A human rights lawyer and Labour peer has outlined what she thinks is the “most sinister” part of the prime minister’s recent speech on policing and protests.
Baroness Shami Chakrabarti spoke to Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips about Rishi Sunak’s speech on Friday.
Speaking from Downing Street, the prime minister railed against “extremist forces trying to tear us apart”, and that there has been a “shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality” – adding that “democracy itself is a target”.
He said he had met police chiefs to tell them the public expects protests to be policed rather than managed.
Baroness Chakrabarti, a former director of the charity Liberty, said that for her the most “sinister” part of the speech was Mr Sunak “almost suggesting that he has read the riot act to the police”.
She said: “I think in a liberal democracy – and he’s now claiming to be a liberal patriot, I think that was the language he used – we don’t have prime ministers interfering with operational policing.”
Mr Sunak described himself as a patriot in the speech, and Britain as a patriotic, liberal, democratic society.
The Labour peer said these kinds of meetings have happened a number of times under Mr Sunak, where police chiefs are called into Downing Street, and then a press release is put out about what they have been told by the prime minister.
“I really don’t like it, and I don’t think people in Britain want their politicians to be deciding how particular a police operation should be conducted,” she added.
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