The Bare Bones

The Police have admitted that there were no broken bones or collapsed lungs at the Bristol protests. They have plenty of form, and this is the week in which the Shrewsbury 24's appeals have been allowed. 

When only one side has turned up with batons, horses, and attack dogs, then only one side has turned up in order to be violent, secure in the knowledge that its pet media would publish its press releases in full and without comment, reversing the footage for broadcast purposes. Nor was Bristol about "rent". It was about the fact that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill would inflict literal pogroms on the Gypsy, Romany and Traveller communities by burning their homes.

I have had nothing but positive experiences of the Police, but no one needs or deserves the numerous terrifying powers that this Bill would confer. "You hate them until you need them" is the cry of those who are used to having them at their own beck and call. Under what conceivable circumstance would, say, GRT people, or members of the black working class, ever feel the need to call the Police?

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act will join the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act as the three sides of the triangle that separated this country from the world's liberal democracies. Britain is the Bantustan that the Alt-Right and its allies have been given as a consolation prize for their electoral defeat in the United States, lately in the Netherlands, soon enough in France, and so on. Expect considerable immigration.

Labour abstained both on the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill and on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill. But for the death of a middle-class white person, then it would have abstained at Second Reading of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which it had described as not going far enough. Do not expect it to vote against Third Reading.