My tips to avoid arrest by the Met

Spectator

3 days ago

An interesting event occurred in London at the weekend. A young man who goes by the name of Montgomery Toms attended a Pride parade. But he did not attend in order to dress in bondage gear while shouting 'Love is love' and 'Free Palestine'. Instead he went with a sandwich board which had a trans flag on it, followed by an equals sign and then the words 'mental illness'.
This is a tactic pioneered by an American man known as 'Billboard Chris', because his name is Chris and he wears a billboard. Chris's schtick is to walk around with a sign saying things like 'Children cannot consent to puberty blockers'. For making such inflammatory statements, Billboard Chris has been detained in a number of jurisdictions, largely because severely deranged people tend to flock around him when he wears this billboard, screaming abuse and showing that they are in no way mentally deranged. But I digress.
Montgomery Toms was standing on Piccadilly on Saturday when some Pride attendees took exception to his sign. As a result the police moved in. One of them asked what his purpose was in wearing it. Toms said it was in order to 'engage in conversations' and to have 'a community and society where people like me are entitled to have a different opinion without being marginalised by other groups'. The fact that the whole Pride business began as a way for marginalised groups to make their voices heard appeared to be lost on the policeman, though it wasn't lost on Toms, who pointed out that the whole 'Love is love' crowd didn't appear to be giving a whole lot of love to him.
The police asked Toms to remove his sign and he refused. In response, the policeman called his superior and walked Toms away from the parade, whereupon a grand total of 11 officers arrived to arrest him. By his own account, Toms was held in custody at Charing Cross police station for ten hours, before being released on pre-charge bail with conditions that included a ban from entering the City of Westminster for at least three months.
Had Toms been in touch with me beforehand, I would have offered him some legal advice for free. Foremost among my learned recommendations would have been that he could save himself from arrest by a variety of means. In no particular order, these would include that when first being questioned by a police officer, he should promptly shout 'Jihad, jihad, jihad'. Next he should whip out a sign saying 'Slay the infidel' before rounding it all off with a few cries of 'Intifada'. To my certain knowledge these are the best ways to avoid arrest in London these days. Had he followed my advice, the first officer would doubtless have said: 'Very well, sir, please carry on and have a nice day.' There would have been no 11 policemen, no Charing Cross and certainly no banning from the centre of London.
It is true that things do not always go as planned in this life. So on the off-chance that the first officer had any unreasonable suspicions about this chap shouting 'Jihad', there are other avenues Toms could have gone down. Another way to have avoided police attention would be for him to have stolen a bike, nicked a mobile phone from a passer-by or – best of all – gone breaking and entering into one of the charming private houses that sit off Berkeley Square. If Toms had followed this advice then not only would he still be free to explore the City of Westminster, but he would have a charming pied-à-terre there.
One other piece of legal advice comes to mind. This is the nuclear option if you really want to avoid the attentions of the law in this country. Toms's mistake was to express concern for young people who might be taken advantage of by ideologies which have not remotely worked themselves out yet. Much better for him would have been to spend the period after Saturday afternoon joining one of the country's many grooming gangs. That way police forces across the land might leave him alone and he wouldn't come to the attention of most politicians for 20 years. That means Jess Phillips and co. wouldn't express any interest in his case until at least 2045, a pretty tempting lead-time for any criminal enterprise.
At this point some readers might feel the phrase 'two-tier policing' looming in their subconscious. It was something that Toms himself raised as he was being arrested by the Met's finest. But any thought of this phrase must be suppressed. After all, in April a report by a group of MPs found that there was no evidence of 'two-tier policing'. Specifically, they found no evidence of any such double standards in the way the police responded to the unrest that broke out after the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport last summer. To put this terrible accusation to bed once and for all, we should also remember that Keir Starmer's Attorney General, Lord Hermer, only last month told the BBC that accusations that there are any double standards at play in policing, or even talk of 'two tiers', is 'disgusting'. And I think we can all agree that anything that so appals the Attorney General is something we should all unite in opposing.
Indeed, anyone even thinking about using the 'two-tier' canard should probably take a long hard look at themselves. Hermer himself warned us all less than a month ago that anyone using such language should think about the 'dangers' they themselves are posing.
In other news, I was pleased to read this week that the Charity Commission has stepped in and given a formal warning and some guidance to a Nottingham Islamic institution which hosted a sermon in October 2023 that took a positive attitude towards themurder of Jews. The watchdog noted that the phrase concerned came from a hadith (or 'saying') of Mohammed. Yet sufficient 'context' had apparently not been given.
No arrests were made, naturally.