[Ruffy]

IMHO, there's a big difference between making a visible protest (to suggest or promote an alternative) and deliberately disrupting someone else's event in a destructive way.

Unfortunately 'the truth' is quite often hard to discern. Reliance on underlying assumptions or prior situations is often required, and judgement calls need to be made. Often the same facts can be interpreted in different ways and decisions made 'on the fly' in operational circumstances are statistically far more likely to be imperfect than not, and thus almost always open to criticism from some direction or other.

But that does not mean they were necessarily wrong or bad decisions. It's all about reasonableness and trade-offs. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" is a pretty tough gig.

For example, picking one of the quoted instances, why did a group feel this particular occasion necessitated a significant-scale issue of rape alarms? Personally, I probably have a natural suspicious or cynical tendency and it does feel a bit incongruous to me that a daytime, public, heavily policed event like this would be perceived as so sexually threatening to women that such distribution was felt important. So, I find it hard to believe that it wasn't just an attempt to create a plausible excuse to disguise or mask a hidden agenda intending to facilitate disruption for other reasons.

I'm pretty ambivalent about the monarchy and the coronation but I won't lose any sleep about a few folk feeling (or being) wronged because of attempts to keep the main show of the day on plan. There should be a time and a place for the other debate but Saturday definitely wasn't it!

(None of that is to suggest that I don't think there are plenty of issues with our political system. I have other concerns about the policies and ideology of those in Westminster - not just government, across all parties.)