SAVE RIGHT TO PROTEST

IT’S hard to know where to start after Met police were photographed pressing a woman to the ground at a London vigil for Sarah Everard.

Rangers football fans celebrating in Glasgow didn’t receive this heavyhanded treatment.

Go into any town or city centre and shoppers are as tightly packed as protesters on Clapham Common on Saturday.

Government health experts Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty agreed that catching Covid outside is unlikely.

But if you ban organised gatherings then crowds without stewards will inevitably bunch together to hear speakers without a PA system. And having two women in charge of the capital’s policing, Cressida Dick and Priti Patel, doesn’t guarantee justice for women.

The first implication is Labour, rather than sitting on the fence, will vote tomorrow in Parliament against a Tory clampdown on demos and jail terms of up to 10 years for statue topplers. Locking up people who damage monuments for longer than those who attack women is, as Labour’s Jess Phillips stated, divisive nonsense.

Using Covid to outlaw legitimate protest is a tyranny we must all resist.

HELD Woman at vigil in London

THE conspiracy of silence between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer over the Brexit disaster is galling. The PM is desperate to evade responsibility for a 41% fall in exports and 30% drop in imports, while Labour’s leader is worried about inflaming past divisions. Starmer, above, must be the first politician in history scared to say “I told you so”. Well, I’m not. If anything, Brexit is inflicting worse national selfharm than I warned it would. Starmer needs to hold accountable the fools responsible – beginning with Johnson and Nigel Farage.