Why do Plod allow these intimidating picket mobs?

REMEMBER the dark days of trade union misrule in Britain and the scourge of secondary picketing?

This was the once common practice of blockading businesses not directly involved in an industrial dispute.

For instance, striking miners laying siege to coke depots and power stations, or car workers attempting to cut off parts supplies to their factories.

It was outlawed by the Thatcher government as a result of the 1984 coal strike, which saw the widespread use of flying pickets.

After that, strikers could only picket their own workplace. even there, anyone using threatening behaviour or language, or displaying offensive material on banners or placards, is committing a criminal offence.

How, then, to describe the picketing of private houses? For the past few days, Dominic Cummings has — like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg before him — had to run the gauntlet of Left-wing militants outside his home.

Whatever you think of him, why should protesters be allowed to intimidate Cummings and his family, including his four-year-old child?

He’s been sworn at, and had ‘Scummings’ and other abuse scrawled on walls.

Peaceful protest is one thing, but hurling threats and insults at people outside their homes is despicable. Why isn’t it illegal, too? Yet the self-styled ‘liberal’ Left believe such thuggery — when directed at Tories — is not only perfectly acceptable, it should be encouraged.

This kind of disgusting behaviour wouldn’t be allowed at a factory gate, so why is it tolerated in a residential street?

Perhaps now Plod have stopped scouring Cummings’s satnav for evidence of a crime, they might care to enlighten us.