Dangerous game for McDonnell’s mob

IF YOU fancy a day’s sightseeing with the family at the weekend, I would certainly give central London a wide berth tomorrow.

That’s because a mass demonstration has been called in which the organisers claim up to a million people will take to the streets with the aim of toppling the Government.

Of course these claims by organisers tend often to be well wide of the mark. For example, a “Day of Rage” demo earlier this month, and which threatened to bring the streets of the capital to a complete halt, attracted at most a couple of hundred of the usual suspects.

There is a chance that tomorrow’s march may turn out to be peaceful, but if past experience is a guide we know there will be many among the crowd who just want a ferocious confrontation with the police.

If anything like a million people do turn out, the chances of potential trouble is high. If you just want to treat the kids to the National Gallery or Westminster Abbey, it is simply not worth the risk.

Expect the usual posturing – the megaphones and dreary chanting, the angry placards denouncing Theresa May, the white men with dreadlocks (cultural appropriation anyone?) banging on steel drums, and the trust-funded senior figures of a major political party calling for an insurrection to topple a democratically-elected government that was returned to power by voters just three weeks ago.

This sounds to me to be dangerously close to sedition. At the very least it is grossly irresponsible for anyone, let alone a man who wants to be our next Chancellor of the Exchequer, to call for mob rule to overthrow democracy.

We had the chance to “oust Mrs May” from Downing Street on June 8 and the country declined to take it. That is the way it works in peaceful, democratic countries.

Part of the problem here is that – aided by some truly disgraceful reporting from the mainstream media – a false narrative has been planted in the heads of many credulous, gullible young people.

These wide-eyed clowns seriously believe that Labour somehow “won” the election, despite the fact that the Conservatives gained far more votes and seats than any other party.

They genuinely think that Jeremy Corbyn is the true Prime Minister and he is only being prevented from taking up his rightful place in Number 10 by some sinister conspiracy. I kid you not.

In these circumstances, when they have been wrongly denied a famous election victory, who can possibly blame them if they want to smash up Starbucks and throw a few fireworks at the police horses?

McDonnell and the demonstration’s organisers are playing a very, very dangerous game here.

Once the genie of mob violence is out of the bottle, it is very hard to get it back in again.

If you delegitimise the current government – as McDonnell is trying to do – then you delegitimise all future elected governments, too. If McDonnell were ever voted into a position of power (heaven forfend!), would he be happy if a mob forced him from power?

The reason our system is so stable and peaceful compared to many other parts of the world is that politicians across the political spectrum, even if bitterly disappointed, accept the election result with good grace. Think Neil Kinnock in 1992, William Hague in 2001, Gordon Brown in 2010 and Ed Miliband in 2015.

By their manoeuvrings, Corbyn and McDonnell threaten this stability.

And following recent terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire, positively the last thing our over-stretched and exhausted emergency services need is a bunch of self-indulgent posh kids trying to smash up the Cenotaph on Whitehall.