I have been directly involved in policing protests by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and anti-lockdown groups, and the contrast between them has been stark and alarming.

There is undoubtedly a lack of impartiality and fairness in the way that these different groups have been treated. I have seen first-hand the way in which police have facilitated and “taken the knee” to BLM protesters for fear of any appearance of institutional racism (which doesn’t exist, in my experience), and to the detriment of the safety of the public and officers on the ground. In a similar vein, Extinction Rebellion are given the freedom to protest, block roads, bring major city centres to a standstill, damage property and intimidate with their presence for weeks on end, without any robust and decisive police action.

Contrast this with the anti-lockdown protesters, who are made up of a diverse cross-section of the general law-abiding public and are not “anti-vax conspiracy theorists”, as the mainstream press would have you believe. These protests have been met with almost immediate and disproportionate aggression and violence from the police.