TOO MUCH PUBLICITY?

This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Too much publicity?

The Press survives by selling newspapers. It doesn't promote sales by starving groups such as EDL and UAF of publicity.

What has been the message these past few weeks but to discourage people travelling into Leicester last Saturday to go about their normal business.

Rather than to allow groups their right to demonstrate within the law, calls have been made to ban that right with one group reported as saying that they would openly flout decisions imposed by the police by assembling at the Clock Tower.

Surely, any advance media notification should not have fuelled what almost amounts to hysteria.

Groups should have marched on separate days.

The police have a duty to maintain law and order to free the public to get on with their daily lives while turning their backs on provocative rantings.

Whatever the names of groups, whether they are approved or disapproved by religious leaders, if those groups break the law they should expect arrest and trial.

Of paramount importance is that groups should not assemble at the same time and the same place to provoke one another into violence.

The police had the right idea to keep these opposing factions well apart, ready to make arrests for behaviour disturbing the peace.

What would have been the result had there been little advance publicity, an opposing group agreeing to march on a different day and the police allowed to get on with their work of supervision and arrest of troublemakers?

I daresay city life would have been far less disrupted.

George West, Groby