All protests are not equal in the eyes of the police

I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du jour involved a bus company owned by a man accused of not much liking the gays. My generation were short on causes, so intermittently there would be a call for direct action against the bigoted buses. I slipped along once, not sure whether I really wanted to join in. Apart from the sight of a few dozen callow students preventing one of the guilty buses from progressing up the High Street, my main memory is the almost animalistic rage of a number of the bus’s passengers. Unable to be heard above the chants, they looked like flies in a bottle, getting ever more furious about being made to be late for their next appointments. I sloped away, reflecting that if I had been on that bus I would not have felt much more supportive of the cause after the protest than I had before.