Is there anyone in the Met Police, I wonder, low-minded enough to think of things in PR terms? “I’ve got a good wheeze, guv,” I imagine some grizzled lifer piping up. “Let’s get tooled up, kick in the door of a Quaker meeting house and chuck a bunch of unarmed young women in the back of the paddy-wagon.” Could such a move, his superior might have wondered fleetingly, look in any way heavy-handed if reported on the front page of a newspaper? If they did, the thought evidently soon evaporated.
It was an advertised meeting, not a terrorist cell
So here we are. No fewer than twenty – twenty! – officers, some equipped with tasers, raided the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster on Thursday and cuffed and hauled off no more than six – six! – women between the ages of 18 and 38. The women were at an open ‘welcome meeting’ of Youth Demand – an activist group associated with climate change and Palestinian rights.
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