Jo Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project, posted on X: “What a brave, democratic, free speech loving, nation we have become under the so-called Conservative Party.”
The most pertinent part for me. The Tories have legalised suppression.
Jo Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project, posted on X: “What a brave, democratic, free speech loving, nation we have become under the so-called Conservative Party.”
The most pertinent part for me. The Tories have legalised suppression.
I mean, that’s part of the point of the protests. You protest, you get arrested, you bring both attention and legal scrutiny to the issue. The kid went in knowing it was very likely. If a protest issue disruptive enough to get you arrested, it isn’t a protest, it’s a circle jerk
Edit: Too many responses with the same basic gist to make individual replies useful.
The point I was making is that a good protest plans for arrests. It’s part of the point going in. It isn’t a matter of whether or not someone should be arrested or not. It’s the fact that the arrest itself is a chance for both media and legal attention to the protested thing.
You want to get arrested because it means you’re directly threatening the status quo. It means she was successful.
Now, whether or not her right to protest was violated by the arrest is a separate issue. But, again, that gives her and her legal team a chance to challenge that very thing. It highlights the problem in the public eye as well. Again, it makes the protest successful.
A protest where everyone protesting finishes up and goes home feeling all warm and fuzzy isn’t a fucking protest, it’s a party. It means nobody that matters paid any attention at all. Might as well just stay at fucking home. You don’t even have to be arrested for protesting, it can be for obstructing traffic, or noise ordinances, or littering. This still gives the chance to effect change on some scale that simply is not there without disruption and arrest.
Do people really not remember the civil rights movement and how they used the combination of peaceful protest and legal activity? It’s one of the most successful strategies for change in human history. It fucking worked.
So, this kid being the face of the protest is definitely on purpose, and I guarantee that the arrest was predicted, if not hoped for. I strongly suspect that it was actually a goal of the protest.
Again, a protest that doesn’t disrupt isn’t a protest, it’s a fucking circlejerk. And nothing shows significant disruption like cops trying to break it up.
You should not be arrested for protesting. This is a direct contravention of article 11 of the human rights act.
I think it’s that blocking that might’ve caused the arrest, not protesting itself. As the link says
Probably falls under the last point
It is loose and contentious. I have no doubt that Thunberg will use funds to take the UK court to the ECHR. She should have taken advice beforehand. I would be very surprised if she didn’t.
Pretty much everywhere that would be called civil disobedience, yes it’s illegal but it shouldn’t be so you take the arrest and essentially argue it’s morality.
If she was arrested for preventing entry its probably “okay”. Otherwise morons would be blocking access to abortion clinics and they would not be able to be arrested/dispersed. Its complicated even from moral point of view for me. I like to protest and complain but i also would like places being accessible with the current “trend” of evangelical extremisim spilling over to here… Wuats next blocking access to libraries becsuse they have a book that talks about abortion?
Abortion clinics have a special status when it comes to protests.
Well that’s the way to test it out
FYI she’s 20 now, no longer a minor. I know some people will still call a person a “kid” at that age, hell I probably would refer to a random 20-year-old as a kid. But, I call this out since some people insist on infantalizing her so they can more easily ignore her- and her message. I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but depending on the message you intend to send you might choose a different way to describe her in the future.
Yeah, once you start looking 50 in the old brown eye, anyone under thirty is a kid
calm down suella. making it easy for fossil fuel meetings to ignore protesters by putting them in jail is not the job of the police. These crusty arseholes need to hear what Greta has to say. The bi product, correlation not causation, is the arresting protesters of high profile makes the news and not the issue itself. And all the bellends come out to say ‘she knew she would get arrested’! The tail does not wag the dog.
Hell I’m pretty sure you can be arrested at this point for just being near a protest and looking at it, the Tories are desperate to turn this country into a dictatorship. I have no idea why they can’t just calm the fuck down.
They looked at Vladimir Putin in Russia and went oh, that’s great idea.
Reminder that Labour has not said they’d remove any of the anti protest stuff, instead they’ll focus on other things if they win the next GE