For anyone else wondering, nicked means arrested
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Oh thanks. In freedom speech it means lightly grazed.
My first thought was, "They what? They stole protestors? Meaning kidnapped? But that's not how it's spelled....."
Ah during BLM, I watched many officers manhandle the women screaming at the racists and push them to the ground. Then politely telling the racists to please stay behind them to avoid getting injured.
What did RATM say about forces?
Chant at cops "WHO DO YOU PROTECT, WHO DO YOU SERVE"
By supreme court decree and by virtue of being part of the violence inherent in the system, "Nobody, whoever is in power"
Capital is what they protect
In a capitalist world, yes. The rich are who are in power.
I believe it was burn crosses
Police are class traitors.
Don't you understand? The oil protestors were going to delay flights and that hurts shareholders! We must never hurt the beloved shareholders!
Don't forget inconveniencing the unbothered! Can't have a mild inconvenience to someone's day.
This being Britain, it's more that the Lower Class fighting against an even lower class (and for most English, immigrants are the lowest class there can be since the English generally think they're inherently superior to foreigners) is fine, but the Middle and Lower class disturbing the interests of the Upper Class is unacceptable.
Britain is an incredibly classist country, not only by US standards but also by European standards and it's a lot easier to understand the dynamics of the use of Power over there if you look at the social class of those involved.
Why does the UK have so much more of this type of action than the US?
They've had longer to marinate.
Far older social system, with power far more entrenched in the hands of a few families and passed from generation to generation (and I don't mean just Royals - it's like an onion with layer after layer, most of which pretty static as that country has the lowest social mobility in Europe)
Further, England's social order never really got upturned by any kind of revolution from the lower classes or occupation by other powers - the closest it got to it was the Barons revolting against the King centuries ago, leading to the Magna Carta, which was a "revolution" of the elites.
Also the mindset of "know your place" and "look up to your betters" is well entrenched in the UK - there was a period of far more social movement and freedom in the Post War years, which is when things like the Punk movement came to be, but the conditions for all of that have been rolled back by now. That doesn't mean the English lower classes are peaceful, it means they only fight amongst themselves, never against "their betters", as demonstrated just now by what's happening there and for years in the form of Hooliganism.
Politically the UK has First Past The Post like the US (so, politically a power duopoly), only with a King who inherited his post rather than get elected and who has some real power (he can refuse to pass certain Laws and it has been shown that the Royals have used that in the past to get or change laws), and in addition to Parliament a second chamber, which is not elected and contains members who inherited their position and, maybe the worst part, no actual Constitution, which means that whomever gets more that 50% of seats in Parliament (which with FPTP only requires about 35% of votes) can make, removed and change any laws they want without being constrained in any area by a Constitution and the higher vote requirements for changing a Constitution.
Last but not least, the way people are coerced in that society it's by using "rules & regulations" to justify legal force - coppers don't run around and shot people (most don't even carry firearms) but there are plenty of vague enough laws that something can always be found if they want to detain somebody and the system is such that anybody detained who can afford a Solicitor with a knighthood (i.e. Sir Something) who went to the same private school as Judges and highly placed members of State - or, even better, is him or herself such a person - will have it sorted out in no time and the coppers will probably get into trouble with the chief for having detained such a person, but that's not so when one of the "riff-raff" is detained.
Personally and as an European, having lived in various countries of Europe including over a decade in Britain, I think right now that country is THE most Right-wing and Authoritarian country in Western Europe but it's all done in a "posh" way rather than the "in your face" way done in many other countries.
I think maybe my comment wasn’t clear. I meant why do we hear so much more about organized civil disobedience from the UK compared to North America, despite all of what you said. The anglophone countries tend to be fairly right wing as you point out, but only the UK seems to have this major resistance campaign going on, despite the repression.
I see.
My point was about the difference in reaction by the police towards the "resistance" of the far right types attacking anything to do with immigrants whilst not actually impacting the money making of the upper classes, compared to their reaction towards the resistance of middle class young ecologists merelly planning to do something which would disturb the money making of the upper classes.
Present day Britain isn't actually prone to the kind of civil disobedience which isn't polite, unless we're talking about working class attacking each other or atacking immigrants based on the newspapers (almost all of which are owned by billionaires who pay no taxes in Britain) having manipulated them into thinking it's the immigrants that are to blame for all that's wrong in their country.
This phenomenon in Britain of true civil disobedience that actually damages the interestes of the upper classes (rather than peaceful, polite even, demonstrations that are invariably ignored) is a recent re-invention (last time around, involving the actual working class rather than the middle class, it was to do with mass loss of jobs during Thatcher's time and they were violently repressed) and miniscule in terms of numbers of individuals involved (respect to them as IMHO they're very much swimming against the current over there) and there's an overabundance of boot-licking Brits (even here) complaining about how those people shouldn't be doing demonstrations which are a hassle for others.
Compared to what, for example, the French do, both in term of their actions and how they're views by those around them this is nothing and even then yields the silence of the many and the loud criticism of a large minority of Brits who have a "people should know their place" boot-licking spirit.
If you look at things like Black Lives Matters, the US has a lot more true civil disobedience in terms of numbers (even relative) than the UK, though it tends to be done in ways which don't negativelly impact the interests of the American upper class (the last that did, Occupy Wall Street, was violently suppressed by none other than Obama, who might be a great Political Songbird but ideologically is as much a Hard Neoliberal on the side of the Financial Elites as the rest).
You're honestly asking why the country with the most gun owners also contains the highest number of selfish cowards? 😂
Without taking away from the seriousness of the situation, that picture looks like a bunch of friends posing for a selfie in front of someone being detained.
I mean that is what it is. They know they are doing the right thing because their friend is getting arrested.
FTP?
ACAB!
... planning to do a crime is not "pre-crime." It's conspiracy.
Headline makes it sound like cops waded into one of these diet-Nazi events and picked out counterprotestors. Nah: they've presumably had warrants for these specific people on-hand since before all that kicked off.
Police have discretion on which crimes to prioritize. They're not honor-bound to ticket someone who is double-parked in the middle of a car chase. They can opt not to arrest people for trespassing if it gets them to cooperate with a murder investigation.
Going to arrest pacifists engaging in criminal conspiracy to temporarily block nonessential industry and infrastructure at one location while ignoring ongoing racially motivated assault, looting, and arson is a choice.
I don't think they were prioritizing one group over the other I think they just did two things at the same time there's more than like five cops you know.
I would love it if the world would be a better place but I don't think the way just stop oil protesters are going about it is helping anyone including themselves. Totally understand why they're arrested.
I don’t think they were prioritizing one group over the other
And you don't think it's weird that they don't prioritize ongoing race riots, arson and assaults over planned pacifist protestors?
Each single cop can't be in two places at once. Every cop occupied with arresting a pacifist is a cop not occupied with preventing arsonists from burning down a building.
As for disruptive protest not helping, have you looked at politics the past two decades? The general public loves disruptive protest.