The new online magazine The First Post has a feature by Sandra Barwick about the Sunday Picnic Protests in Parliament Square:
A very English demo
Sandra Barwick joins a Westminster picnic protest against police powers to curtail free speech
N.B. The First Post publishers appear not to understand how world wide web search engines and blogs work - they seem to be continually re-numbering the articles in their online archives, and they have an web unfriendly copyright notice. Presumably they do not want any casual visitors to their website.
We have mirrored the article below, but it might disappear if they complain:
"A very English demo Sandra Barwick joins a Westminster picnic protest against police powers to curtail free speechIs it now a crime to eat a cake in Parliament Square without asking permission from the police? Possibly. The cake in question was a small homemade one with white icing, sitting on a rug on the grass just across from the Mother of Parliaments. Spelled out in wobbly pink were the words "Peace v War". To consume such a cake in public view may well be to take part in an organised expression of opinion - that is, a demonstration. Twelve people were gathered around the cake, a brown shiny teapot and some Jammie Dodgers, risking arrest. It was a very English protest: the subversive picnic.
It has taken place on the grass
opposite Big Ben every Sunday afternoon since spontaneous protest was criminalised by the Mother of Parliaments - she has been so testy and careless of democracy recently that some suspect she has early signs of dementia. If this picnic is a demonstration, then, under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, if he so pleases, may limit the number of guests and force them to drink their tea at three in the morning on a traffic island. He now has most of the powers of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.
Mark Barrett, a tour guide who has already been arrested under the new law, and others from various causes gather purely in support of free speech for, as he says: "It removes the essence of protest if you have to ask permission from the state." Barrett has not yet been charged, but the police have forbidden him from going within one kilometre of Big Ben. So he can't take a trip on the London Eye, let alone meet his MP in his Parliament. So far 17 people have been arrested for allegedly demonstrating outside Parliament without police permission, which carries a maximum prison sentence of almost a year.
Meanwhile, it seems the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, is keen to have a memento of a lovely Sunday, which was no doubt why his emissary, a police photographer, took pictures of all the picnickers."
Leave a comment