If the monarchy is part of British culture and tradition, so is respect for civil liberties such as peaceful assembly, demonstration and protest, a police force that does not abuse its power, arrests first and questions later, and compassion for political asylum seekers fleeing persecution in their own countries. But if royalty has emerged somewhat renewed from the events of Charles III’s coronation, the other factors in the equation have long since deteriorated. The country is not what it used to be.
Scotland Yard’s iron fist and “pre-emptive strike” with republican militants even before the march to Westminster Abbey began has been widely criticized by MPs, human rights organizations and a section of the press. as something “deeply anti-British” and a sign of the authoritarian drift of the Conservative Government, which after 13 years in power shows signs of deep exhaustion. Before the coronation, he passed a law that allows the police to arrest for disturbance of public order without any scandalous reason, just to suspect that it will happen.
On Saturday they arrested 52 people using these draconian powers, including several Republic militants (including their leader, Graham Smith, who spent 16 hours in jail), at 7am, three hours before the procession began, in front of the statue of the decapitated King Charles I, under the pretext that they were carrying ropes and hooks with which they could have been tied to lampposts or columns and disturbed the ceremony. Really, they say, it was to consolidate the banners they wanted to deploy with messages such as “Meghan, the people’s princess”, “It’s not my king”, “The parasite king” or “Let’s privatize the Windsors”. Also animal activists and women with anti-rape alarms, “to prevent the noise from scaring the horses and there being a riot”. “They clearly got out of hand,” commented a Liberal Democrat deputy yesterday.
The police’s justification is that they had received intelligence that “groups and individuals were planning to cause trouble” and preferred to “act preemptively, bearing in mind that this was a once-in-a-generation event, with hundreds of thousands of people in the street, two hundred dignitaries and a global audienceâ€.
Criticism of Saturday’s arbitrary arrests joins others at Scotland Yard in recent months over sexism, racism, abuse of power and excessive use of violence. We must also add the new requirement to present a photo ID to vote and the conservative Government’s policy of considering illegal immigrants as criminals, denying them all their rights and sending them to Rwanda.
The monarchy is not in danger, but civil rights are.
