"Hundreds defy ban to attend Clapham vigil"

[TheRabbitOfCaerbannog]

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/sarah-everard-vigil-defy-police-ban-clapham-common-b923959.html

I believe Sisters For Justice have another planned event at 4pm today.

It is so unsavoury that they have hijacked this awful event and made it about them.

Last week there was violence from TRAs in Paris, I'm not sure that that is a coincidence, this has provided an opportunity.

There are groups who will rock up to any peaceful protest in order to either hijack it for their own cause or to make trouble.
They will even do this when it's a vigil, if it is high profile enough for them.

Every march, every demonstration, will attract these people BUT they will normally be such a tiny minority that they aren't even noticed among the majority of peaceful, respectful protestors.

However, when you ban demonstrations and protests, who do you think is most likely to stay away? When the police go in heavy handed, who is most likely to leave quietly? Not the people who relish a confrontation, not the ones shouting "acab".
Which skews the crowd and the shouty-shovy lot are less diluted.

It is so unsavoury that they have hijacked this awful event and made it about them.

Hardly surprising though. They're keen to hang on to any gains they have made in removing women's rights and safeguards. They're not going to back down now, especially if there's a risk of them losing ground, particularly as Sarah's murder has made people actually listen about male violence towards women for once. They don't care about Sarah. They don't care about any women. They just care about men's rights. And they'll stoop as low as they need to so they can advance their cause.

There weren’t lots of ‘fighty men’ there

The vast vast majority of men there were with a woman

^This.

The vast majority were women and girls, some male partners were with women as allies.

The spin that the poor met police had to respond to a violent group of #WHOEVER just isn't true.

I've never in my life been on a march or rally that didn't attract some of the fruitcake fringe (and I was on the 70s march to reclaim the streets as a young teen). That has never justified disproportionate response from the police or the rubbishing of the event.

It was peaceful until the heavy handed policing started and became peaceful later on as people drifted away.

I suggest anyone who cares about the right to protest follow the bill going to the Commons on Monday. It effectively removes the right to democratic protest and has no end date.

If it had been a women only event this would not have happened. Men kept to the edges with police at the back but they really did not need to be there. The terf posters and ACAB signs were provocative and nothing to do with why women were there and should have been removed. But the contract between how women are treated and men is significant.

Contrast

From another thread, Sisters UnCut are 'anti-carceral feminists'. As far as I understand it, this means they are against imprisonment for all crimes, including violent crimes against women, and do not want the police to be involved in protecting women because they believe their involvement is weaponised against minority groups?

Have I missed something? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Was the shouty woman on the bandstand from Sisters for justice?

The one who was bellowing “we shall overcome” for everyone to repeat... Why was she “leading” ? Did she just appoint herself to do that?

I think encouraging mass chanting was really unnecessary and unhelpful. It was peaceful before that with people laying flowers and lighting candles and being respectful.

That woman and her little group seemed to turn it into more of a political rally and it looked like the atmosphere started to change even then, not long before the police arrived and started to behave in a heavy handed way.

I think this could definitely have been avoided if it had been allowed to go ahead and the police had worked with reclaim the streets. They could have clamped down on trouble makers and kept to the spirit of the vigil.

I don’t really blame individual police officers either, I blame whoever was instructing them. If their orders were “Go in there and break it up and clear the area” then going to the front and taking the ringleaders out of their will be a strategy that they cover in police training surely ? (I know nothing about police training btw, but assume there must be some planning in place re: how to break up a riot for example!)

I felt very sorry for the police officers there. They looked scared. There was a point when they were all huddled in a kind of group formation, and it was female police officers who were holding the edges with their bodies facing towards the crowds. Those women, who were doing their jobs, were faced with men, and women, screaming in their faces and ‘chanting shame on you’.

After they were trapped in that huddle they moved forward, as a group, and I thought the police did really well to get out of there without one of their officers being seriously hurt, and without a member of the public being injured.

But, those same officers , who must have been bloody exhausted and scared, have now woken up to criticism and to have the mayor chiming in.

Who is saying thank you to them today and making sure that they are okay? They didn’t murder anyone and I can’t imagine what a thankless task being an officer in London must sometimes feel like, or what the last week has been like for them too.

For the record, if I had to take a “side” it would be the side of the women who should have had a right to publicly protest.

The police approach was very badly thought out and made the situation much worse.

But someone gave the orders and planned that response. Who was it?

I don’t think it was the officers on shift who just had a chat between them and decided to match in and break it up

Who authorised it and decided on the approach ? A police officer who was actually the the fray, being screamed at? Or someone sufficiently senior enough that they did not need to be there and were able to watch it safely from behind a a screen?

I hope that the decision makers are being held accountable today and it is not the individual staff on shift who are being thrown under a bus to protect their seniors.

@merrymouse

From another thread, Sisters UnCut are 'anti-carceral feminists'. As far as I understand it, this means they are against imprisonment for all crimes, including violent crimes against women, and do not want the police to be involved in protecting women because they believe their involvement is weaponised against minority groups?

Have I missed something? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Was that Tara Wolf?

There weren’t lots of ‘fighty men’ there.

I didn't say there were. But there seem to have been some.

@Ereshkigalangcleg - There were definitely a few groups of teenage boys/young men in hoodies who looked like they’d just turned up for a good scrap. They were the ones the police seemed to have a few physical spats with. Again though, the police seemed to do well as just pushing them back with a minimum of force and not escalating the situation.

@DdraigGoch

Antifa = anti fascist. That's the default, surely? *@MmeLaraque* no, Antifa are a collection of anarchist and communist revolutionaries. They are not mainstream society.

My grandpa was anti fascist. He was one of the allies who helped ot defeat Hitler and Nazism, all those years ago. It is the default for any decent human being. Or should be. Are you really trying to push that Trumpist right-wing bullshit?

I'm an anti-fascist. Aren't you?

Police behaviour last night was appalling. "Trying to keep everyone safe" my arse. They took a safe situation and made it unsafe.

At the moment I feel sorry for Sarah’s family, not those at the event last night. It’s probably too raw for them to have her name linked to this.

Yes, Sisters Uncut seem to be against the criminal justice system: www.sistersuncut.org/category/blog/

MmeLaraque anti-fascist is not the same as modern Antifa. Our grandfathers were not Antifa and the young men (and women) acting under that moniker now are an insult to their memories.

@C8H10N4O2

There weren’t lots of ‘fighty men’ there

The vast vast majority of men there were with a woman

^This.

The vast majority were women and girls, some male partners were with women as allies.

The spin that the poor met police had to respond to a violent group of #WHOEVER just isn't true.

I've never in my life been on a march or rally that didn't attract some of the fruitcake fringe (and I was on the 70s march to reclaim the streets as a young teen). That has never justified disproportionate response from the police or the rubbishing of the event.

It was peaceful until the heavy handed policing started and became peaceful later on as people drifted away.

I suggest anyone who cares about the right to protest follow the bill going to the Commons on Monday. It effectively removes the right to democratic protest and has no end date.

I was reading about that protest bill last night. That's going through tomorrow, unless someone stops it. How to stop that? The UK govt has been taking steps to remove the right to peaceful protest for some time. The Tories don't want anyone protesting against them.

I'm guessing the police officers know that.

Some wrote that they felt very sorry for the police officers there.
I don't. They know what they're doing. A peaceful protest against police corruption, and they do *that?

I remember reading accounts of the police standing there and refusing to help the injured and dying at HIllsborough. Stephen McGann wrote that he and his brother were in the terraces, and couldn't believe what they were seeing. The police have form. They haven't learned a damned thing.

Considering what that protest was about, the police screwed up, big time.

@Cwenthryth

MmeLaraque anti-fascist is not the same as modern Antifa. Our grandfathers were not Antifa and the young men (and women) acting under that moniker now are an insult to their memories.

This is interesting. I see a lot of people claiming that antifa are terrorists.

People find a way to fight back, and they're designated as terrorists. In this particular example, it was Trump, of all people, who declared a group to be antifa terrorists (without any evidence).

DO, please explain exactly who you think antifa are.

I'm an anti-fascist. Aren't you?

define fascist

cos if it's 'person who understands that men aren't women' or 'person who doesn't think tearing down statues does anything about social injustice', then you're not doing the same thing as your grandfather

The police forget that some of us are older and have seen how they can behave and how they can spin their behaviour, and with the support of the government and the press, most often.

I quite honestly don't know what to think about the whole thing. The police have behaved appallingly but as usual, others have waded in and made this all about them and their own agendas. People wearing 'I am Sarah' T-shirts, if that is true, what the fuck?

It must be absolutely awful for Sarah's family right now, this whole thing will be making things even harder for them.

I described upthread my own experience of Antifa. You clearly have no real idea given that you are equating them with what our grandfathers fought for just because it sounds like it’s innocent shorthand for antifascist. Btw the protest I encountered them on was back when Trump was just an amusing punchline and no one dreamed he could actually become president. I’m not listening to his opinion on anything 😂.
Anyway we should probably stop derailing the thread, I think the point about Antifa has been made and I don’t feel the need to defend or elaborate it further.

I'm an anti-fascist. Aren't you?

The problem is that when the word 'facist' is used indiscriminately to justify any action, it loses its meaning.

If ever there was a case study of ‘divide and conquer’

Posters on here should ashamed of themselves

Some of these posts, inventing, supposing, guessing what may have happened last night, who may have been there, what there motives were. They belong in the Daily Mail comments section, not here.

Competitive grief, competitive socialism, competitive protester status.

It’s nuts. MRAs will find these pages and laugh themselves inside out at everyone ripping into each other.

I’m standing next to the Bandstand at the moment looking at people continuing to flock to place flowers and messages, and then looking at the nonsense being posted on here and it’s making me as angry as I was at 9pm last night watching the police marching towards us.

@Lisz

My grandfather was Antifa; fought and very nearly died for his country in WW2, as i'm sure many of our relatives did. He was left half-starved after 10 months in a Japanese POW camp and had to be put in extreme R and R in a hospital for 2 months until he was fit and well enough to come back home. He was proudly Antifa* and was as 'mainstream' part of society as you could ever get. Makes me queasy to read people say the Anti-fash are anarchists and 'not mainstream society'. Whoever says as much should be glad people went abroad and served as Antifa, so they could then sit on a message board decades later bleating about commies.

*they called them The Allies back then.

Oh bloody hell how facetious can you get? Comparing soldiers who fought and died in world wars to people who brawl in the street and vandalise buildings and cars. I fucking despair.

Any time people like Antifa and Sisters Uncut and all the other "anarchists" and "communists" get involved they're guaranteed to make a bad situation worse.