Close your eyes. Let the words of the prime minister and the home secretary wash over you. Now tell me that you don’t think that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will be completely gutted if this Saturday’s pro-Palestine Stop Bombing Gaza march goes off peacefully. Everything they say is barbed. Twisted with malice. The opposite of what they really mean. What they feel. They are driven by hatred. A desire for conflict. Neither will be truly happy unless it all kicks off.
Then they can say they were right all along. That they always knew that everyone who claimed to want a ceasefire had murderous intent. Almost as if it suited their narrative to stoke antisemitism and Islamophobia. Division is their life-blood. The idea of peaceful protest anathema. A march with no more disturbances than the average football match an impossibility. Everything must be reduced to a binary equation. One racist idiot equals the subconscious desire of 100,000 others who would quite like people to stop killing each other.
