Police, City Council Give Extinction Rebellion A Free Pass To Wreak Havoc

No one is allowed to walk on the grass outside Trinity College Cambridge.

I suppose an exception might be made if you were a 365-year-old don who once lolled under the famous apple tree with Sir Isaac Newton (probably a couple of those old fellows still holed up in the port cellar).

Otherwise, set one foot on that sacred turf and you will soon find yourself experiencing the full force of Newtonian gravity; rugby-tackled to the ground by a puce-faced porter in a bowler hat.

So there was general astonishment on Monday when a scrofulous mob of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters was allowed to dig up the lawn.

After hideously defacing the emerald sward, they carried the earth in wheelbarrows to Barclays Bank, where they deposited it in the foyer.

Where were the porters? Where were the police? Why did no one intervene to stop this appalling act of vandalism?

Fear and collusion, that’s why. Increasingly, we see authorities of all kinds running scared of over-mighty minority groups.

Tread softly for you tread on their screams. Universities cower before (or even agree with) strident students.

Hounded by trans groups, domestic-violence refuges admit “women” with a penis. The vast majority of the country thinks this is insane, but too many institutions have been captured by the woke zealots or are afraid.

The demands of XR Cambridge are particularly outrageous.

Having occupied the council chamber last week and delayed the crucial city budget, they insisted that the council give its democratic powers over to an unelected Citizens’ Assembly.

Behavior which seems even crazier when you consider that Cambridge Council has one of the most advanced strategies for tackling climate change in the UK. In our road, recycling is next to Godliness.

The huge shock for residents like me is that those bodies we thought would protect our interests – the council and the police – have behaved as though they are on the side of those disrupting our way of life.

Crossing Cambridge by car can be a frustrating business, but a whole new level of nose-to-tail fuming was introduced at the weekend when Extinction Rebellion occupied one of the city’s busiest junctions.

No problem, we thought. It was surely the work of minutes for police to remove the straggly gaggle of protesters who were getting a well-deserved pelting from Storm Dennis.

Except, as soon became apparent, the police had no intention of reclaiming the public highway for the public.

An extraordinary tweet from Cambridge Police said: “We are using emergency police powers to close two city centre roads. An organisation known as Extinction Rebellion Cambridge have begun a week long protest…”

The statement went on to say that the police, “working in partnership with Cambridge City Council and Cambridge County Council to mitigate disruption,” had closed the Fen Causeway intersection.

That’s a bit like the Mayor of London announcing that to avoid causing chaos to Southern commuters, Waterloo station would be shut for seven days while a scheduled climate-change protest took place, but people were most welcome to use a replacement bus service.

Of course, the disruption in Cambridge could quite easily have been “mitigated”. All you had to do was arrest protesters who were breaching Section 137 of the Highways Act 1980.

I approached one councilor to ask what on earth was going on.

“The ridiculous police and council strategy,” he said, “seems to be that, by closing the roads and diverting traffic themselves, the actions of XR are no longer illegal, so they don’t have to do anything. Heaven forbid some dons’ children get arrested. If kids from the Arbury [Cambridge’s big council estate] tried this they would be straight in the slammer. What a joke!”

The helpful councilor shared a photograph to clarify matters. It shows an “XR Youth” banner and a female protester flanked by Daniel Zeichner, Cambridge’s Labour MP, and Lewis Herbert, the leader of the city council.

Do you think that pair would have been smiling so benignly if it was Right-of-centre protesters who had blocked two key thoroughfares?

Silly question. They’d have Brexit supporters expelled faster than you can say climate-change emergency.

It’s dismaying, if not entirely surprising, that a Left-wing MP and councilors should be cozying up to an extremist group aligned with their own agenda.

It is quite another to find out that the police have been enlisted to support those political purposes.

I emailed Superintendent James Sutherland, who is in charge of (not) policing the XR protest. Had Priti Patel and the Home Office been made aware of Cambridge Police’s extraordinary decision to use emergency powers to inconvenience residents?

“There is no requirement under statute or College of Policing APP to provide such notification,” the superintendent replied.

I asked him in what way could the closing of two roads in the center of Cambridge be said to “mitigate disruption.”

“The closure […] has allowed for proper diversion routes to be in place prepared as a contingency by the County Council. […] Diversionary routes are working effectively with minimal impact. Cambridge City Council and the County Council have been working in partnership with us and all other emergency services.”

Let me translate that from the Copperese for you, shall I? There was never any intention of trying to stop the XR protest. Instead, councilors and the police collaborated to accommodate the activists.

They knew full well that there would be disruption so they introduced diversions which would hopefully ease it.

Then they tried to present the whole thing to residents as a remarkable success, even though it was police and councilors who had agreed to permit the inconvenience in the first place.

Ironically, both of the diversions are immensely environmentally unfriendly. One takes you through the narrow streets of the historic center, rattling the bones of fragile 17th-century buildings.

A frantic ambulance, siren whooping, was stuck there for 10 minutes on Monday behind a lorry. But who cares if a heart-attack victim dies so long as our imperious eco-overlords get their way?

Superintendent Sutherland told me that the police “are under a positive obligation under the Human Rights Act 1998 to facilitate peaceful protest.”

The law, he says, sets a high bar for police action that:

“…impedes or frustrates lawful protest. The College of Policing guidelines state that the obstruction of the highway does not make a protest unlawful. The test that the police apply is the seriousness of the impact on the life of the community… whilst undoubtedly frustrating and inconvenient, the road diversions have meant that this threshold has not yet been met.”

Do you see what Superintendent Sutherland did there? By using emergency police powers to close two roads while opening another to create diversions, Cambridge Police effectively enabled Extinction Rebellion to wriggle under the high bar for action against them.

What world are we living in where police and council workers actively set up a roadblock for protesters? With good reasons, five thousand Cambridge residents have signed a petition calling for the roadblocks to be taken down and accusing the police of allowing “mob rule.”

I reckon there is a strong case for saying that the actions – or rather inactions – of the police emboldened the XR protesters to dig up the Trinity College lawn. It was so clearly an act of criminal damage.

At least to anyone who hasn’t swallowed the pernicious nonsense that the human rights of protesters outweigh the community’s right to expect respectful behavior.

Even people who have been sympathetic to Extinction Rebellion’s cause recoiled to see them tearing up the very green stuff they claim to want to protect. That beautiful lawn was one of Cambridge’s precious lungs.

At least you expect anarchists to behave badly.

I confess it has been deeply shocking to see police officers in my own town stand by while a council meeting is disrupted, while ambulances are delayed, while college property is destroyed and traffic deliberately held up.

(The fact that yesterday Cambridgeshire police belatedly arrested a 19-year-old woman in connection with an “incident” outside Trinity College suggests that public anger may be cutting through.)

The Home Secretary must intervene. The spectacle of a police force acting with a Left-wing council to interpret the law in favor of extremist protesters, and against the interests of decent citizens, is enough to shake your confidence in the justice system. Far too many of our intimidated institutions agree with their attackers.

Priti Patel needs to get her tanks on their lawn – and fast.

Read more at The Telegraph