Roger Watson
The Metropolitan police, so slow to allow ambulances past Just Stop Oil protesters and loath to do anything to people who glue themselves to the King’s highway except bring them a bottle of water, did not hesitate to clear said King’s highway of fifty Not My King protesters off the street and arrest them on the day of the coronation. There remained plenty of such protesters but presumably the arrests were carried out pour encourager les autres into good behaviour for the rest if the day.
As far as I could see the Not My King protesters, while noisy in places, were good-humoured and even humorous with their Just Some Bloke and The Best King is a Burger King placards. With the full might of all branches of the British armed forces on parade and the Metropolitan Police backed up by nearly a million CCTV cameras with facial recognition enabled, how insecure could our new monarch and his legion of leeches be? When we start arresting people before they commit a crime then we can assume that they do no feel they have the support they think they deserve.
Correctly, there has been criticism of heavy handed policing tactics and the obvious attack that this constitutes on our right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech. Commander Karen Findlay of the Metropolitan Police who oversaw the police operation at the coronation praised her force for not being heavier handed in the run up to the big day, as if not arresting people for not committing an offence was a virtue. Justifying the arrests, she said that whether such arrests on the day of the coronation should have taken place depended “on the context” and, in further justification, that the coronation was a “once in a generation event.”
So that’s OK then. We have now entered the new age of contextual policing and Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer supports this notion saying that the police got the “balance right.” How arresting peaceful protesters can be considered having got the balance right is an astonishing claim and, likewise, the sophistry involved in using the context as an excuse. If we are now to be policed contextually, who decides when the context is appropriate and what more can we expect under the label of context?
With the advanced age of our new King and his increasingly unhealthy appearance I would not like to bet on the Coronation being a ‘once in a generation’ event; it may not be long before we see another; will that be contextually policed? How long before the rarity of the event is dropped as an excuse and context begins to encompass visits from unwelcome foreign dignitaries or protests against the government of the day? We are not, in fact, that far from the latter; indeed, it may already have happened. Lockdown protests were explicitly against the government of the day and their advisers, and we got a hefty dose of contextual policing then, especially in Trafalgar Square and some other places.
Apart from the manifest unsuitability of the incumbent who gives it its name, the Third Carolean age is not off to a good start. If people do not want a monarchy—after all, we pay for it—and would prefer a republic or would even prefer a military dictatorship or a single party state they should be allowed to put their case in writing, in the mainstream media and on the streets. I still prefer a monarchy and I have got what I deserve; sadly, he is ‘my king.’
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
