Anglosphere enthusiasts, can you imagine the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in the United States? And Rightists in general, consider the provision that the residency status of a foreign national who attended a demonstration could be revoked on the word of a single Police Officer.
Gloat all you like that some teenager who had been sworn as a Constable that morning could order the deportation of a Professor at SOAS or the LSE, but that Constable could just as easily order the deportation of Kate Andrews or Alexander Downer. Likewise, the policemen who illegally used the edges of their shields as weapons against a reporter on the Daily Mirror could just as easily use them against a reporter on The Sun or the Daily Mail.
From Tony Abbott to Mikheil Saakashvili, the Right is quite as internationalist as the Left, and it can routinely afford to be rather more so in practice. Much of its ideology has been formed in exile, not uncommonly exile in Britain. Successive British Governments of the Conservative Party and of the Labour Right were closely allied to Nicolae Ceaușescu. Should Romanian exiles who demonstrated against his regime have been liable to the loss of their residency status on the say-so of a single Police Officer? Or Polish protesters outside the London embassy of General Jaruzelski, to whom the Thatcher Government was so close that Poland supplied Britain with coal to break the Miners' Strike?
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