Sir Julian Lewis: It sounds as though the Minister is getting to grips with this, and I am very grateful for that. Will she accept that the counterpart or corollary of operational independence for the police is their political impartiality, and does she agree with me that the last thing we want is a poisonous cocktail of football hooliganism infected by the hatreds arising out of the middle eastern conflict?

[The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones): The right hon. Gentleman is right to talk about political impartiality. It is absolutely crucial that our police are not making decisions based on politics. We ask them every day to almost do that, even though we are very clear that they must not. It is difficult and complicated, and when they are policing – for example, in London or our big cities – protests with multiple causes, and protests in response to events around the world that are deeply interesting to a lot of citizens of this country, we do ask a lot of them. We need to appreciate that, in the vast majority of cases, they make the right call, and they also do things behind closed doors that we do not see. For example, there is lots of negotiation with lots of protest organisations about changing the route of a protest, and making sure that it is moving in the right way to avoid more conflict. In the main, they do a very good job, but we need to make sure that we get to the bottom of this case.]