Been ongoing for a long while now. Like boiling frogs.
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As a former student in Manchester, a long time ago, I was aware of Peterloo. And you are correct it remains one of the key precedents for unarmed civilian police officers, not armed troops, keeping the peace.
However, well trained the army may be, I do fear another Peterloo (Bloody Sunday anyone?) and this time it may be a precedent for quite the opposite. And before anyone says Bloody Sunday had protestors attacking the army, plenty of UK riots snce have had people attacking the police in similar ways - but with remarkably few people shot dead by those keeping the peace. A squaddie on patrol or on guard with a gun is a very different beast to a copper with the same gun. I certainly know my reaction to police with guns at airports was one thing. My reaction to soldiers in the same place would be very different.
(On the other hand if the police had just kept the peace by confiscating that electric guitar, history would be very different!) 
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It is a very different experience if you arent used to it.
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So far Trump’s ‘American aid’ consists of US leaks of shared intelligence to US media of details of an ongoing UK police investigation, such as the suspect’s name, which for operational and legal reasons were not deemed ready to be released to the public.
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Given my experience of ex squaddies, I have worries about how they will handle the various Pride marches that are coming up. I do not think they will shoot anyone, but they have a tendency to have far right sympathies and be homophobic/transphobic.
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Yeah, I’m reminded of the time she was booed off stage at a police federation address.
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Apparently the soldiers will be guarding places like Buckingham Palace. Which is weird, because the last time I was there I’m sure there were soldiers already on guard.
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generic statements of support of the sort that would be expected after such an event = support for all specific responses, clearly. I mean, that’s just how it works, right? We’re assuming Trump would like to do that, too, if he could.
(And I recall that after the World Trade Center attack, New York was basically under military occupation for several months.)
Not really. Having active-duty military patrolling the streets is something that’s not allowed by law in the U.S. for various reasons. We had the National Guard out, but you’d only see them at the train stations and airports and some government buildings. Outside Ground Zero, the operation and business of the city got back to something approaching normal in NYC within weeks and sometimes days – the greatest repudiation to violent religious fundie arseholes who want to make everyone as miserable and dysfunctional as they are.
I hope something similar will happen in Manchester and the UK by summer’s end, but May has a lot more latitude to exercise her authoritarian impulses than Prince Bush and Regent Cheney ever did.
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It worked so well in Northern Ireland, why not do it in England?
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You remembered!
What will probably happen is internment camps - for suspected potential terrorists. The ones we know about but can’t deal with under current laws. That way police and security can focus on finding the ones we don’t know about - and who usually do these things.
What’s really remarkable is that we know, within hours of these outrages who to blame - and everything there is to know about them.
Maybe if they were exposed to all the love, while on duty?
There isn’t an ‘existential threat’ ffs. Unless it’s armed squaddies bimbling around outside football matches and festivals. I know plenty of soldiers and ex soldiers. I most certainly don’t want them with live ammo among the public. The bloody police are bad enough with guns. Look at the De Menenez shooting. Now multiply that cluster fuck by two to account for the communication difficulties between police and soldiers and add some on for ‘not police trained’.
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It seems like an inevitable escalation. They cannot go back in time and change the domestic and foreign policies that have led to the current situation, and just letting the terrorists run around beheading people and blowing up crowds unhindered seems like a poor choice.
So in a country where self defense of any sort is discouraged, and the police simply cannot cope with the scale of the events unfolding, the logical choice is either the Home Guard, which was long ago disbanded, or the military.
I don’t think the biggest issue for the UK and EU governments are the the individual terror attacks and rapes and such. Even as the frequencies of those events increase, motor accidents have a larger real impact. The real issue for those governments is that the citizenry might decide that the governments will no longer protect them. That is where the danger of Islamophobia comes in. Even there, it is not that Merkel or May or any of them care whether a few Mosques or kabob shops burn down. They fear a large populist uprising. And they should.
Queen’s Guard doesn’t count?
You’re quoting the wrong person, I’m afraid; I was saying that I have seen such personnel.
Though no, I probably wouldn’t count the Guards. Never thought about it, really, but inside the fence at Buckingham Palace isn’t a public space, and I suppose Horseguards is technically a military installation.
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If the soldiers aren’t given independent power to arrest; and even if they are, if the suspects they arrest are tried for civilian offenses in a civilian court under civilian procedure and standards of evidence… then I don’t think it can be called “martial law”, yet.
My own recollection is seeing them a lot more places than that. And the helicopters. Constant low-flying groups of huge helicopters over our apartment in Brooklyn, setting off car alarms. Yeah, I know the difference between the Guard and the army (and the Guard is supposed to help out in emergencies, it’s part of their job), but the massive scale sure felt like an occupation. There was no avoiding it.
How? By their nature, suicide bombers cannot be stopped by police or army troops as their very goal is to blow such people up along with the citizenry at large.
Manned checkpoint full of soldiers? Suicide gold. “Enhanced” security so the line of people snakes down the street or there is a mob packed in at an airport? Hot damn.
“They must know something we don’t or they’d not be doing this” is not a defensible assertion. The politicians make decisions then look for justifications (if they even bother). And their motivation is always colored by “What is going to make me look good in the press and to voters?”
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