Campaigners rejoiced last Friday as the government’s hopelessly conflicted anti-protest tsar finally got the boot – but said it raises questions about the ongoing mass imprisonment of political prisoners.

John Woodcock, AKA Lord Walney, held the role of independent advisor on political violence and disruption for four years. He used his position to make 41 recommendations for restricting the right to protest, while taking money from the arms trade and fossil fuel companies as a paid lobbyist.

As he responded to the news of being dumped on Valentine’s Day, he couldn’t resist a final parting shot at people protesting against the genocide in Gaza. Posting on social media site X, he said: “At a time of increasing threats and intimidation, we must do more to protect our democracy and its MPs from organised coercion, and the public from the menace of extreme protestors … In particular, the combined toll of the weekly Gaza marches shows that the balance is not currently set right.”

The government announcement also confirmed that Robin Simcox, the commissioner for countering extremism, will have to reapply for his job. Simcox, a former fellow at the neo-con think tank the Henry Jackson Society, said that Palestine protesters are promoting “a shameful extremist agenda, the normalisation and promotion of antisemitism”. As one of the largest protest movements Britain has ever seen took shape, these were the people who gave the “expert” heft to the prevailing anti-protest mood music. Their smears were repeated uncritically in much of the media.

Questions over Walney’s seeming conflicts of interest grew louder after campaigners passed a photo of him arriving to the 2014 ADS dinner – a swanky networking event for the arms industry – to Novara Media. He was pictured smirking as he walked past protesters holding placards with slogans such as “mourn arms trade victims”. He later told GB News how “everyone who ran the gauntlet was being shouted at, screamed at, horrific things said to them, megaphone in their face”.

Here he was, making it clear that his experiences as an arms-trade lobbyist had influenced his attitude towards the right to protest. It was an astonishing admission, but one which may point to just how normalised the close relationship between the government and the arms trade has become. What appeared to campaigners and journalists as a blatant conflict of interest didn’t even register for Walney as something to keep quiet about. Nor did it pose a problem for the last government, while the current one kept him in place for eight months.

According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the relationship between weapons manufacturing and the British state is not merely a revolving door, but an open plan office. One way of understanding the end of Walney’s appointment to a role supposedly to do with protecting democracy is that it made this all too obvious.

We’ll have to wait for the new appointments of a new commissioner for countering extremism and a permanent independent Prevent commissioner – which were also part of the government’s announcement – to see whether there has been an ideological change at the top of government. In the meantime, does Walney’s sacking signal an end to the government’s cosiness with the arms trade influencing its attitude towards protests?

For the answer to that question, we can look at this year’s ADS dinner, held at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane in London on 28 January. Defence secretary John Healey attended the £265-£540-a-head event. He told attendees that protesters at university campuses targeting arms-trade stalls at careers fairs are “well-meaning” but “fundamentally flawed.” Along with two other ministers, Healey has written a strongly worded email to university vice chancellors demanding that “all necessary precautions” are taken to ensure that arms-trade recruiters are not put off from campuses.

“We don’t stop wars by boycotting our defence industry. We stop wars by backing it,” Healey told the ADS dinner. This would have been music to the ears of event sponsors BAE Systems, which is a lead partner in building the F-35 combat aircraft which campaigners say has been “instrumental” in flattening Gaza. Labour is still refusing to ban the export licenses of these jets despite calls from more than 200 human rights organisations across the world.

Indeed, ADS CEO Kevin Craven thanked the Labour government for its “strong show of support, understanding and listening”. Referring to noisy protesters outside the event, he said: “Despite what you may have heard on the way in, we are not the bad guys.”

Walney’s departure means the government no longer employs someone whose job is to dream up imaginative new ways to crack down on protests. This is a victory for campaigners, and can only be a good thing. But with scores of political prisoners facing punitive stretches on remand in jail before having been found guilty of any crime and the state still locked in a tight embrace of private arms firms, the government’s fallen anti-democracy tsar is – sadly – just one character in a much bigger story.