I was not at the protests in London this week, but having just watched a video on Oxford Spring I am very glad that I was not.
It appears that the Mounted Section of the Metropolitan Police charged into the crowd.
As Oxford Spring puts it:
There is no excuse for this mounted police charge into the crowd. No, it is not on the scale of the Miner’s Strikes or the Peterloo Massacre but it is still grossly disproportionate to what the police officers faced.
The Met’s police chief yesterday stated clearly that there was no cavalry charge. If he does not call what this video shows a ‘cavalry charge’ he is merely playing with semantics – to any reasonable observer, this is a charge by the Met’s Mounted Branch.
I do have one word for people in England – at least be glad that your police service is not routinely armed. The officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland nearly always are armed, and more than once have used arms against rioters. I would not class the scenes that I saw in this video as a riot. A disturbance possibly. But at least the Met did not fire baton rounds into the crowd. We save that for protestors in Northern Ireland only, it seems.
As the cuts that Her Majesty’s Government are introducing across the UK, and the inevitable cuts that the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland will have to make, bite, all of us right across the whole of the United Kingdom are likely to see more protests like those seen in Westminster and up and down the country this week – and not just by students.
I hope that the scenes illustrated in this video are not what I think they are. I think they are a worrying sign of things to come.
Gyronny Herald 