The George Floyd unrest spreading across the United States has crossed the Atlantic to Great Britain, with thousands of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other activists taking to the streets of London with little apparent regard for the coronavirus regulations.
Breitbart reporter and videographer Kurt Zindulka recorded activists at a variety of locations in Britain’s multicultural capital — led by Labour politician and prominent Trump critic Sadiq Khan — including the U.S. embassy, the gates protecting the Prime Minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street, and Trafalgar Square.
The demonstrators are, ostensibly, protesting the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after being pinned down a white police officer, who has since been charged with third-degree murder and negligent manslaughter, in the U.S. city of Minneapolis, Minnesota — although some believe Mr Floyd’s death is increasingly being used as cover for riots, looting, and the advancement of various political agendas.
Protesters crowded into Trafalgar Square, home to the iconic column commemorating Admiral Horatio Nelson, carried placards bearing menacing slogans such as ‘SILENCE = VIOLENCE’ and ‘THE UK IS NOT INNOCENT!’ alongside the more innocuous ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’, and chanted “Stop killing us! George Floyd!”
Quite how the protesters believe the British state culpable in a suspected unlawful killing in Minnesota is not immediately clear.
Crowds, not socially distancing and largely not wearing masks, were also filmed at the gates to Downing Street on Whitehall, confronting a rather thin line of uniformed police constables and chanting “Fuck Boris!” — whose connection to George Floyd’s death also seems difficult to establish.
“Why’s there no black man among you?” demanded one man of the officers as they attempted to placate the crowd. “Where’s Boris? It’s not just about George Floyd!” he added.
Other footage from Downing Street shared on social media, possibly shot at a later point in the protest, shows the police having retreated behind the gates, and the crowd outside waving an Antifa banner and chanting “Fuck the police!”
Footage shot near the U.S. embassy shows a tightly-packed crowd having closed down the streets around the building, with ominous symbols such as a black flag and a placard bearing the slogan ‘NO LIVES MATTER UNTIL BLACK LIVES MATTER’ present.
Graffiti alleging that the ‘MET POLICE SERVE TRUMP’ was also seen, although how the activists came to gain this impression of the Metropolitan Police — led by left-liberal Commissioner Cressida Dick and answerable in large part to the city’s anti-Trump mayor — is unclear.
Protests also took place in the German capital of Berlin, with Reuters reporting “several hundred” demonstrators with placards bearing slogans such as “Justice for George Floyd”, “Stop killing us”, and “Who’s neckst” [sic] rallying outside the U.S. embassy.
The Berlin protests are, conceptually, even stranger than the ones in London, as while Britain is to a great extent the United States’ mother country — with British America and the British West Indies even predating the Treaty of Union which created the United Kingdom in 1707 — the German state and its predecessors have no such relationship with the North American superpower.