Its only worth protesting about not being allowed to drink in the t3 area. If your priority is just drinking you don't want to be stopped from doing so by drawing attention to your session!
Re Greater Manchester police. Two things.
Firstly a substantial amount of police funding isn't through central government. Its through local taxation. Greater Manchester's councils are up shit creek and they dont have money to police a t3 lockdown aggressively. If rumours are to be believed they will struggle to maintain the policing levels there currently are because the councils are so skint.
Then there the concept of policing by consent:
The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent in the United Kingdom and other countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
So the idea is that the police are only legitimate in their right to enforce the law because the public agree with the law and allow them to enforce the law.
In a situation where you have every single elected representative in Greater Manchester regardless of party political alignment saying they do not agree with the imposition of a law from Westminster, you have a big problem for peelian principles. In effect this is the people's representatives saying they do not consent to the enforcement of this law. Therefore the local police are obliged under peelian principles not to do so because they have not been given the consent of the people (via their elected representatives).
So its not simply about being answerable to Andy Burnham alone as the top ranking locally elected official, although he controls the policing budget (remembering here concerns arising about whether there may be enough funds to even get to the end of the financial year and pay them all). We know that Manchester was promised more money in April for covid related expenses only for the government to u-turn on this after money had been spent. We know its not getting business rates. We know its not getting significant revenue for Manchester Airport. Put simply how do the police operate if there is no money left for the policing?
So i do think there's two strings to this: the financials and the notion that the police operate on behalf of the public rather than to control the public.
The idea of consent in policing is a liberal one. Its about the police being almost 'one of us' rather than being people who rule us (authoritarian).
If you look at the history of policing in the uk, this is the idea that the police come from their community look after their own communities for the benefit of the community.
Peel's most often quoted principle that "The police are the public and the public are the police."
If anyone wants to read up on the background and history to this then have a read of
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Peelian principles
Particularly the section which gives the nine principles on which the Metropolitan Police were founded on.
I think its really interesting and its hard to imagine living in this country at a time before policing and what that meant for law and order (clue: it wasn't too nice and it was only the rich and powerful who could enforce the law whilst in effect not being answerable to it themselves - unless someone more powerful than them took a disliking to them breaking the law. Or the entire community organised against you to enforce the law - eg if you murdered someone and the village turned on you. Justice, in this sense, very much, was unequal and not something for the poor)
We do take all these little bits and pieces of our liberal heritage and wisdom hugely for granted.
That we might have a crisis of the police saying they do not have the consent to police a matter as directed by Westminster is therefore one very much of its time and a reflection of the desire of some now to rule by decree and force rather than by consent of the people and for the people.
This would not have happened in 2015. Its happening in 2020 with good reason.
So the letter from Greater Manchester Police Head makes perfect sense.
The government don't own or control the police. Nor does Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham merely directs them for Manchester and on behalf of Manchester.
Police forces in the uk are notable in how they are organised as local forces rather than a centralised organisation. We don't have a single police force. We have numerous local forces who are decentralised and detached from central government.