Subjects object

How fitting that the Metropolitan Police should choose the Coronation to remind Britons that we are subjects first and citizens second. After liaising with the Met to facilitate a peaceful protest, members of the pressure group Republic were bundled into the cells on a pretext as risible as it was predictable.

Despite admitting the arrests were ‘regrettable’ (the standard non-apology apology), the Met insists the action was not pre-planned.

Cock-up or conspiracy? I cannot improve on this tweet by actor Reece Dinsdale: ‘Easy to apologise after the event. The officers knew what they were doing. “Mission accomplished, lads. Give ‘em an empty apology… that’ll sort it until we need to do it again!”.’

Equally regrettable was the seeming indifference of the legal profession to this fresh assault on our right to peaceful protest. Curiously, the consensus seems to be that it was bad form for Republic to seek to strike a sour note at a ‘celebration’. One social media regular even suggested the real blame lay with Republic’s CEO for angrily tweeting about the affair. How impertinent of him, in the presence of his betters.

Not all were so sanguine. A barrister shrewdly noted that the Met had declined to get into the detail of what would amount to arrestable conduct. How can the scope of lawful protest be left so casually unclear?

One plausible answer is that this lack of clarity is deliberate. When the rules of engagement are so ambiguous, how much easier it will be to proscribe for reasons of political expediency any protest that might prove merely embarrassing, never mind ‘noisy’ or disruptive. ‘When the right [to protest] is contingent on arbitrary, political decisions made by ministers and senior police officers, it ceases to be a meaningful right at all,’ declared the current affairs magazine Byline Times. Quite so. But precisely that contingency was what the Public Order Act was designed to introduce. Let us not pretend otherwise.

Lawyers are limbering up for Republic v Metropolitan Police, but the circus has left town. A price worth paying to prevent a few pesky dissidents from engaging in an act of lèse-majesté in front of hundreds of millions of television viewers. ‘Mission accomplished’ indeed.