‘I’ve looked at your website and it says you embrace democracy,” Tory MP and Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson said to Graham Smith, chief executive of the anti-monarchist campaign group Republic, during a parliamentary select committee hearing last week. “If you embrace democracy so much, why don’t you put your placards away and stand for election?”
Smith was one of six Republic supporters who had been pre-emptively arrested on the morning of the coronation. Other protesters, including from Just Stop Oil, and people who had no intention of protesting, such as volunteers from Westminster Council’s “Night Stars” women’s safety team, were also arrested.
