An Extinction Rebellion splinter group has blocked a motorway in England for the second time in three days, as police are facing calls to take a stronger line on the disruptive actions from the climate change alarmists.
Parts of Britain’s busiest motorway, the M25, was shut down after 89 members of the eco-warrior Insulate Britain activist group staged blockades of traffic on Wednesday morning. The leftist action group imposed a similar disruption on Monday. Other activists from the group also blocked parts of the A10 and A3.
The latest protests come just weeks after the UK’s top climate change activist organisation, Extinction Rebellion, spent two weeks putting on demonstrations to shut down Central London.
As seen in Extinction Rebellion protests, activists from the Insulate Britain group glued themselves to the road in order to make arrests and clearing the road more difficult for police, according to The Telegraph.
Police also had to deal with a car crash involving four vehicles during the same time, in which a woman in her 50s was airlifted to hospital after suffering serious injuries.
While police have said it was too early to tell if the crash was caused by the protest, a witness told the newspaper: “The cars ploughed into the back of each other. It was so blatantly obvious what had happened. The standstill traffic was caused by the protest. One car was squashed into half its size.”
Yet, the police have come under increasing fire for failing to take swift action against the green activists and allow ordinary Britons to go about their day unencumbered.
Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger told the Daily Mail that the protesters “should have a criminal record and everybody should be made aware of the damage and misery they cause. Their whole plan, of sowing chaos to our lives in this way, just won’t fly with the British public because they don’t kowtow to bullies. They cannot be allowed to hijack the conversation by threatening to destroy livelihoods if they don’t get their own way.
“If they have a grievance, they should take it up with their Member of Parliament in the lawful, peaceful way. They can’t just throw a tantrum and sit in the road at whatever cost to other people. If they can’t be adults in this conversation, they shouldn’t be in the conversation at all.”
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen added: “They are putting people’s livelihoods and indeed lives at risk through their reckless behaviour. They don’t actually care about what’s good for the general public and they are little more than anarchists.”
On Tuesday, responding to the initial M25 protest, former detective chief inspector at the Metropolitan Police, Mick Neville, maligned the current state of policing, telling LBC radio that many senior officers in the Met are readers of the left-wing Guardian newspaper and are sympathetic to the “champagne socialist” protesters.
“What you need is some ex-soldiers there grabbing hold of them… put them in the handcuffs and put them at the side of the road,” Neville said.
“That’s what the public want to see. The police pander too much to these silly protests rather than the guys and girls who just want to get in their cars and go to work.”
Insulate Britain said they shut down the motorway “because we are angry, because we are outraged, because we feel disgust beyond words. Because we will not stand by and see our families suffer, their livelihoods destroyed and our country betrayed. Never. Never.
“The world is burning and burning, each year worse than the last. They are disrupting not just today or this week but the next hundred thousand years – forever. This country is facing the greatest crisis ever and we are told to plant trees and do the recycling. We can take the lies no longer. We are not stupid. We are not children. We will no longer tolerate this dishonesty.”
At the time of this reporting, the police managed to arrest 32 activists on Wednesday, on top of the 42 arrested on Monday.
“We understand and respect the right to protest but not the right to cause disruption to the public in this way. This affects critical national infrastructure and diverts many officers from responding to emergencies in their communities,” the Met said in a social media statement.
“We consider this to be unreasonable and unsafe highway obstruction and we will respond as quickly as possible and robustly to any incidents of this nature,” the police force added.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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