Spineless senior officers need the sack
If the asylum-seeker protests now sweeping England are a dream come true for the online Right, the police response is even more tantalising. From the hastily formed “elite” squads monitoring online sentiment to the allegations that officers facilitated trollish counter-demonstrators in Epping, conspiracists can easily claim that the powers-that-be are conniving to keep anti-migrant activism down. Yet the truth, like most heady narratives, is far more prosaic. Far from crushing innocent protesters with an iron fist, British police forces are actually afflicted by a crippling institutional paralysis — one that could yet overwhelm them.
