A young woman has been abducted and brutally killed. The man who has been charged with her murder is a Metropolitan Police officer.

In response to this event it has been distressing to read the vast and growing encyclopaedia on social media of women’s lived experience of daily and unremitting fear and intimidation by men, and there is a growing feeling among many women that We Have Put Up With This Sort Of Thing For Far Too Long. 

A number of women wanted to hold a peaceful and Covid-safe vigil for Sarah Everard at Clapham Common, and—as I understand it—were making good progress negotiating with the local force at Lambeth toward that end. Until Enter The Metropolitan Police, at which point the whole event turned confrontational.

When the women gathered, it appears that the Metropolitan Police (one of whose colleagues has been charged with the murder in question, let us remember) ‘kettled’ the women towards the bandstand, prevented any woman speaking from the bandstand, and behaved aggressively and violently as we saw.

The Metropolitan Police culture has long been regarded as in need of review. It is led by Cressida Dick, whose previous professional high point was the shooting of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, from which frankly her career should never have been allowed to recover. Her sex, and her sexual orientation, do not give her a free pass to avoid scrutiny. She has presided over a quite shocking piece of policing and should resign.

Cressida Dick reports to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who if she had any shred of decency would also resign. Instead, Patel and Boris Johnson are trying to roll the boulder back down the hill towards the police—but of course will do nothing other than mouth empty words about Lessons Needing To Be Learned as they have been doing for the whole of yesterday.

None of this is to cast any aspersions on individual police officers who like other uniformed public servants do an immensely difficult job every single working day. It’s about the culture and the leadership—the sort of thing for which, in previous and more honourable days, those at the top of the tree would have taken responsibility.

Meanwhile to put the cherry on top of all this, today is the day that Priti Patel is introducing in Parliament a Bill to remove the right of peaceful protest in all situations, not just for Covid but for life.

The Bill will require protests not to ‘impact’ anyone (an astonishingly low bar); will prosecute participants on the basis that they ‘ought to know’ of restrictions on the day even if they have not been advised of them; will extend restrictions on protests to include single-person protests (a piece of law specifically designed to silence one individual, the anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray); will extend the penalty for damaging statues to ten years’ imprisonment (compare that to the sentences meted out to people who commit violent assaults on actual human beings); and will give Priti Patel herself power to change the meaning of ‘serious disruption’ in relation to protests, without scrutiny by Parliament.