Pic: La Pethick, an 89-year old retired psychotherapist, one of 466 people arrested yesterday, is removed by 4 policemen.
For holding cardboard signs saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
She and her fellow activists triggered the police into arresting over 120 more than the previous largest number of arrests in a single protest, thought to be the poll tax riots in 1990.
The photo is by Toby Shepheard for the Sunday Times.
The wording in the article is more precise than my paraphrasing of it:
“made by the Metropolitan Police at a single protest event”.
And the number of “466” that it cited proved to be higher than that, and higher than 475.
The thing about numbers generally is they lend themselves to comparison and we end up focusing on that instead of the dysfunction they highlight
…Before the protest, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan police said: “We are aware that the organisers of Saturday’s planned protest are encouraging hundreds of people to turn out with the intention of placing a strain on the police and the wider criminal justice system.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/defiance-grows-uk-ban-palestine-protest-group-action
Which is exactly what is needed when idiot MPs pass bad law sculpted by a reactionary Home Secretary propping up indefensible foreign policy from a Labour government full of shit
The police are allowed to prioritise the crimes that they choose to devote effort to solving. Every crime that was not investigated by the Met Police over the weekend because they decided to arrest non-violent protesters was a policy decision by their leadership. Newspapers need to start listing every crime that was not investigated because the police decided to prioritise pointless activity.
@david_chisnall I was open to the idea I saw expressed earlier that they might be intentionally placing pressure on a bad law so that it might be reconsidered. Unlikely, but theoretically possible.
But then I just chatted to my son who happened to be in Trafalgar Square yesterday catching up with a friend. They didn’t know what was going on just half a mile away and were wondering why there were Lancashire Police cars parked up on Northumberland Avenue…
arresting 89 y.o grannies, clearly the real danger to society
Folk also saw officers with "Heddlu" caps so they had also come from Wales (which is surely having a knock on effect in all these other regions if any real crime happens there).
Last week in Suffolk there were 4 different road traffic collisions on one afternoon and I saw one RPU officer single crewed having to deal with a closure to a main highway route (and a secondary incident that had occured about 100m away) on his own, so its not as if they are flush with resources..
so they let it place a strain, instead of being low key, letting it pass, they marched in and were deliberately heavy handed.
I am at a loss.
Perhaps when a linked post has not yet been federated to your instance?
Here’s a screenshot without image description
with the Mets history and the Stalinist handed Cooper in charge, I think it more likely it is a, chilling attempt, scare away demonstrators because they know they will be mass arrested. And next time, the Police won't be in polite high vis, but helmets and riot gear.
…When a government takes 19 months to participate in dropping food aid that actually kills people when it lands on them, instead of doing anything substantive to undermine a psychopathic government that it still sends military supplies to, I think we know who the terrorists are.
And it ain’t people holding signs or throwing paint at killing machines in a rampant industrial overshoot crisis
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