeland Party, was to give a speech on the subject of the problems with the management of the insurgent Reform Party.
Mr North didn’t get to give his speech but for those who wish to read it I’ve linked it HERE.
The reason that Mr North didn’t get to give his speech and espouse his ideas to an audience was because of a group of far left thugs who invaded the pub where the meeting was held. The police should have prevented this from happen but did not. The lefties were causing so much disturbance and losing the publican so much custom that the publican terminated the Traditional Britain Group’s meeting in order to get rid of the aggressive lefties.
According to descriptions given by Mr North and photographs to be found on his X feed, five riot vans full of police turned up not it seems for the violent lefties but for the Traditional Britain Group. Although the publican played a major part in shutting the event down for the safety of his own business, the Metropolitan Police didn’t help support the rights of either Mr North or the Traditional Britain Group to lawfully and peacefully assemble.
The Met should have allowed the lefties to protest in such a manner as to not impinge on the rights of those attending the Traditional Britain Group meeting, but they did not. By going all in on not protecting the rights of the Traditional Britain Group to assemble, the police give the distinct impression that they’ve taken a political ‘side’ here.
This will no doubt feed into the current and rising concerns about ‘two tier policing’ where demonstrators from one cause are treated better than those who are marching for different causes. We’ve had plenty of cases recently that have stoked up that narrative.
Over the last year and a bit we’ve seen pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah hate marchers taking over central London every Saturday since the Hamas-led October 7th Pogrom in Israel. The Met have basically left these demonstrators alone even when they are clearly inciting violence against Israelis and also by extension British Jews. The Met have rarely intervened contemporaneously against those Muslims and Leftists who call for a new genocide against the world’s Jews instead the Met are quite often relying on post demonstration appeals to the public for information about potential offenders that the Met have spotted on these demos.
In contrast, when those who defined themselves as ‘patriot groups’ protested in Whitehall following the Southport Atrocity where three little girls were murdered and many other children and adults were injured by a monster in human form armed with a knife, were policed markedly differently. The Met on this occasion brought out the riot shields and some very robust policing tactics. The Met’s officers battered demonstrators with batons, snatched demonstrators from the crowd and generally did what has rarely been done to the pro-Hamas hate marchers when they’ve marched on the streets of London.
We’ve seen several occasions when the police and not just the Met but officers from other forces as well who have gone in hard with patriot demonstrators shouting out ‘Allah, Allah who the fuck is Allah’ but do little or nothing when groups of Muslims on the hate marches for Hamas make calls for jihad. In fact the Met, acting it seems under advice from the force’s Islamic community advisors, even put out statements challenging the definition of jihad and in another incident excused the flying of a swastika by a pro-Hamas marcher as the police said that the flying of the swastika needed to be seen ‘in context’.
The police, both in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom are rapidly losing their reputation for being impartial. That’s not a good position for police forces to be in. For the police to take the position where they put the speech rights and assembly rights of ‘Abdul’ over ‘Alan’ or the trans activist class ahead of women just wanting their rights protected , as they’ve quite obviously done with regards to the pro-Hamas hate marches and their response to women’s rights demonstrations is wrong. It doesn’t make the general public any safer and further erodes public trust in their police forces.
Policing it is said should be ‘without fear or favour’ but increasingly that’s not what we are getting. It worries me that unless things are turned around and those groups that are unpopular with the left such as the Traditional Britain Group are allowed to peacefully assemble without the leftist hecklers veto, then things could turn quite nasty indeed. If or rather when we have a situation in Britain where large numbers of an increasingly disgruntled population find themselves confronted by police who have clearly chosen the side that the protestors see as their opposition, then the police might be seen as an enemy of one part of the population but not the enemy of others. This is where we might be the police cannot recover both the prior reputation for impartiality and policing equitably and it’s not something that I wish to see happen. It would be better in my view to put right the problems with policing, remove the bias in policing and police for the benefit of every Briton and not just some Britons.