[Politics] The Right Honourable Suella Braverman. KC MP **Sacked 13/11**

[LamieRobertson]

Very harsh, unless you've been whooshed. Mikeyjh is using a rhetorical question to demonstrate that of course Remembrance Day has a point, and is very important to a lot of people. Just like being able to protest against what is effectively a war with the death of thousands of innocent people including children is very important to a lot of people.

Wouldn’t have hurt them to miss this wkd though …five on the trot?

 

[LamieRobertson]

Not so.

The exclusion zone excludes everyone. I have it on good authority that the police are far more concerned about right wing opposition factions causing disruption than any historically peaceful Palestinian marchers.

I have it on good authority that they don’t see those demonstrating for ‘peace’ as all very nice people and are concerned about them as well

 

[WATFORD zero]

As every other right minded person, I just want protestors to complete their route peacefully. I want the police to be professional and not start any scrapping. I want mourners to be unaffected. And then everyone can home and watch the football.

Which is what everyone wants despite Suella Braverman, this Cabal in Government, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon etc and their various supporters in the mainstream media's concerted efforts to the contrary

 

[Lethargic]

A letter from a British Army veteran who will be marching on Armistice Day which sums it up perfectly for me …

“I served in the British Army between 1992 and 2000, mainly in the UK, Germany and Belize. My partner is also a veteran of the Balkans conflicts, and many of my friends are serving and ex-serving members of the military, who share my anger that people in government – most of whom have never worn a uniform, and for whom war is an abstract concept – claim to speak for the rest of us.

While I am sure they exist somewhere, I have yet to meet anyone from my own circle of military friends who has voiced genuine concerns about tomorrow’s planned march from Hyde Park to the US Embassy on Armistice Day calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Personally, I cannot think of a more appropriate day to demand a ceasefire than on the day we remember the mother of all ceasefires, to remember and honour those who sacrificed their lives in pursuit of peace and an end to war.

I will be marching for peace tomorrow. The idea being pushed that this march is somehow disrespectful to the Glorious Dead, that people like me are ‘hate marchers’ is as disrespectful as it gets to the many of us who observe and remember our friends or relatives – and all victims of war – during the silence of the Armistice. The real disrespect to the Armistice is the weaponisation of remembrance as part of the government’s wider ‘culture war’.

I am horrified by the tone, language and incitement our own government is using to whip up hatred against its own citizens – citizens who are standing up in solidarity with the besieged and bombed citizens of Gaza. It is clear that our hollow and awful politicians are dog-whistling to the far right, who have responded with a call to stand pointlessly – but menacingly – around statues and the cenotaph (which, incidentally, tomorrow’s march route passes nowhere near).

So where are the many self-proclaimed free speech tsars now to defend our right to freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to protest? Undoubtedly, they are rallying behind the cruel and ridiculous rhetoric of home secretary Suella Braverman as she and her government colleagues seek to defend Israel’s right to commit war crimes on its watch, and to silence or outlaw anyone who holds the view that its actions are unacceptable. In her pursuit of this agenda, she has even taken aim at the Metropolitan Police, making them a target for far right violence by absurdly portraying them as biased toward Palestinian solidarity protesters.

Where are the voices of our opposition in all this too? Why isn’t Kier Starmer speaking for me and millions of us who have no choice but to sit idly by as we watch scenes of utter terror being inflicted upon fellow human beings – bombs falling on schools and hospitals and entire families being blown apart? I don’t want a brief ‘pause’ to allow victims to gather their broken bodies while the abuser resets themselves to deliver the next blow. I want a full ceasefire now.

Braverman does not seem to want to see a peaceful march tomorrow. She is doing everything she can to stir hatred and division, undoubtedly so she can continue her ongoing attack on the wider right to protest in the UK.

Like so many of the Armed Forces, both serving and veterans, who will be in London this weekend, I am not fooled by her faux-outrage, and she certainly does not speak for me.”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gaza-suella-braverman-palestine-solidarity-march-armistice-day-remembrance-veteran/

As someone who served I concur.

 

[Hamilton]

Perplexed as to why the BBC website has labelled this as a Pro-Palestinian march. It is not. My understanding is that most are marching for a ceasefire. The BBC is being forced or unwittingly reinforcing Braverman's line and creating division and polarity. Shame on those website copywriters.

Police brace for largest pro-Palestinian protest and impose Cenotaph exclusion zone

Hundreds of thousands are due to take part in the march, while elsewhere commemorations take place for Armistice Day.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[chickens]

Wouldn’t have hurt them to miss this wkd though …five on the trot?

I don’t know, that feels a bit flippant to me.

I’m fully behind remembering our own veterans and those who never returned from past conflicts, but I can also understand that if my kids/aunt/mother had just been buried in rubble from a strike on a hospital, that ‘my’ cause of a war that was happening right now and continuing, where a cowardly Hamas leadership were skulking among ordinary civilians who just want to live their lives, and the IDF were not taking any great care or responsibility with their aiming, I might feel that this was the march that took precedence.

Remember that there are plenty of Israelis and people in Jewish communities internationally who are aghast at the semi-indiscriminate way that the response to Hamas’s horrific attacks are being carried out.

This isn’t an abstract memory of a war, this is civilians caught in the crossfire right here and now. I can understand why hundreds of thousands of people want our government to try and negotiate a path to setting the IDF on a more targeted and less indiscriminate course.

In fact, the marchers would like focus to go back to organising a peaceful two state solution, a situation which is currently impossible while both sides are under their current leadership, as Zeberdi and others have set out in the separate thread.

Anyway, back on topic, what this weekend didn’t need was a batshit insane Home Secretary and a gutter press, stoking up the tensions to the maximum degree possible short of donning armour and riding out with a spear.

 

[Comrade Sam]

 

[Deportivo Seagull]

As someone who served I concur.

As do I.

 

[Deportivo Seagull]

But Tommy Robinson and his followers wish to protect the Cenotaph, why would the Met Police set up an exclusion zone around the Cenotaph aimed at people who are there to supposedly protect the Cenotaph. Isn't it more likely that the Police are more concerned about breakaway groups from the pro Palestine march ?

does he bollocks. He’s looking for an excuse to inflame racial tensions. He couldn’t give a toss about the Centotaph because if he did he’d leave it to the MET. The man’s a weapon grade penis.

 

[pocketseagull]

Being reported that FLA types are fighting with police as they try to reach The Cenotaph. In a just world Braverman would be immediately sacked for causing this.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

But Tommy Robinson and his followers wish to protect the Cenotaph, why would the Met Police set up an exclusion zone around the Cenotaph aimed at people who are there to supposedly protect the Cenotaph. Isn't it more likely that the Police are more concerned about breakaway groups from the pro Palestine march ?

The Cenotaph has been protected for decades. Have you forgotten the IRA who planted bombs on London, and attacked military targets for over 30 years?

Yaxley-Lennon don’t want to protect anything. He is a 4 times convicted criminal who lives off funds donated by deluded fools who think he is some kind of Islamaphobic vigilante. He is, a coward, who, attacked another England football fan from behind.

 

[Deportivo Seagull]

The Cenotaph has been protected for decades. Have you forgotten the IRA who planted bombs on London, and attacked military targets for over 30 years?

Yaxley-Lennon don’t want to protect anything. He is a 4 times convicted criminal who lives off funds donated by deluded fools who think he is some kind of Islamaphobic vigilante. He is, a coward, who, attacked another England football fan from behind.

So much respect that the vast majority of them aren’t wearing poppies ….

 

[joydivisionovengloves]

On a train to London which I do most weekends and there is way more Stone Island lads travelling up. There’s always a few heading up for football but today there’s a ton more. It could be entirely coincidental or it could be that the Home Secretary has stoked a fire in which case she’s a massive kvnt.

 

[Justice]

At least Ajax fans managed to kick the crowd control barriers over, pathetic attempt from that lot

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

Being reported that FLA types are fighting with police as they try to reach The Cenotaph. In a just world Braverman would be immediately sacked for causing this.

I am absolutely shocked, who could see this happening

 

[Eeyore]

I'm so glad that these honourable British folk have arrived in London to uphold the memory of those who died for us. My heart swells with pride at the reverence in which they cloth themselves for the memory of the fallen.

 

[Pretty Plnk Fairy]

You snowflakes are slaging off some of our top boys who are defending the Senopaf from the wokey wokeys by braking through the police lines and giving a few OB a slap en root are forgetting one thing. They are doing it PATERIOTICULLY so stick that in you’re keanewa you lefties.

if I wasnt masturbating in a frenzy to my Green Street DVD I wood be their myself

Regards
DF

 

[Bakero]

I went on two of the largest demos in our history (Iraq war and countryside) and yet i don’t recall any of the controversies, disorder concerns or disquiet about hijacking by politicians, the press, rent a mob or extremists. As far as I was aware at the time, a peace march was simply a peace march.
Following this thread has left me more confused as to what is really going on or is likely to occur over this weekend, but the whole subject matter feels like a sad indictment of our current society.

I think you're misremembering. I went on the big Iraq demo in London on a bus with fellow protestors from Bristol. Upon returning to the west country, we we greeted by a mob of police filming each one if us as we got off the bus.

Here's a snapshot of some of the media coverage.

"As a million Britons marched through London in 2003 against war with Iraq, William Rees-Mogg gazed on from outside the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. In the Times, he sniffed at the protesters’ outfits (“they dressed as they might for a football match”) and scowled at their arguments. However well-intentioned, their very presence helped “maintain the torture chambers of Baghdad”. They were, he said, “Saddam’s useful idiots”.

Those protesters were as British as the former Times editor, but that didn’t matter. The country was at war against an “axis of evil”. It was us versus them, and those who objected or worried or wanted more evidence were little more than traitors.


Journalism’s finest minds agreed. It may have been Britain’s biggest ever march, but the copy merchants could confect even larger generalisations. So the Sun’s Richard Littlejohn huffed that protesters were all “stuck in a students’ union timewarp”, while Barbara Amiel claimed in the Telegraph that their “real purpose was to attack Israel, America and free enterprise”. The Times warned that “the presence of many Muslim groups and masked anti-globalisation activists could provide cover for terrorists”

The thousands calling for a ceasefire and peace deserve better than abuse and belittlement | Aditya Chakrabortty

Politicians and much of the media ignore, stereotype and demonise protestors. This lack of engagement is a risk to us all, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

www.theguardian.com

The late Euan Ferguson of the Observer also noted the attendance of "the usual suspects – CND, Socialist Workers’ Party, the anarchists".

 

[Bakero]

I'm so glad that these honourable British folk have arrived in London to uphold the memory of those who died for us. My heart swells with pride at the reverence in which they cloth themselves for the memory of the fallen.

I believe "useful idiots" is an appropriate aptonym here. Or should it be "useless"?

 

[The Clamp]

Well, this has backfired on Braverman.

Only disorder is being caused by far right thugs.

Just as we all thought it would be.

****s.