You can shove your rubber bullets up your arse

The Met were thoroughly tooled up at Trafalgar Square for today's student protests. The atmosphere was prickly. One amped-up officer yelled at me with excessive aggression just cos I was crossing the road as a car approached 30 yards away. Edgy doesn't begin to describe it.

And the marchers hadn't even arrived at this point.

A lot of lip service is paid by people to the notion of peaceful protest in this country, that it is welcomed, a symbol of the freedom we should cherish.

Experience has taught me, however, that such a thing is nigh-on impossible, and by that I mean protest as much as the peaceful part.

When protest is on the terms of those in charge, it is meaningless. And when so many laws are introduced to throttle dissent, you can no longer describe what's left as true democracy.

The occupations at St Paul's and Finsbury Square are examples of how protest can be peaceful. There the levels of policing have, save for the first 24 hours, been minimal and civil. This is in no way coincidental.

So, as promised, here's my photographic synechdoche: this is the law. As Joe Strummer observed, you can fight it, but right or wrong, it always wins. Of course it does.