Arresting Developments

10 arrests for what, exactly? The state broadcaster can parrot the official line all it likes, but we have mobile phone footage these days. We have seen the woman punched squarely in the face, the people beaten to the ground when they had their hands up, and the illegal use of the edges of shields as weapons.

The Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill was the dream come true of the angry white men who needed shields, batons, horses, attack dogs, and heavy vehicles to make them feel anything like adequate, but who could not join the Armed Forces because they could not face people who shot back. Simple protest was to have been made a crime. And not just a little crime. It was to have carried a sentence of 10 years in prison. Even the Official Opposition was going to abstain as this measure sailed onto the Statute Book.

But then the murder of Sarah Everard, followed by the beating of her mourners, awoke the middle-class ambivalence about the Police, which sees them as necessary in order to keep down the rest of the riffraff, but which would never dream of inviting them to dinner. Suddenly, even Keir Starmer and David Lammy were prepared to vote against this Bill.

To save the dream of a lifetime, then there needed to be "riots" in order to "make the case" for it, even though everything to do with rioting was of course already illegal. But we all know who has really been rioting. We all know who came dressed for a riot, and tooled up for one. And we all know who did not.

Notice that the rioters are now at pains to call themselves "Crown servants", meaning servants of the Government of the day. That is why no Prime Minister would ever consider abolishing the monarchy. Far from filling a space that a politician therefore cannot, it gives anyone who can wrest and hold the office of Prime Minister the status of an absolute monarch. Complete with the power to send Parliament home indefinitely and then to rule by decree using Orders in Council, which are primary legislation unless they are superseded by an Act of Parliament, an Act that Parliament would have to sit in order to pass.