My Wrongful Imprisonment Shows Two-Tier Policing is Real

One year ago today, July 31st, I attended a peaceful protest on Whitehall opposite Downing Street. Simply for peacefully standing in a crowd, I, along with some 120 other protestors, was arrested by the Metropolitan Police. I was then unlawfully detained for 20.5 hours and handcuffed behind my back, which caused me unnecessary physical pain and trauma. I was never charged or even interviewed. I have since successfully sued the police for this. You can watch an interview about my ordeal on the Sceptic podcast here:

The protest I attended was one of a number responding to spiralling violent crime, and in particular the brutal murder of the three young girls, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Stancombe in Southport by Axel Rudakubana. In January, Rudakubana was found guilty of their murder and sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in behind bars (in fact, he will almost certainly die there). In prison, Rudakabana would later attack a prison officer with scalding water.

While other protests had seen some violence, the protest I attended was a peaceful demonstration. The protesters, in contrast to the police who turned up in full riot gear – shields, batons and helmets – and who almost outnumbered us, were not masked or carrying weapons. Protesters were simply chanting “save our kids”. Nonetheless the police decided to kettle the protestors, before charging on them and arresting people at random and en masse. They did so an hour before a dispersal order, made under section 14 Public Order Act 1986, came into effect at 8:30pm. This meant protestors were not able to leave in advance of the dispersal time and indeed were trapped by the police. In any case, most of the protestors were also not aware the dispersal order or protest conditions to begin with. The dispersal order had only been issued an hour or two before the protest began, when the police posted a tweet with a link to protest conditions on their website. I did not see this at the time, and it was entirely unreasonable and unrealistic to expect protestors to have been aware of this at such short notice. The police also made no attempt to communicate the protest conditions, imposed under Section 14 of the Public Order Act, to the crowd at the protest. In all likelihood, this meant they failed to meet the second limb of the legal test for proportionality of Section 14 orders, as set out in James v Director of Public Prosecutions [2015].

I have good reason to believe, having spoken to the officer who arrested me and also to numerous other people who had attended that protest and suffered notable injustices there, that orders had been given to police officers to arrest as many people as possible. The narrative being spun, almost certainly planned beforehand, was that the number of arrests would reflect the level of disorder at the protest (this is certainly how the over 100 arrests have generally been interpreted since in the media). Therefore, to create the false narrative that the peaceful protest was disorderly – a “riot” – the police maximised the number of arrests.

The question still remains: who gave the orders and why? We know that senior police officers are political appointments and that the political government response to the unrest was to be seen to effect a severe crackdown. Other factors (not necessarily at play at that protest but perhaps more generally) include the semantic differentiation between protests and riots in insurance policies. Some insurance policies will cover damage from riots but not necessarily peaceful protests. This might explain the artificial overuse of the term “riot”.

A year on from Southport and the response to it, and with the country in the midst of another summer of anti-immigration unrest, what has changed?

Certainly, the official government rhetoric has changed. Gone is the propagandist “far-Right racist thugs” labelling – at least from the Prime Minister and police leadership. But is this simply superficial? Two-tier policing continues: with police taking an asymmetric approach depending on who is protesting. It is unfair to say this is entirely determined according to the traditional Left–Right political divide, as individuals within certain groups supporting Palestine and some climate activists have also received unduly heavy-handed and disproportionate treatment by the police. A doctor was recently arrested for raising awareness of medical facilities destroyed and doctors killed in Gaza. Even if we do not all necessarily agree with the cause, in a cohesive democratic society we should defend the right of all citizens to peacefully assemble and protest.

Though underreported by the mainstream media, the recent nationwide protests are happening because the residents of often small towns and communities across the country are perturbed by the Government stationing large numbers of asylum seekers – the vast majority of whom are adult men – in their local hotels. It is important to note that this fear is not specious or prejudiced, but based on evidence. There are known disparities between the offending rate – especially in rape and sexual offences – of the native British population and foreign-born men from particular cultural and religious backgrounds. There are 18.2 prisoners per 10,000 foreign nationals compared with the UK citizens at 14 per 10,000. Among certain groups the disparity is especially high, with one in 50 Albanians in the UK in prison. Meanwhile, figures from the Centre for Migration Control show that Afghan nationals living in the UK are more than 20 times more likely to commit sexual assault and rape than native British people.

The recent protests at The Bell Hotel in Epping, for instance, which have made the national news, were sparked when a 38 year-old asylum seeker housed there at taxpayers’ expense was charged with sexually assaulting a local 14 year-old girl. Consequently, local residents – not political activists – have staged daily protests outside the hotel demanding its closure (which has now been voted for unanimously by the Council).

Yet again, in Epping the police did not treat the local resident protestors fairly. For one thing, despite the protests being overwhelmingly peaceful, they turned up in riot gear. Of even greater concern is the fact that the police had escorted Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) counter-protestors, who were not local residents, into the middle of the protest.

When asked about why his force had done this, the Chief Constable of Essex Police, Ben-Julian Harrington, shirked responsibility. All he did was deny that the police had bussed in protestors – in fact, they had escorted them in on foot, which is hardly much better. Nor is his claim that the police took people away “for their safety” a plausible framing of events. There was no threat from local peaceful protestors to the SUTR protestors for leaving the protest. In fact, there is footage of the far-Left counter protestors waiting patiently in queues for the buses, arranged by the police, to take them away. Their safety was clearly not imperilled by any imaginary “far-Right mob”. The Chief Constable also denied operational responsibility and accountability for this whole charade, despite his role as Chief Constable being to comment on, evaluate and debrief police operations in his area.

Questions remain: were Essex Police under orders to bring in counter-protestors from outside the area who risked escalating local tensions? Why are the same counter protestors so often appearing at different protests across the country? It is known that SUTR, a front for the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) employs 29 full-time employees. Why is the National Lottery (via its “Solidarity Fund”), and Bristol City Council together funding much of SUTR’s income stream? Why do masked SUTR protestors and Antifa never seem to be subject to anti-masking legislation (section 60AA (Criminal Justice Act 1994) in the way other protesters are?

It is clear that the Government and the organs of state, including the police, continue to focus on the public reaction to the problems of legal and illegal immigration rather than the cause of the problem – the failure to protect Britain’s borders and to return people with no right to be in the country. The latest development is that a new National Internet Intelligence Investigations team will work from the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster to monitor social media for “anti-migrant sentiment”.

Targeting the symptoms is the wrong approach. If the Southport protests and the failed government response have demonstrated anything, it has shown that the public, who bear the consequences of government policy failure, do not respond well to kneejerk authoritarianism. Indeed, Keir Starmer’s response to Southport accelerated an existing political realignment: calls for mass deportations of illegal migrants and the closure of all asylum hotels are now going mainstream.

The Government has failed repeatedly to listen and act in the interests of its citizens, instead preferring to censor their speech and lock them up for daring to dissent. Now citizens, having lost faith in their elected leaders, have turned to protests and civil disobedience. One year on from my wrongful imprisonment, it is clear that such heavy-handed two-tier policing ultimately only backfires.