London protests Saturday — 80,000+ across two marches, 4,000 police

[ScottishSkeptic99]

Big public order weekend in central London. Two separate protests routed through the city on Saturday — one pro-Palestine demonstration timed a day after Nakba Day, the other a far-right "Unite the Kingdom" rally staged by Tommy Robinson. Met deployed roughly 4,000 officers including reinforcements brought in from outside forces. Cost estimate £4.5m.

Forecast turnout per Al Jazeera's coverage was about 80,000 total — Robinson's march estimated at ~50,000, Nakba rally ~30,000. Police said in advance they'd be running the largest public order operation in years and were going zero-tolerance on cross-protest contact.

Reading the day-of coverage on BBC, Guardian and Sky: the two marches were physically separated by ring-of-steel barriers and route timings, which is the standard playbook for keeping them apart but it ate the centre of the city for the entire afternoon. A small number of arrests overall (the figure I saw was around 40-50 across both protests) which is lower than the operation's scale suggested they were preparing for.

Not a Scottish story but it's the second weekend running where the Met has run a major operation against two-march coordination, and the cost is becoming politically uncomfortable. Worth noting because the same operational pattern was used at last month's smaller version and the Home Office briefing on it has just been published. Curious what people made of the coverage.

[AngusReviewsAll]

Watched the Sky live feed for an hour. The split-route worked operationally — no physical contact between the two marches that I saw, the Met got that bit right. The press conference afterwards, the Assistant Commissioner sounded relieved more than triumphant.

£4.5m for a single Saturday is the bit that'll get rerun in the press. Two of these a month and you're into nine figures a year on policing protest, which the Met budget is not designed for.

[RouletteRebecca]

The Guardian had a decent set-piece on the turnout-counting methodology this morning. Police vs organiser numbers diverging as usual — Met saying ~35k for the Robinson march, organisers claiming twice that. Aerial pictures suggested the Met number was closer.

What didn't get much front-page coverage: the smaller counter-counter-protest in Trafalgar Square that the Met kept off the main route entirely. Sensible call but it's a sign of how much routing pre-work goes into these now.

[KieranCS2Bets]

Travelled into Euston on Saturday afternoon for unrelated reasons. The disruption was real — tube short-formed, the West End basically unwalkable from about 1pm to 5pm. Pubs around Leicester Square were boarded up by lunchtime, which is now the standard pattern for any large central protest day.

The cumulative drag on central London business of running these every other weekend is the unspoken story. None of the coverage I saw mentioned it.