9/19/2023 0 Comments World of goo ipad demoI asked what authority he had to do that and he said, ‘You could be arrested for breach of the peace.’ I said, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal, I’m just expressing an opinion. He would probably have walked away and found an alternative route home if he hadn’t been stopped by security guards – or crowd management services, as the police later called them. “A couple of people told me to shut up,” he says. But I know they couldn’t hear it at the front because the Oxford Mail reported an indistinct heckle.” Did he say anything rude? Hill looks appalled. How loud was his heckle? “Loud enough for the people near me to hear. Hill had not planned to protest at the proclamation but stumbled into it. I called out, ‘Let’s not bow down to our equals.’ Then the security guards pushed me backwards and the police rushed in But things like trying to love your neighbour is a form of activism for me.” He is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion and The Upside-Down Bible. I try to live by my faith all the time,” he adds, and reddens slightly. Hill’s activism has always been bound up with his Christianity, much of his objection to monarchy derived from his faith: “I don’t understand how a Christian can agree to a proclamation declaring somebody other than Jesus to be our only king. As a child, you don’t understand why one woman should be a housekeeper and another should have a housekeeper. When he was six, his mother became housekeeper to a wealthy, aristocratic couple: “We lived in what would have been called a servants’ cottage back in the day.” He admits his memories are partial, but some are still so clear – being allowed to play with the employer’s dog as if it were a treat the benign patrician taking down a glass of wine to his mother in the kitchen and telling her not to mention it to his wife, who would disapprove. He was born into a working-class family in the Midlands. Hill tells me it was his childhood that radicalised him. He bears a resemblance to Mole in The Wind in the Willows – small, bespectacled, flat-capped, scrupulously polite and kind. H ill and I meet in a Wetherspoon pub in Oxford where he orders a non-alcoholic beer. (Indeed, a couple of months later Chinese protesters used blank pieces of paper to protest against the country’s zero-tolerance Covid policy in what people referred to as the A4 revolution.) What was happening to Britain and its much vaunted democracy? In the days after the queen’s death, as TV stations cancelled regular programming and sombre music was played on the radio, only supine monarchism seemed acceptable. It felt like something we might read about in China or Russia. Perhaps the most alarming story to emerge was that of a barrister threatened with arrest after holding up a blank piece of paper outside parliament. One young man chucked five eggs at the new king and, despite his failure to hit his target, he was also charged with a public order offence. More overt forms of protest also made headlines. How could it have resulted in a criminal charge? On the same day, a 22-year-old woman who allegedly held a placard reading “Fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy” was arrested in Edinburgh for breach of the peace. Not because his had been an extreme or dramatic protest, but because it had been so mild. “I find this language very demeaning, and I called out ‘Who elected him?’” To his astonishment, he found himself surrounded by security, arrested and eventually charged under the Public Order Act 1986. At the start of the ceremony, which focused on the queen’s death, he was silent: “I wouldn’t interrupt somebody’s grief.” But when “they declared Charles rightful liege lord, and acknowledged our obedience to him as our only king”, Hill had heard enough. Hill is a Christian, historian, pacifist, teacher, writer, activist and republican. He was looking forward to spending the afternoon relaxing with his housemates in their garden, and now he was stuck in a celebration he regarded as archaic and irrelevant. Hill is a quiet, thoughtful man of 46, but it doesn’t take much to rile him when it comes to the monarchy. This ceremony, organised by the council, typified the pomp and pageantry. It was 11 September, the day after Charles Windsor had been officially proclaimed King Charles III in London, and local events were being held nationwide. S ymon Hill was walking back from church on a sunny autumn Sunday when he realised his route was blocked the roads around Carfax Tower in Oxford were closed off.
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