SIX people have been charged by the Met police for allegedly breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules while attending the Sarah Everard vigil in south London.
Many hundreds went to the vigil-mass demonstration at Clapham Common in March 2021 after Ms Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving Met police officer Wayne Couzens.
The vigil, on 13 March, saw clashes with police manhandling demonstrators.
The six are due before Westminster Magistrates’ Court accused of gathering when London was in Tier 4 restrictions. Dania Al-Obeid, 27, from Stratford; Vivien Hohmann, 20, of Clapham; Ben Wheeler, 21, from Kennington and Kevin Godin-Prior, 68, of Manchester, all face a charge of participating in a gathering of more than two people in a public outdoor place in a Tier 4 area.
They have been listed to be dealt with at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday.
Now Jade Spence, 33, from Lambeth, and Jenny Edmunds, 32, from Lewisham, are due at the same court on 15 June.
Their appearance comes a day after the Met police was refused permission, for a second time, to appeal against a High Court ruling that said the force breached the rights of the organisers of the official vigil, when it told them they faced £10,000 fines and prosecution if it went ahead.
At the High Court in March, Lord Justice Warby and Mr Justice Holgate found the Met’s decisions in the run-up to the event were ‘not in accordance with the law’.
Dismissing the appeal bid by the Met on Tuesday, Lord Justice Holroyde said in a court order, he could see ‘no arguable basis on which it can be said that the (High) Court’s decision was wrong’.
In fact the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer enraged millions of people and there were mass protests.
The widespread nature of the protests can be seen by the fact that one of of those who went to Clapham Common to support the demonstrators, was the Duchess of Cambridge!
There is an overmighty state developing in the UK, that deems that its role is to attack ordinary people and their rights, and treat them with absolute contempt.
Asylum seekers who are on hunger strike over plans to send them to Rwanda, have now been threatened with faster deportation by the Home Office if they do not eat.
At least 17 people from Syria, Egypt and Sudan, who are being held at the Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick airport, began the protest when they were told they would be sent to Rwanda on 14 June as part of the vicious new scheme.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, one was threatened with deportation even sooner if they did not stop their hunger strike!
In a warning, it said: ‘Your refusal of food and/or fluids will not necessarily lead to your removal directions being deferred. In the interests of your health and safety we may prioritise your removal from detention and the UK.’ This is the state and its beat, beat and beat again tactic.
At the same time, the police-ridden capitalist state is planning to bring in new anti-union laws to attack the rail workers and make their proposed strike action illegal.
On June 18th the TUC is organising a national demonstration in London, that will be attended by hundreds of thousands of workers.
The TUC, on its knees as usual, intends to plead with the Tories, the bosses and the state to go easier on the working class and the youth and to curb their out of control state apparatus.
Workers must make sure that this demonstration is the first day of a general strike to bring the Tories down, and to smash up the capitalist state to go forward to a workers government that will nationalise the banks and the major industries to advance to socialism.
