Groups clash near Stoke-on-Trent mosque as Hanley protests turn violent

“Avoid the area while officers deal with the incident” apparently means do fuck all while armed groups run past you.

Police have to get these situations under control. If minority groups feel that they aren’t sufficiently protected by the police, they will form their own defence groups, and that’s when things can get very out of control. There isn’t a lot of trust between the police and minorities to begin with.

Would you like my opinion? No? I’m going to give it anyway even with the mass downvotes I’ll get.

We have a problem in this country with protests. Whether it be JSO (just stop oil), Palestine or whatever. America has the same problems but in America as was shown with the peaceful Uni protests they can and will just go in hard. The UK government and police don’t have that luxury (normally). The question then is what options do they have? Peaceful protests cost money and in our lovely greed capitalist world money is king. The Tories started this talk of banning protests, they also talked about banning strikes (the two are very interconnected) but there was no way they could pass it. Let’s get to labour who are by all definitions Tory Lite®. They can pass such a law and ardent genocide supporter Keith (Starmer) would love nothing more than to shut down the very peaceful Palestinian protests. How do you get the public on side? JSO are a joke who love nothing more than to push public opinion towards protest banning. Now though we have a situation where it’s those right wing nut jobs with their absolutely non-peaceful protests who are being pushed by well placed comments on the internet with calls to action. Lots of perfect photos capturing the mayhem from the governments best friend the media. They’ll keep pushing this as much as they can then they’ll have a vote in parliament to not only severely restrict protest (which they already have) but to outright stop them altogether. If you want to live in a world where you can’t complain or can’t protest anything anyone does then that’s what you’ll get. We already have plenty of laws in place for the lawless behaviour of the EDF and all these right wing nut jobs and what they are doing. We don’t need anymore to stop them. Don’t be fooled by that and what this government is going to do to your civil liberties. We are sleepwalking into a totalitarian nightmare. This is just my opinion of course so feel free to pile on the hate with those downvotes but a few years from now you’re going to see I’m talking perfect sense but by then it’ll be too late.

tl:dr we are all screwed and you are going to support the removal of freedoms previous generations fought hard to get.