18 March 2021
Patel, Policing and Politics
More haste…
By Lynda Goetz
A text from a very good friend pinged into my WhatsApp box on Sunday evening, ‘Cressida Dick has to go’. I slept on it and waited until Monday morning before sending my reply. I didn’t agree and the unrolling of events and general fallout of the unlawful vigil on Clapham Common over the weekend have, I think, borne out my reservations.
The abduction and murder of Sarah Everard has, like all such occurrences, shocked the nation. As Metropolitan Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick pointed out when announcing the horrible news last week, the fact that violence of this sort is actually rare and the chances of it happening to any one of us incredibly remote does not take away from the horror. How Sarah’s parents and family feel doesn’t bear thinking about. Somehow, what happened next has rather removed the focus from the individual to the general.
Press coverage of events has been extensive, as has analysis and commentary, but stepping back from all of this it does seem that reaction has been, like so much in this last year, over-hasty. The organisation Reclaim These Streets had failed to get court approval to hold a vigil for Sarah, which was banned on account of the Covid regulations. An appeal against that ban failed last Friday, although talks continued in an attempt to find a way to proceed ‘safely’. Protests last summer around the Black Lives Matter campaign had, notably, not only been allowed to go ahead, but provided scenes of police openly sympathising with the protesters and ‘taking the knee’. In contrast, scenes from Clapham last weekend seemed to show ‘heavy-handed’ policing. Last November Home Secretary Priti Patel had used coronavirus legislation to remove an exemption previously enjoyed by protestors against the general rules banning large gatherings. This ban, draconian as it was, seemed to be in line with much of the legislation passed over the last year.
The planned vigil for last Saturday thus became an ‘impromptu’ event, effectively without organisers and not legal under current regulations. The courts and the politicians left it to the Metropolitan Police to ‘enforce the law’, as indeed, they have done for most of the last twelve months. Is it then really that surprising that we end up with a bizarre mixture of heavy-handed policing (£10,000 fines for a teenager who had a house party[i]; one police force flying drones over common land to make examples of families out dog-walking; young policemen asking 82 year-olds why they are sitting on a park bench taking a brief rest before returning home after exercising their dog; setting up road blocks in town centres asking people to explain why they were not ‘staying at home’) and a hands-off approach which allowed protestors to pull down statues?
The illogical and nonsensical nature of so many of the coronavirus regulations have surely made any thinking person question the reasoning? How, for example, is it now okay for hairdressers in Wales to be open for business but those in England still to be closed? Why were there curfews in some countries but not others? Why on earth should drinks have to be served with ‘substantial’ meals? Etc etc. These are all political decisions made for political reasons, mostly it seemed ‘on the hoof’. Amazingly, in an apparently overwhelming desire for ‘safety’, longevity and self-preservation, people have, on the whole, accepted this endless stream of regulations (even to the extent of ‘telling’ on others who have not been abiding by them). The police are put in an invidious position, as Cressida Dick pointed out. In a country where policing is generally seen to be by public consent and peaceful public protests are part of the country’s DNA, how are they expected to behave in a situation where the law appears excessive and is supposedly temporary and for reasons of ‘health and safety’; the vigil ostensibly peaceful and for the purpose of drawing attention to male violence; and then certain women start getting aggressive or refuse to ‘move on’? In order to do their job and ‘enforce the law’ as it currently stands, the police need to use force; brute, mainly-male force against women drawing attention to male violence. The irony can have escaped no-one.
There have been suggestions that when things started to get difficult, from around 6pm onwards, those who were abusive were not peaceful protestors, most of whom had already gone home, but agitators from Extinction Rebellion (XR), Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Both Ken Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, and Dame Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, have defended the actions of their rank and file officers who were on duty at the time. Ms Dick has robustly rebuffed any suggestions that she should resign and has been (perhaps belatedly) supported by the Prime Minister. Mr Marsh pointed out that twenty-six of his officers had been spat at and abused and that whilst it might look heavy-handed to have four or five officers arresting one person it was a way of ensuring they did not fall or harm themselves. “It’s to protect you as much as us”, he said. Patsy Stevenson, one young woman who was arrested, made the point in a subsequent interview that attention needs to be ‘directed away from the police and towards the matter at hand, which is the safety of women’.
The Home Secretary’s latest Bill does in certain areas appear to stretch the bounds of what is acceptable in a supposedly liberal democracy, however. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill will expand police powers to allow them to stamp out protests that cause “serious unease” and create new penalties for people who cause “serious annoyance”. Certain parts of this 300-page Bill in relation to protests are a direct result of the events of 2019 when Extinction Rebellion brought central London to a standstill and later managed to do almost the same in Bristol and other cities, as well as blockading print works. The Black Lives Matter protests last year, described by Patel as ‘dreadful’, were also instrumental in the thinking behind these measures in the bill, which passed its second reading in the House of Commons this week. Should we be concerned by this diminution of our liberties or grateful that we are being spared ‘serious unease’ and ‘serious annoyance’ (both of which terms seem very vague)?
This lengthy bill covers a great deal more than the matter of protests and has been in the pipeline since the Conservatives won the election. It delivers promises made in their manifesto about bringing in tough crime and justice legislation. However, the authoritarian aspects of life under coronavirus legislation has led to a certain amount of unease amongst Tory backbenchers, many of whom have pointed out the role of the government in making protests illegal in the first place.
Knee-jerk reactions have abounded this week. On Monday, after a meeting of the Crime and Justice Taskforce, chaired by the PM, ‘immediate steps’ were announced which included a doubling of the Safer Streets fund (better lighting and CCTV) and undercover police officers in bars and nightclubs (and that would have helped Sarah Everard how exactly?). The following day the government let it be known that protests would be permitted again on March 29 when the rule of six comes back into force. (Immediately causing counter protests, as it will still not be possible to meet friends or go to large weddings or funerals). The Sun newspaper ran the headline, ‘Thousands of angry Brits have backed a petition for Met Police chief Cressida Dick to resign’ (turned out that was 8,000). Social Media has of course been buzzing with people’s instant views on the subjects. In the midst of all this furore, a mother, Bea Jones, who also lost her daughter, Moira, thirteen years ago, in similar circumstances to the Sarah Everard case, has pointed out that the public ‘hijacking’ of mourning for Sarah and the turning of the situation into a movement for protest must be causing her parents even further grief.
Of course we should ensure that our streets are safe places for women and for men too come to that. Indeed, it is more often men who are violently killed on the streets. We also need to ensure that women are safe in their homes, which, as this year of lockdown has highlighted, is not always the case. The women who wanted to organise the vigil did not want to force Cressida Dick to resign over the way the Saturday night vigil was policed. (Who, incidentally would be likely to replace her… a man?) Hasty, volatile responses to all these issues solve very little. Demonising all men for the actions of a few is not the answer either. I suspect that, like so many of our current issues, our attitudes are dependent to some extent at least on our age, our education and our own experiences. Society is changing fast. This is another area in which change will happen. Education and legislation will be needed, but we must avoid calls to legislate when existing laws which can be used are already in place. Calls, for example, to make misogyny a hate crime take us yet further down the route of subjective criminality, which is in my view dangerous.
Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee, said, in response to the announcement about protests being allowed from March 29 onwards: “This paradox highlights the importance of getting back to a world where we rely on common sense and people taking responsibility for themselves and for others. The important thing should be that efforts are made to limit any possible negative impact and we do not constantly tie ourselves up in complex, arbitrary and ever-changing regulations.”
Meanwhile, Priti Patel, blithely floating above all the dissension, has asked for a ‘full report’ from Scotland Yard on what happened. Now that, at least, is not hasty…
[i] Not upheld in court this week, where he was told he should have been fined £100.
