You have two choices: cheer on the monarchy, or shut up. There is no third option. The anti-monarchy campaign group Republic found out.

Its chief executive and several other protesters were bundled into a police van yesterday after being arrested at a peaceful protest in Trafalgar Square. It followed a letter from the Home Office last week that informed them of new police powers to curb protest and harsher criminal penalties for protesters. “I would be grateful if you could forward this letter to members likely to be affected,” it ominously suggested.

These arrests by the Met took place in the context of new laws ushered in by increasingly authoritarian home secretaries. Priti Patel introduced new measures to give ministers wide powers to define the conditions under which the police can impede protest. Suella Braverman has gone further still: her freshly enacted Public Order Act says the police have the right to impose conditions if anyone is hindered “to more than a minor degree”, to stop and search anyone without suspicion, and imposes what the UN has called “disproportionate” criminal sanctions on peaceful protesters.

…“We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration,” the Met tweeted last week, seemingly unaware that “undermining” royal festivities is not (yet) unlawful.

Rape goes unprosecuted but “undermining” the expensive and pointless display of royal royalityism will be dealt with “robustly.”

These sweeping powers should concern all democrats. The police are supposed to treat citizens impartially, regardless of their belief. But they have a poor track record, and not just when it comes to republicans.

Take, for example, the egregious way the police have clamped down on the free speech of those who express the “gender critical” belief, protected in equalities law, that sex is binary, immutable and relevant in society. The police should be scrupulously neutral on this. Yet in recent years they have adopted the controversial position of campaigners who believe that gender identity can replace sex altogether – that being a woman is not a biological reality but instead about conforming to feminine stereotypes or a matter of inner identity, and that it is somehow “hateful” to deviate from this view.

The two are quite similar, really. Charles imagines he’s special, and men who claim to be trans imagine they are women. For some reason the police are punishing people for refusing to endorse these fantasies.