So the wedding is over and rather pleasantly quietly it would seem – but then I’ve not been near a paper or a pub with a TV, so what would I know. Reading comments on other peoples blogs it seems to have been quite a mixed bag of a wedding, from what it tells us about the state of the nation. Given we are still a monarchy (even if there is debate as to how much power/relevance the monarchy has) how people, both the people and the powers that be, react to it is rather interesting.
Lets start with the good, despite half a million people being kettled on the mall there wasn’t any trouble. Who’d have though it, it’s actually possible to have large numbers of people contained for hours at a time and have their movements controlled by the police without starting to chuck about chunks of masonry. It’d be nice to think that this was the “normal” people of England getting out to demonstrate they are still there, and that middle England still exists. Actually by and large I do believe that, and I’d possibly say it was the people of Britain not just England, but Middle England was definitely out in force – demonstrating what they stil believe in.
However one reason why there may not have been protesting voices is that they’d been otherwise detained. Some people think that silencing voices of dissent (or idiocy depending on your point of view) is ok just for one day other people predictably disagree. I find myself somewhat caught between the two, in so much as the conspiracy and intent laws make me nervous, but I’d rather the police be able to arrest someone planning to kill me without having to actually let them have a crack at it first. But conspiracy to make a public twit of yourself? That does seem to be at least very close to a well worn slippery slope, if there was enough detail known of the conspiracy could it have been dealt with without such a pre-emptive arrest. The other 99 or so arrests mentioned may have been on graver conspiracies (like planning to cause mayhem and such somewhere it matters) . We don’t know, but we at least know it happened, which means we’re at least near the top of the slope. But will our glorious leaders repeat the plan on a larger scale for the olympics and other “one off” events? That risk is what makes the recent small actions something that mustn’t be shrugged off. Particularly given the ramifications of being arrested these days (the permanent entry onto databases that can have long term effects on employment and such). I would hope that if the conspiracies were so serious that they merited people being arrested and detained that they will also lead to prosecution – otherwise one might suspect that it was just a pretence to keep things tidy.
And finally the down right daft, apparently a verger was caught doing a cartwheel in the abbey after everyone had gone home but got caught on camera. And has now been rebuked by senior clerics presumably for actually celebrating at a celebration.
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