Thank fucķ the Met were on the ball today and were able to bring down this, erm, terrorist threat.
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Go Met 💪
The Rats, the Piper, and Reverend Sue: A Dark Age by Design:
There she is 83 years old, Reverend Sue Parfitt, hair like silver fire, being led away by a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers with the grim efficiency of a bad theatre troupe. Her “crime”? Daring to stand, peacefully and visibly, in front of Gandhi’s statue and remind Britain what it once pretended to stand for.
This image is not just a vignette. It is an indictment.
You don’t have to be a lawyer to see what’s wrong here though as one, I can name every statute and every sleight of hand they’ve used to justify this descent into pettiness masquerading as order.
When governments cannot win the argument, they criminalise dissent.
When judges forget their independence and nod politely to the state, the law itself becomes a cudgel.
And when police are ordered to enforce illiberal laws as if they were enforcing the weather, they become rats chasing a piper whose tune is written by Right Wing hysteria and performed by xenophobia.
The Pyrrhic Victory.
The government’s ban on Palestine Action and its knee jerk restrictions on protest were sold to the public as necessary. Of course they were every autocrat since Caesar has called his own tyranny “necessary.”
But this is not a victory for law and order. This is the kind of victory you can only savour through vomit in your mouth.
A Pyrrhic triumph where what is sacrificed justice, proportionality, dignity outweighs whatever fleeting “stability” they claim to achieve.
One frail woman being frogmarched in front of the statue of a man who taught the world the power of nonviolent resistance.
They can’t even see the irony, because irony requires a moral compass and at least a modicum of shame.
Rats Following the Piper.
What we are watching is not governance.
It is theatre.
A staged performance designed to keep the public compliant and afraid, while the architects of this darkness whisper instructions from the wings.
The piper plays a tune that sounds like security, patriotism, national pride.
But if you listen closely, you’ll hear what it really is: fear, hatred, and cowardice wrapped in a flag.
And the rats follow.
The police follow.
Some judges follow.
And the public, God help us, follow too, their heads down, their hearts hardened.
A Lawyer’s Lament.
As someone who has spent decades watching and defending the rule of law, I say this plainly:
When you hand the state the power to silence, to round up, to ban, to smear, they will never stop at the people you already dislike.
They will come for everyone.
They already are.
Reverend Sue stood there not just for Palestine but for all of us. She stood there because someone has to. Because the law that fails to protect the most unpopular opinion today will fail to protect your opinion tomorrow.
We are not merely sliding into the dark ages ,we are marching willingly, led by the music of demagogues, too proud to see the abyss yawning ahead.
History will record this moment not as a victory, but as the day Britain looked at Gandhi’s statue and decided to arrest his spirit too.
And the rats? They’ll keep dancing.
Until we stop the music.
Philip George
(Lawyer, observer of human folly, and deeply unimpressed rat-catcher)
6 July 2025.
