A scuffle broke out yesterday, on St. George’s Day, between officers and a small crowd clad in English flags, prompting further complaints of the “two-tier” approach taken by London’s Metropolitan Police.
Reports say that the rally to celebrate England’s patron saint in the capital largely “passed off peacefully,” although the Met pointed to one particular incident which it said saw a group react “violently” to the formation of a police cordon deploying two horses.
Footage shared by the force does appear to show a number of those involved in the scuffle attempting to break through police lines, which might explain Conservative Security Minister Tom Tugendhat’s comment that “these men aren’t patriots. They’re just thugs.”
But GB News presenter Nick Dixon insisted that this view was typical of the “Tories [who] hate English people,” while others on the right suggested that the “Met Police once again provoked peaceful protestors by unreasonably kettling them.”
TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer said that whatever the rights or wrongs were in this particular case, the police response was “very, very much in contrast to their policing of pro-Palestine protests.”
Even when [pro-Palestine campaigners] are defacing statues and climbing up on the Cenotaph [national war memorial] … the view seems to be … “We’ll keep it all calm, we won’t get involved. We’ll take photographs and we’ll get these people later.”
They don’t seem to have the same view when it is a protest by other people.
Six people were arrested in total, including one man “on suspicion of animal cruelty after a police horse was targeted” and another “for being drunk and disorderly.”
Sir Mark Rowley, the head of the force, is already facing calls to resign after police stopped what they described as a “quite openly Jewish” man—who, unluckily for them, happened to be chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism—from crossing the road during one of the many pro-Palestine rallies because his “presence” might have caused a negative “reaction.” Gideon Falter, the kippah-wearing individual in question, accused the Met of making central London a “police-enforced Jew-free zone.”
The St. George’s Day scuffle came just hours after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer attempted to prove his patriotic credentials in a video—set to heartstring-tugging music—in which he described the English flag as “a symbol of pride, celebration, belonging and inclusion.”
Patriotic, conservative commentators viewed this short film as “so flat, sapless and unconvincing that the viewer repeatedly asks ‘Really?’” Perhaps Starmer would also be disappointed to find that polling suggests one in eight Labour voters believe the English flag to be “racist and divisive.” Such thinking has fuelled the annual left-wing social media campaign against English national symbols, which involves lecturing patriots—already abused all year round as ‘gammons’—about how St. George was ‘Turkish, actually.’
