With the politicians off for Easter, some might imagine Britain has been granted some respite from international self-embarrassment. Well, think again.
We might be enjoying a couple of weeks without our MPs but that image of a rudderless, incompetent country is now being ably maintained by, among other things, a pink yacht, currently parked across one of London’s most famous intersections, and the transformation of one of the capital’s most important bridges into a yoga mat.
Now entering Day Four, the so-called ‘Extinction Rebellion’ is settling down nicely as our new national joke.
Between them, a handful of earnest, peaceful and impressively organised eco-warriors have managed to bring the capital to a standstill while the police make inconsequential arrests and the other 99.9 per cent of the population are left asking: who, exactly, is in charge here?
Among yesterday’s highlights were one group who shut down the Docklands Light Railway and a quartet who glued themselves to Jeremy Corbyn’s house (though they later unglued themselves and said they were very sorry). Today, we are promised widespread chaos on the Tube network.
Who decided that people should be allowed to enjoy an extended camping holiday at central London landmarks?
Who gave permission for a musical stage to be erected indefinitely across both carriageways on Waterloo Bridge, not to mention a skateboarding ramp?
Who decided that people should be allowed to enjoy an extended camping holiday at central London landmarks?
Who agreed that people should be allowed to build plywood lavatory cubicles in the middle of London’s Oxford Street? They are not even public ones, it transpires, but only available to those with the key.
Who said that more than 50 bus routes should be blocked with impunity? Who gave permission for a musical stage to be erected indefinitely across both carriageways on Waterloo Bridge, not to mention a skateboarding ramp?
London has seen protests of every stripe over the years, some of them violent. However, they have tended to come and go in the course of a day or two.
This one, which, it must be said, remains peaceful, is now settling in for the long haul. The organisers say that they are preparing for an open-ended stand-off with the police until the Government agrees to their core demands.
Since these include replacing Parliament with a ‘citizens’ assembly’ and the end of capitalism, it might be a very long wait. Yet how much longer is London prepared to have some of its most important thoroughfares sealed off to traffic by a self-appointed cadre of we-know-best activists?
I arrive at Oxford Circus – the crossroads of Britain’s two best-known shopping thoroughfares, Oxford Street and Regent’s Street – to find a 20-foot bright pink sailing boat on a trailer parked in the middle.
Around 20 recumbent protesters are chained to its trailer. A couple of hundred others stand around it swaying to tunes played by a grey-bearded disc jockey who has set up his sound system in the boat’s cockpit.
Who agreed that people should be allowed to build plywood lavatory cubicles in the middle of London’s Oxford Street?
He fires off revolutionary slogans in between his Radio 2-style repertoire of hits from the Seventies and Eighties. ‘We’re here to tell the politicians: F*** you!’ he shouts, to a few lame cheers.
It is the middle of the afternoon. It’s wholly inappropriate on a road junction next to the world’s largest toy shop, Hamley’s, as a steady stream of children pass by.
But the police do not bat an eyelid. Most stand around ‘monitoring the situation’. I find one police sergeant politely enduring an interminable lecture on the state of the planet’s permafrost by a pimply teenage know-all in a Green Party bib.
I wait and wait for the policeman to ask him to move on but, instead, he asks him a question about tree-planting.
The police are certainly keen to keep the temperature down. All are in soft hats and hi-vis vests rather than riot gear.
Every now and then, a team of seven or eight move in and pick up one of the protesters lying by the boat. Most of their targets go quietly, having volunteered for arrest in advance of these protests.
The protestors are settling in for the long haul with organisers saying they are preparing for an open-ended stand-off with the police until the Government agrees to their core demands. Since these include the end of capitalism, it might be a very long wait
Many will be back again as soon as they are released. There are none of the combative anarchist element who trashed Oxford Circus during the May Day anti-capitalist protests a few years back.
There are no balaclavas, no finger-jabbing conspiracy theorists aggressively filming the police or the media.
It is, largely, a combination of fresh-faced college activists and a lot of grey-haired people in sensible walking boots who look ready to ramble.
‘I’ve only been on three demonstrations in my entire life,’ says Bob Hill, 65, a retired civil engineer from Abergavenny, who genuinely knows his stuff about pollution levels and global warming.
‘This is so important that we just have to do everything to make the politicians listen. And it’s no use having a one-day protest. It’s got to go on.’
Here, too, is Robin Boardman, 21, one of the organisers. He has taken a year’s break from his modern languages degree course at Bristol to focus on this cause. Viewers may have seen him walk out of a heated television interview with Sky’s Adam Boulton yesterday. ‘He wasn’t asking me proper questions,’ Robin explained. ‘The media need to take this seriously.’
He had no problems whatsoever with the police, he went on, merely with the Government. ‘We are a world-leading economy and we have to set an example. And we will maintain our programme of economic disruption until the politicians listen.’
How does this win hearts and minds? And why on earth make all this noise when the entire political class is on holiday and thus cannot hear?
‘This is an international movement and this was the date that was set in advance,’ says Robin, from Beckenham, Kent.
I explain that a lot of people look on all this as a lot of posturing by an arrogant middle-class minority who are inconveniencing millions and achieving nothing.
‘A lot of middle-class people also know that we need to cut back on our consumption,’ he replies.
Here come the cavalry, 72 hours too late: police swarmed into Parliament Square yesterday evening
Over on Waterloo Bridge, there are similar scenes. The mass yoga session from earlier in the day has finished. Many just lie in the sun reading a book, as homebound commuters weave past their rucksacks and the potted plant displays which some demonstrators have erected. Some office workers make little attempt to hide their contempt for the people who have added half an hour to their commute but there is no abuse.
Again, there has been a slow trickle of arrests here too, although they do all add up.
By the end of the day, the Met puts the total thus far at 340. But if most of those are simply going back to their original spots straight afterwards, the police strategy seems a little flawed.
‘It’s about proportionality,’ one police officer explains when I ask why it is permissible to park a boat, trailer and toilet block in Oxford Street for days on end but not permissible for an ordinary person even to drive a car down it.
‘If we tried to move everyone, there’d be a riot.’
At some point, in the not too distant future, there is going to be a riot if they don’t.