Policing Protests

The right to protest has been called into question by Labour’s Duncan McNeil. In a bizarre move Dunky has asked that MSPs who were at a recent protest at Faslane against Trident Nuclear Missiles to apologise to anyone who was mugged that day or burgled as the protest was policed.

Is Dunky really suggesting that there should be no policed peaceful protest in Scotland? I would have thought that our rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association would have been something that a democratically elected MSP would have supported.

And I`m sure that the pictures (found after a very quick google search) on the left must show a quite different Dunky McNeil taking part, and indeed speaking at, policed peaceful protests. I sure he issued an apology to all victims of crime during the protests he was at - or is this a simple case of Labour hypocrisy? Perhaps he quite sensibly saw that a police presence at peaceful protests is in fact part of their role.

Or maybe Dunky doesn’t want the police to be policing such protests and events. No doubt he’ll apologise to the people in Manchester for the cost of policing the last Labour conference. Apparently that little gathering cost £2.4m to police. And no doubt he’s already made the point of apologising to the people of Oban for ‘wasting police time’ at the last Scottish Labour Conference. I`m sure we can expect Dunky to soon chastise the couple of hundred thousand people who marched in the peaceful and policed Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh…or maybe he was at that one too.