That's why I said you've got it arse-about. You are getting the order of when things happened wrong. You said: > The problem is that when you make protests i

That's why I said you've got it arse-about. You are getting the order of when things happened wrong. You said: > The problem is that when you make protests illegal and meet them with riot police only the most hardened/radical protesters will turn up. This is not what happened. The initial response was, as is typical with all large scale protests - to have regular uniformed police monitoring it, and controlling traffic/the direction of the protest. The specialist/better equipped teams like the Public Order Response Team are almost always on standby during a large protest/march. They're only deployed when things get heated or actually turn violent. This is pretty much the same thing that happens in other western countries whenever there's a large protest.