Margaret Brown (Viewpoints, 6 April) seems somewhat confused in her letter.
She seems to think that protestors are calling for “a restriction of police powers”. This is simply not the case.
What they are actually calling for is the abandonment of the proposed legislation which would greatly extend the police’s powers.
Doubtless if I quoted the Wildlife Trust, or Liberty, or Friends of the Earth, or any of the many other groups alarmed by this legislation, she would say “usual suspects” or “lefites.” So instead, perhaps the words of Peter Fahy, former top cop for Greater Manchester Police will give her pause for thought.
He recently said”“People need to be really worried about this…. the right to protest, the right to gather, the right to have a voice is fundamental to our democracy, and particularly British democracy. Bringing in legislation on the back of the Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, rushing that legislation through, putting in some really dodgy definitions which the police are supposed to make sense of…. you’ve got to be really wary of more legislation being rushed through just because certain politicians didn’t like certain demonstrations in the summer.”
This Bill is appalling. It is a further encroachment of state power on an already weakened and cowed civil society.
Dr Marc Hudson
editor Manchester Climate Monthly
manchester climate monthly 
I find the American and Canadian political systems essentially involve two established conservative and (neo)liberal parties more or less alternating in governance while habitually kowtowing to the interests of the very wealthy but especially big business’s crippling threats (whether implied or explicit) of a loss of jobs, capital investment and/or economic stability, etcetera. This of course fails to mention, amongst other things, the corporate-welfare-cheque subsidies doled out annually to already very profitable corporations and the forgiveness of huge loan debts owed to taxpayers. Also, almost all of our information is still produced and/or shared with us by concentrated corporate-owned media.
I believe it reflects why those powerful interests generally resist proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which tends to dilute the corporate lobbyist influence on the former. The first-past-the-post electoral system seems to barely qualify as democratic (within the democracy spectrum), and it best serves corporate interests. This corporate-political reality may be why so many low-income citizens have felt futility in voting at all, let alone waiting in long lineups in the weather to do so.