IF PATEL’S Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill banning “annoying demonstrations” had come into force in 1976, I’d surely have gone to jail by now, given the amount of gigs I’ve done on the backs of slow-moving or stationary lorries, hastily erected stages or quite simply in the middle of the road.

This Bill, now law, is an attack on our basic human rights. There won’t be real protest at all but state-sanctioned, sanitised cosmetics.

It is a pre-local election sop to the servile, cap-doffing gerontocracy which is England — not Britain — in 2021. It is “protecting” inert bits of stone and flags while ignoring living, breathing women, ethnic minorities, the poor, the vulnerable and, above all, the young.