Discussion
Why is it that police feel able to arrest retired women holding cardboard signs in pedestrian areas but not masked men marauding across roads and through a town?
In what sense do the government or the police uphold that “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy”?
@urlyman Strange how the same people who say they’re terrified of seeing a Palestinian flag in public seem quite happy to see organised masked thugs blocking the roads for hours while the police don’t even turn up.
Because they get to define what qualifies as peaceful, and at present peaceful is defined as "will it piss off the Daily Mail".
A better answer, from Abigail Thorn, years ago:
Because when commentators describe a group as violent or peaceful, they are usually not describing that group's activities but rather the social response to them that the commentator desires. If someone called Insulate Britain "violent", they were saying that they wanted society to use violence (in the form of the police and prisons) against Insulate Britain, not that they thought Insulate Britain were themselves doing violence.
A neat proof of this is by asking such a commentator about whether they consider the military or police to be violent. Those groups are unquestionably violent, that's their job, but people often don't like the idea of violence against the police, and so calling them "violent" is often difficult.
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