Eco nuts and pious hipsters are milking the humanity of police

SUMMER holidays are over and it is back to work for the nation’s eco protesters. Yes, I am afraid the Protesting Season is upon us once more!

Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and the Anti-Milk Mob have all been busy, busy, busy over the past few weeks. Just look at the Emilys and the Ruperts, the Fenellas and the Sebastians who have recently converged on the capital and elsewhere to do their worst.

Pious hipsters pouring milk on the floor of Harrods Food Halls, unemployed graphic artists assaulting wheels of cheese with yet more milk in Fortnum & Mason, safe in the knowledge that some grub on minimum wage will clear up after them, after they have made their point that . . . well, what? I’m still unclear. Though the irony of wasting perfectly good food while people around the world are starving seems to be lost on them.

Meanwhile, we can all quietly seethe at Just Stop Oil nutters gluing their palms to the roads outside Parliament. Or retired, middle-management couples from Basingstoke putting on their anoraks, filling flasks with tea — hope there is no milk in there! — and riding the rails up to London for the day to wreak mayhem on the city streets. The end of the world is nigh, they claim — even if all of them, every last whiny protester, benefits from and uses oil, milk and God knows what other liquids to fuel their lives in the wholesale pursuit of annoyance.

By gluing themselves to Tarmac, the protesters are like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire — bear with me — because they rely on the kindness of strangers to thrive. Specifically, the decency and humanity of police officers, who do not want to use force to rip their hands from the road, leaving palm-shaped leaves of skin in their wake.

Yet the more tolerant the police, the more the eco nuts will take advantage of their good nature.

Meanwhile, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens always seem to be at the bottom of the police’s concerns, especially if we have the audacity to be burgled or find an intruder in our loft.

We should all get together and protest against the protesters. And blanch the Blanches in hot oil, for a start.