Police kidnap anti-monarchists to prevent protest
Submitted on 29 April, 2011 – 11:37 on the Workers Liberty website
Sacha Ismail and Esther Townsend report:
12.50pm, Friday 29 April: This morning about ten anti-monarchy protesters, students and young workers who are mostly socialists and anarchists, were stopped by the police outside Charing Cross station, searched and handcuffed. When we left to write this report, they had been held outside the station for about an hour.
Trafalgar Square was tightly controlled, with the help of the police, and it was not actually possible to protest. The group of comrades were preparing to leave to attend the Republic street party in Holborn when the police stopped and searched them. Another thirty police were then called in, arriving in four vans, and surrounded them.
This paranoid, over the top action by the police is part of a wider assault on civil liberties in the run up to the royal wedding.
Updates as we have them. For more information ring Sacha Ismail on 07796 690 874. Please reprint this report widely.
Update, 5.30pm: The comrades were arrested for ‘breach of the peace’, even though there was no possible way this could be justified. They were then taken to Sutton police station, in deep south London, where they were eventually released – of course – without charge. This was essentially an act of kidnapping by the state to prevent a protest.
Thanks to everyone who got in touch to express solidarity or offer support.
Shiraz Socialist 
James Bloodworth said,
April 29, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Who says we live in a democracy? Thousands of people in central London yearning for dictatorship, and police arrest those who *might* protest against it.
The Judge said,
April 30, 2011 at 2:44 pm
I don’t see how anyone can now deny that we live in an age of thoroughgoing political policing. Enabled by the tabloid-lickers like Straw, Blunkett, Reid & Clarke, the police now see it as their role to protect the ruling class from any form of dissent, however measured, however nuanced. This is a role which – to a large extent – the police have embraced with some enthusiasm; especially the Met, which must now been seen as little more than a private militia for the political class and the corporations which own them.
It’ll come back to bite them on the arse, especially when they discover that they have lost the best tool any police force can possibly have; the consent of the people.
Trouble is, by then how many people will have had their lives disrupted by wrongful arrest and detention, how many will have had their lives ruined by politicised prosecutions and sentencing, and how many may have had their lives ended by police actions for which – to give the all-too-familiar litany – “no one individual will be blamed”, “prosecution would not be in the Public Interest(TM)” and “Lessons will be learned”?