The police have been broadly interpreting this law since it was passed to interfere with people's right to speak or express themselves exactly as we see here.
It's left to the police officer to decide if a passer-by could be caused distress by the 'threatening' words.
So of course someone saying 'fuck' in a conversation outside the pub isn't targeted by police, but people holding political placards/wearing political T-shirts with the word 'fuck' are.
You see this at countless demos. It's an extremely broad piece of legislation which the police regularly use to silence people in exactly the manner you see here.
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Hindsight narrative is gaslighting on a national scale. I remember exactly what it was like in March 2020. The pressure was intense for the government to take action weeks before it did so.
And even if that wasn't the case, they made precisely the same mistake in autumn. Weeks of warnings, completely ignored, thousands dead.
We literally just lived through this. Don't now come and tell us that it didn't happen.
Priti Patel's 'protest banning orders' are a direct threat to freedom of speech and assembly inews.co.uk/opinion/column…
They’re basically a copy-and-paste job from football banning orders, which are used to tackle violent hooligans, or criminal behaviour orders, which are used to tackle anti-social behaviour. But there is a crucial distinction.
Those orders prevented people from going to football matches or engaging in misconduct. These orders prevent people from exercising their democratic rights.
Grim to hear her respond to Sarah Everard case by citing provisions in the policing bill. If they really believed in those provisions, they wouldn't have stuffed them in a bill which also worked to silence those who demonstrate to protect women from violence.
Johnson's line that we're transitioning to high wage economy is different to most of his post-truth gibberish, because it'll be verifiable in people's real lives by the next election.
Usually his post-truth gibberish is based on the future, like the Brexit campaign, or cultural values, which aren't falsifiable. But in this case, people will come to their own conclusions about their quality of life.
That's a problem for him, because in truth there is no strategy. The higher wages schtick is a PR bandage job on a crisis they themselves inflicted. If you create a labour shortage amid ongoing inflation and reduced trade, people will in general be poorer.
It's still the case that Starmer should be much, much better at day to day attack, especially on the fuel crisis.
But today he dragged Labour into a position that could potentially win an election. He got them cheering for a vision which is palatable to the voters they need to attract without betraying their values. And that's a triumph, whichever way you look at it.