Mark Andrews: Manchester horror shows why all sides need to calm down and end the protests, plus death-trap scooters
About 1,500 protestors will converge on Trafalgar Square today to voice their support for the banned group Palestine Action. They will ignore requests from Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Met police chief Sir Mark Rowley to take a week off in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack, arguing that cancelling the demo would be 'letting the terrorists win'.
Of course they do. Never mind the irony that they are actually marching in support of a proscribed terrorist organisation. They believe their cause is so important that nothing at all must be allowed to stop them doing their thing.
And isn't it this kind of self-indulgent, fanatical mindset which has brought us to the situation which culminated on the dreadful attack on Thursday?
And it's the same with the idiots who heckled David Lammy at yesterday's vigil, blaming the Government's recognition of the Palestinian state for the atrocity.
For clarity, I think the Government was wrong to give Palestine Action the kudos of being called a terror group, and foolish to make the futile gesture of recognising a Palestinian state when there is nothing tangible to recognise. But am I angry about it enough to go down The Smoke to stage a sit in? Of course not. Or travel to Manchester to abuse a cabinet minister? Or, for that matter, traipse down to London to listen to a bit of Tommy Robinson's venom? Only a hardened bigot would go to those lengths.
And worryingly, there seem to be an awful lot of hardened bigots about at the moment.
*****
Driving up a narrow, dimly lit road, in driving rain a face whizzed past, inches to my right. Within seconds h'd vanished, from sight at least. He was riding one of those death-trap electric scooter things, with no lights after dark, seemingly oblivious to the danger he was putting himself, and pedestrians in.
What I don't understand is that everybody knows these things are illegal to use in public, unless part of a formal hire scheme that doesn't operate in this area. Yet every day you see folk brazenly riding around on them, I've even seen people bringing them into the shops. So why don't the police confiscate every one of these things that they see? I know they're over-burdened with paperwork and giving out 'advice' on non-crime hate incidents, and I suppose people on scooters are hard to catch. But surely if they can send five men to nick Father Ted writer Graham Linehan over something he wrote on Twitter, they can take a few scooters off the road?
