Friday 12 April 2013

Police State Klaxon

The Met Police have, quite frankly, excelled themselves here:

The Metropolitan Police has asked groups planning to demonstrate during or in advance of Margaret Thatcher's funeral to make themselves known to officers so that their "right to protest can be upheld".

I'm sorry, what?

What fucking shit is this? Why the fuck would the police need to know who wants to protest so that they can "uphold" their right to protest? See that fucker over there protesting? Uphold his right. Jesus.

The next thing you know, people will have to apply to the police for permission to protest. Oh, hang on.

Look, Thatcher was a flawed politician, any politician is flawed. I also remain unconvinced that her "achievements", good or bad, were down to her alone. Unlike Blair, she still believed in having a cabinet where relevant ministers made their own decisions. That the mines closed down and industry was gutted was much more down to the unions having no business sense and believing they could leech indefinitely more and more off a failing, sickly host. So I'm not convinced that her veneration by the right is justified.

I can understand the hatred of the left, however, because it's much easier and more desirable to blame someone external for your own complete, abject failure than to look at yourself and say: "We fucked up." The petulant, pouty lip of people who weren't fucking born or were still in nappies when Thatcher was ejected from power is ludicrous, but typical of the whingeing lack of responsibility of communitarian, authoritarian leftards.

But having said all that, if people want to protest her, they should be free to do so and the police's burgeoning contempt for the Peelian principle of policing by consent needs to be slapped down very soon.

9 comments:

JuliaM said...

I hear they want to protest in Trafalgar Square - well, fine, let them. What they shouldn't be allowed to do is protest at the funeral or procession itself.

I have to support their right to be childish, hateful little cockweasels - I don't have to support their right to do it right in mourners faces.

Anonymous said...

Its a funeral!!! There are better times and places to protest than at somebodies funeral.

The protestors (looters) have been feverently talking about how much damage they are going to do. So, I can hardly blame the police for cracking down before bad stuff happens. Otherwise the tax-payer has to go around fixing lots of broken windows, burnt shops

Tom Mein said...

I wonder how many people will protest by breaking into a store and stealing a 40" Samsung television?

Storm Saxon's Gall Bladder said...

It gets worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

Of course you can hold a sign during the Democratic National Convention: three blocks away inside a wire cage.

Anonymous said...

Bunny

Interestingly enough when the protest is going on some gentlemen who support Millwall Football Club have said that they may have to drop by and show their disapprobation. I agree that the anti-Thatcher group have their right to demonstrate and equally I think the Millwall fans have their right to show their feelings of disapproval. Hopefully kinetically.

Robert Edwards said...

What must the world think of us? I realise that they are the usual suspects, but, really...

Bobo said...

'Law and Order', a BBC crime drama is always interesting for the light it throws on Lefty thinking about the judiciary, the police, the state, etc. A few weeks ago the steely and determined but sensitive and empathetic lady DCI said, apropos of some vigilante-type case:"It's our job to prevent the public from policing themsleves."

Wrinkled Weasel said...

Well, don't be too dismayed. This protest is merely just another line to peg a bit of abstract hatred onto. If you ask them why they hate Thatcher, they don't really have an answer, as Andrew Neill so brilliantly demonstrated on The Daily Politics.."So, was the closed shop a bad thing?..So, is it right to have a secret ballot? etc.

Anybody who lived through it and had to deal with the Unions knows that they were dealing with a bunch of tyrants who were no better than the KGB, and believe me, they used the same methods.

As for the plod, they like nothing better than to slap a few stinky lefties. I hope for all our sakes they get on with it.

Anonymous said...

"I can understand the hatred of the left, however, because it's much easier and more desirable to blame someone external for your own complete, abject failure than to look at yourself and say: "We fucked up."

Absolutely. While they're busy spouting their bile about Thatcher they might want to take a minute to remember just how it was she came to be in power in the first place. Remember that? Everyone was on strike, the streets piled high with shit, the dead went unburied, ah the good old days eh! Frankly we would have voted for a hedgehog if it promised to get us out of that fucking mess. They say "you get the government you deserve," quite so.