Head of Anti-Monarchy Protesters Released After 16 Hrs. in Detention
By Staff, Agencies
Chief executive of the anti-monarchy group Republic, Graham Smith, has been released from detention, 16 hours after being arrested by London police ahead of King Charles's coronation.
Smith, who was among 52 people being arrested near Trafalgar Square on Saturday, blasted the UK government’s violation of the freedom of expression, posting to Twitter that there was “no longer a right to peaceful protest in the UK”.
“I have been told many times the monarch is there to defend our freedoms. Now our freedoms are under attack in his name,” he wrote on Twitter.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today program on Monday, Smith said that the police had "every intention" of arresting him before the coronation event, adding that he was held despite being in close conversation with the Met "for four months" about the group's plans.
“They also said they had intelligence, which is untrue. If they did have intelligence their intelligence officers are either lying or incompetent because there was never any discussion, thought, email, message, anything that suggested any intent to do anything disruptive,” Smith went on.
Rejecting the suggestion that his arrest was necessary to limit disruption, he told the program: “That's not an excuse to rob people of their rights. It's not an excuse to arrest people and detain them for 16 hours because some people want to enjoy a party.”
He said that his arrest along with other protestors was a "political issue" and the politicians had ordered the police to carry on the arrests.
“We no longer in this country have the right to protest, we only have the freedom to protest contingent on the permission of senior police officers and politicians, and it's my view that those senior police officers were under immense pressure from politicians,” Smith said.
Speaking among the protestors earlier on the day of the coronation, Smith depicted the coronation ceremony as an “expensive pantomime” and a “slap in the face for millions of people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.”
UK Metropolitan Police confirmed 52 people were arrested on the allegations of affray, public order offenses, breach of the peace, and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance around the coronation. Besides arrests, the police also attacked the protestors and seized hundreds of protestors’ placards.
The Met said a further 14 people were detained in east London on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
The government is under fierce criticism for the arrests, with Human Rights Watch [HRW] calling the move “incredibly alarming”.
“Peaceful protests allow individuals to hold those in power to account – something the UK government seems increasingly averse to,” HRW said.
The spokesman for the Animal Rising campaign group, Nathan McGovern, described the arrests as “nothing short of a totalitarian crackdown on free speech and all forms of dissent”.
Trying to explain the reason behind the arrests, the police, however, alleged that their so-called duty to prevent disruption outweighed the right to protest.
The Metropolitan Police had deployed some 11,500 officers for one of its biggest-ever security operations for the day of the coronation.
The police had warned that it would have an "extremely low threshold" for protests, and controversially planned to use mass facial recognition technology to monitor the crowds.
