How much more of this anarchic lunacy before police reclaim the streets?

As mob rule shuts British Museum...

Mob rule returned to the streets of London on Sunday, forcing the closure of the british Museum. Hundreds of masked demonstrators laid siege to the main gates, blocking access to visitors and trapping others inside.

The protest was organised by an outfit calling itself Energy Embargo For Palestine, another Far-Left front organisation bringing together anti-Israel fanatics and Just Stop oil headbangers.

They have managed to link the war in Gaza to the museum’s ten-year £50million sponsorship deal with bP, which has been awarded an offshore licence to explore for oil and gas in Israeli waters. Protesters waved Palestinian flags, and brandished banners including ‘boycott the british Museum’ and ‘bP fuels colonial genocide’ — two of their current favourite buzzwords.

by mid-afternoon, the museum was shut on police advice and never reopened. once again, the mob had succeeded in stopping people going about their lawful business.

Time and again we have seen this type of demo disrupt daily lives — closing bridges, blocking motorways and airport approach roads, stopping ambulances getting to hospital and parents taking their children to school. buildings have been defaced, paintings attacked in art galleries, the list is endless. Now it’s the turn of the british Museum, because of a tenuous link between its sponsor bP and Israel — sorry, the ‘Zionist Entity’.

There’s little to be gained by pointing out that Hamas — which has been occupying Gaza for the past 18 years, started this war and is hell-bent on genocide against Israel — is bankrolled by Iran, which relies on oil exports for its wealth.

THE mob isn’t interested. They only target Israel and the West. Any excuse will do — climate change, ‘colonialism’, ‘genocide’, slavery, you name it. The purpose is protest. As I wrote here months ago, after the pro-Palestinian/Hamas marches were getting into full swing: If you could be bothered to go along to any demo, any day of the week, you’ll bump into the same old faces.

The cause is largely irrelevant — Stop brexit, Stop The War, perm any one from dozens.

The agitprop Left is a multiheaded hydra, which travels under an assortment of banners. Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rebellion, Just Stop oil, ocean Rebellion, HS2 Rebellion,

Planet Patrol, Fossil Free London, Plane Stupid, Insulate britain, Reclaim The Streets.

Queers For Palestine remains my personal favourite. To which we can now add Energy Embargo For Palestine. The dead hand of the Socialist Workers Party is behind most of them.

Here’s a direct quote from this column in November: ‘I’m prepared to bet good money that many of those regular Just Stop oil protesters were on the streets waving Palestinian flags on Saturday. Protest is what they do, what they live for. And for all they claim their sole concern is the alleged “climate emergency”, they’ve already expanded into other areas.

‘Tell me what any of these people think about anything, and I’ll tell you what they think about everything, from brexit and climate change to the war in the Middle East.

‘I see even that self-appointed global warming goblin Greta Wossname has joined in the slandering of Israel. What has that got to do with global warming? Precisely nothing.’

Well, now they have found a way to combine Israel and global warming, as a result of bP’s sponsorship of the british Museum.

Everybody back on the picket line!

Performative political protests are football hooliganism for trustafarians and the Guardianreading

classes, any excuse for a punch-up in the name of ‘social justice’.

(Yet, bP sponsorship aside, you’d expect the wokerati to lay off the museum, which has gone out of its way to embrace today’s revisionism. Not so long ago, during the black Lives Matter madness, the then director Hartwig Fischer moved the statue of the museum’s founder Sir Hans Sloane, because of his links to slavery and ‘colonialism’.

More recently, chairman George osborne — the former Tory Chancellor, who clinched the bP sponsorship deal — advocated sending the Elgin Marbles, ancient sculptures once housed in the Parthenon, back to Greece.)

Meanwhile, back on the streets, the mayhem goes on, while the police largely stand aside and watch. No arrests were made on Sunday and Scotland Yard described the demo as ‘peaceful’. That’s a matter of opinion.

Met chief Mark Rowley initially complained he didn’t have the powers to arrest eco-nutters blocking the streets. When Parliament gave him the powers he wanted, he refused to use them.

BuT here’s what puzzles me. Surely forcing the closure of an institution like the british Museum and preventing people going about their daily business must constitute obstruction at the very least.

If this was an industrial dispute, the number of pickets allowed at the gate would be no more than six. After the miners’ strike, flying pickets were outlawed altogether.

So why the hell are we expected to tolerate hundreds of protesters from goodness-knows-where blockading the entrance to the british Museum, preventing staff and visitors from entering and trapping others inside?

We’re already having to suffer anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hate marches every week.

Now the ‘river to the sea’ crowd have teamed up with the eco-mentalists, anywhere they suspect of ‘colonial genocide’ is apparently fair game.

Mob rule is not going to stop the war, it’s not going to stop bP drilling for gas. So how much longer do we have to put up with this anarchic lunacy before the police reclaim the streets?

Just stop it.