LETTER TO SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Who said the following?
It sounds very much like someone in Hong Kong, the Police Commissioner, perhaps.
It's actually the Deputy Commissioner Laurence Taylor of the Met in London, referring to the XR protests. (Transcript, with errors, is mine).
Everybody has a right to protest. But that right does not extend to disrupting people's lives and their livelihood.…
We've been really clear that the activity of the protesters …is unlawful. Obstruction of the highway is an offence.... They are now committing a criminal offence and are liable to arrest. … we're absolutely determined that people who commit offences go through the criminal justice system.
in April we arrested over 1,100 people. 900 have been charged and 250 now have a criminal record.
It's actually the Deputy Commissioner Laurence Taylor of the Met in London, referring to the XR protests. (Transcript, with errors, is mine).
But whereas in London these moves are accepted, indeed welcomed, here in Hong Kong similar moves are seen as draconian, authoritarian, a slide into dictatorship.
The police are not innocent, these recent months. I do wish they hadn't used the baton quite so freely, especially on the MTR on August 31. And sometimes they seem to turn up when things are relatively calm where their very presence ignites tension. But they are not violent and they're not "murderers" (I've seen some graffiti calling them that). Compared with US or French police, they're panda bears, pussy cats.
Moreover, they have been deliberately provoked. A New York Times article on June 30, by Fred Chan Ho-fai recommended a so-called Violent Margin Theory, drawing on Leninist analysis, to incite police to hit them. Chan's article was widely spread on social media and has now developed to the point that demonstrators are willing to do anything to get police to react. Up to grabbing handguns and, last night, cutting a police officer's throat. Chan has a lot to answer for.
[Isn't there something distasteful in the New York Times running an article exhorting violence against our police and linking to an article of Leninist revolutionary theory?]
Two pleas: Police, stop using guns and batons. Protesters: stop the violence.
Pf, etc...
