It was going to be the high level conviction that would make the news and be a shot across the bows of anyone else who protested and it failed, miserably. The CPS and everyone else involved are going to have to consider each new case now because the chances of conviction don't look good.
they still got to inconvenience protesters
Most protestors these days are prepared for inconvenience (some go out of their way to courter arrest in order to make a bigger splash), it's a whole different ballgame if you could be looking at a criminal conviction for not doing much at all.
It's the CPS that may think twice about the prospect of prosecution, and the police are going to be pretty loathe to arrest if prosecutions are unsuccessful,
What? Police have no issue arresting people regardless of the conviction possibilities. They literally could not care less. Arresting people is just part of their day at the office.
That’s really not how it works. If there’s little prospect of prosecution they simply aren’t going to bother with the time expense and resources to arrest.
Perhaps under normal circumstances, but arrest alone is enough of a deterrent for a lot of people. Plus some cops will arrest people just because the people pissed them off. They know no criminal charges will come of it, but they also know it'll inconvenience the person for at least 4 hours and ruin their day.
What time and expense? The cops and the jail staff are there regardless of arresting people or not. It costs them nothing additional to arrest you. The expense is part of their regular operational budget.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't cost them any more money to go out and arrest a bunch of people, than it does to sit at a donut shop stuffing their faces. They get paid either way, as do the people running the jails. Their budget isn't affected by what they do during the course of a shift.
They have a certain amount of money that they have to spent on operational work. The police and crime commissioners/mayor depending on region absolutely look at arrests v conviction rates and will give the Chief Constable a hard time if they are arresting people without hope of conviction, telling them instead to focus on priorities. It wouldn't surprise me at all if we don't see the criteria for arrest to be tweaked a bit.
Rwanda is a flagship policy that says more about their intent rather than their ability to make it work. They'll keep flogging that dead horse until they are winkled out of office.
This seems a poor policy that even those tasked with enforcing it didn't want and they can quietly forget about it.
What it says most is that Suella Braverman wants to continue her father's business of running concentration camps in Africa.
Her dad, who for some reason has a Hispanic name, is of Goan Indian descent but born and raised in Kenya. In 1960, during the Mau Mau uprising under which Kenya gained independence from the UK, he somehow was granted a UK passport - while the rest of his family fled back to India. Upon arriving to the UK, he landed a job as head of a housing association. Now, his daughter is an MP.
I've struggled to find hard evidence to confirm anything beyond the last paragraph, but it seems like there is a massive evidence-shaped hole that points to Braverman's father running a British concentration camp in Kenya, one of many with horrible conditions that prompted Kenya's revolution for independence.
Lately, the Tory government have neglected in processing migrants from the UK, instead opting to house them in hotels (often owned by party donors, and at UK taxpayer's expense). Many of these people could have long been deported from our shores, but doing that would reduce the potential stockpile of people they could put into the proposed Rwanda concentration camps.
These are for profit businesses, run in a foreign country, which the UK taxpayer is paying to set up and accommodate. Furthermore, section 16.1 of the Rwanda deal says "the UK will accept 'vulnerable migrants' from Rwanda in return for those sent to Rwanda". When pressed on the House of Lords, the government has refused to comment on how many migrants the government will be taking in return. Is it 1 for 1? More? Less? That is not defined.
They're still fucking stealing from us. We're paying their court bills and their salaries while they set up their tax haven businesses that the UK society will see a significant net cost from, with very little benefit.