Sanction This

"Violence is never the answer" rings hollow in the only country that requires potential Heads of Government to have promised in principle to obliterate hundreds of millions of people at the touch of a button, and which is now the principal backer of the Saudi war in Yemen, the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, six years old today.

In any case, it turns out that Nadia Whittome was right all along. There was no punctured lung at Bristol, and the only broken bones belonged to the protesters. Who would have guessed that the violence would have come from the larger, all-male gang that had shields, helmets, batons, horses, attack dogs, and heavy vehicles to drive into the crowd?

First the death of Sarah Everard, and then the beating of her mourners, had led the Police to fear the loss of their cherished Bill to make protest itself an offence punishable by 10 years in prison, and as a boon to legalise their anti-Gypsy pogroms as well. Until a middle-class white person had been killed, and middle-class white people had been roughed up when they had objected, then the Official Opposition had been planning to abstain on that Bill, which would have gone through unnoticed by the official media.

Therefore, a Police riot was staged, secure in the knowledge that those media would parrot the press releases and reverse the footage, thereby "making the case" for a Bill that, once enacted, would remove this country from the ranks of liberal democracies. But there is now all to play for against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

No one who had voted against renewal of the coronavirus measures would really be any friend of civil liberties unless they opposed this Bill. No parliamentarian who had been sanctioned by China would really be any hero unless they had fought this Bill to the last ditch. If the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act ever did join the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act on the Statute Book, then the triangle would be complete, and it would be Britain that would be worthy of international sanctions.