Your correspondent John Baldry (CP letters 19-03-21) has tried to connect Brexit with the UK becoming a fascist state.

He applauds the “famous friendly British bobby” while conveniently ignoring the police’s violent excesses during the 1984/5 miners’ strike, and the activities of the notoriously thuggish Special Patrol Group in the 1980s and its hand in the death of Blair Peach (plus the involvement of several high-ranking police officers in cases of corruption in the past).

Mr Baldry then bemoans the reduction in numbers of serving police officers since Osborne’s austerity budget and states that we are on the road to fascism, completely ignoring the fact that repressive and totalitarian regimes require larger not smaller police forces.

He finishes this off by stating that none of the restrictions on public demonstrations, as proposed within a bill going before the house, would happen if we had remained a member of the EU.

This is despite the fact that the EU has never had powers over a member state’s domestic policies (as demonstrated by Brussels’ inability to have Hungary tone down its restrictive domestic practices).

Mr Baldry seems to be labouring under the belief that the EU is a global force of civil liberties even though it has been revealed this year (and published in The Guardian) that the EU has been training police forces in Myanmar to contain public demonstrations.

So far 70 people have been killed, in what Amnesty International have deemed unlawful extrajudicial killings, since February this year.

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