By Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail
Published: 17:00 EDT, 28 April 2022 | Updated: 18:28 EDT, 29 April 2022
Two busy motorway service stations on the southern stretch of the M25 were the latest targets of the Just Stop Oil eco-mentalists yesterday.
Self-styled 'saviours' of the planet used hammers and spray paint to disable petrol pumps at the start of the morning rush hour.
They stuck themselves to the forecourt entrance to prevent drivers filling up, while the first police on the scene just stood and watched.
One 'protester' who superglued his hand to a diesel pump developed cramp in his arm.
The Old Bill looked on as his partners in crime wheeled a chair for him to sit on. Still, what else have we come to expect?
Self-styled 'saviours' of the planet used hammers and spray paint to disable petrol pumps at the start of the morning rush hour
When XR staged a sit-down demo on the northern section of the M25, a senior officer asked them if there was anything she could bring them. A few cushions, perhaps? A nice cup of tea and a packet of Hobnobs?
And to hell with the thousands of motorists condemned to spend hours in an interminable traffic jam; the missed flights, doctors' appointments and business meetings; the ambulances unable to reach hospitals; the sheer aggravation adding to the everyday stresses of life.
Yesterday's wanton vandalism closed the busy service areas at Clacket Lane and Cobham in Surrey for hours. The only surprise was that Plod didn't fetch one of those mini battering rams they use for bashing down doors from the boot of their patrol car and lend a hand.
Go, go, go! Or rather, don't.
Police chiefs appear to see their job as facilitating even the most fatuous and disruptive 'protests', not serving the wider public who pay their wages by keeping the Queen's highways open.
Would they be so indulgent if this, say, had been a gang of Millwall supporters venting their frustration at a 1-0 away defeat by destroying a few petrol pumps?
What do you think? They'd be scrambling the riot squad, all batons blazing and cracking skulls as a basis for negotiation. And rightly so.
It's not as if this bunch of XR spin-off headbangers wasn't 'known to police'. They included a couple of clowns with plenty of previous, including tethering themselves to goalposts during Premier League matches at Everton and Tottenham.
One of them has already been jailed for a month and a half for blocking the M25 last October. Not nearly long enough. Deportation would have been a better option. I hear Rwanda is nice this time of year.
Police chiefs appear to see their job as facilitating even the most fatuous and disruptive 'protests', not serving the wider public who pay their wages by keeping the Queen's highways open
Despite the attention they receive and the widespread disruption they cause, these lunatics are few in number and speak for nobody but themselves.
Yet as I wrote recently, they have been allowed to succeed in bringing much of Britain to a standstill where Arthur Scargill's flying pickets during the year-long miners' strike failed miserably.
The difference, of course, was that back then the Old Bill, under orders from the Government, sent in the heavy mob. Today, the police roll out the red carpet and send along the skateboard squad to join in the fun.
This Rag, Tag and Bobtail collection of full-time agitators operates under assorted flags of convenience, from Insulate Britain to Animal Rebellion. They are not legitimate protesters, they're nihilists.
They have no serious goals, other than self-indulgence and a despicable determination to cause as much misery as possible to their fellow citizens. Most of them are serial offenders, freed time and again by the courts to commit further acts of criminal damage and public nuisance.
Even when the police can be bothered to arrest them, the courts are guaranteed to treat them with extreme leniency.
For instance, in September 2020 Extinction Rebellion stopped millions of newspapers being delivered by blockading the gates of print works on Merseyside and in Hertfordshire for 11 hours.
This selfish action prevented 1,100 shops receiving copies of the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Telegraph, costing publishers £1.2 million at a time when sales were already badly hit by Covid.
Lest you think this is special pleading on behalf of my trade, consider the effect on family newsagents struggling to stay solvent, delivery workers deprived of a day's income and readers denied their daily paper.
Not to mention the outrageous attempt to silence our Free Press. Yet again, the police just stood back and let them get on with it. And this week, when two of these fanatics finally appeared in court, charged with obstruction, they walked away laughing in our faces.
Despite the attention they receive and the widespread disruption they cause, these lunatics are few in number and speak for nobody but themselves
The women involved were let off with a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £600 prosecution costs plus a £22 'victim surcharge'. Whatever happened to the punishment fitting the crime?
This pathetic sentence hardly reflected the scale of the knock-on effects, let alone the cost. Where did the court come up with the £600 figure? You won't find many lawyers who'll get out of bed for six hundred quid. It'll cost more than that to heat the court for the day.
As for the £22 victim surcharge, don't make me laugh. A speeding ticket will cost you five times that.
How does less than the price of a round of drinks these days compensate publishers for a £1.2 million hit? Not to mention the revenue lost by newsagents, garages and convenience stores.
Yet this kind of pathetic, kid-gloves mollycoddling is only too typical of the softly-softly approach towards anarchic eco-maniacs and others of a woke ilk by the alleged forces of law and order. Claiming to have a fashionable cause means never having to say sorry.
Compare and contrast the sentence handed down to the XR print works pickets with the hardline treatment of a frustrated businesswoman in Southend who nudged a couple of Insulate Britain demonstrators with her car.
They were blocking the road, stopping her getting to work and taking her 11-year-old son to school. Even though no one was hurt and she couldn't have been doing more than two miles per hour, she was charged with dangerous driving and had her licence suspended pending sentencing on May 6.
That'll teach her to drive an £80,000 Range Rover.
Face it, the police and those responsible for running the criminal justice system are no longer on the side of the law-abiding, tax-paying majority in this country.
They have all been captured by the Left-wing Common Purpose conspiracy which infests every branch of so-called 'public service' and is hell-bent on furthering 'progressive' interests, including militant environmentalism.
What's the betting that if and when the idiots behind yesterday's vandalism and disruption eventually appear before the courts, they'll be released immediately back on to the streets, with a pound from the poor box, to continue their deranged campaign of unapologetic criminality?
These ego-centric exhibitionists — in their designer hair-shirt, hi-viz vests — care more about the bloody polar bears than other human beings.
Do they really imagine that even a Government that bends the knee to every passing woke bandwagon is going to get rid of fossil fuels by tea-time, especially in the midst of a worldwide energy crisis and the looming threat of nuclear war?
They are more like a rip-roaring bonkers, Waco-style religious cult than a legitimate pressure group with tangible aims.
If there was any real justice in the world, they'd all be locked away in a padded cell wearing a jacket which does up at the back.
Maybe then, they'd Just Stop It.
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