So-called ‘Insulate Britain’ protesters have again blocked major roads in and around London leading to 38 members of the group being arrested on Monday morning.
Major routes in and out of central London including the Blackwall Tunnel — one of a handful of Thames crossings in East London — Wandsworth Bridge over the Thames, the Hanger Lane roundabout on the North Circular, and Arnos Grove were blocked. In the style now familiar to the ‘Insulate Britain’ group of activists, groups of people wearing high-visibility vests carrying signed walked onto the roads and sat in the path of oncoming traffic during the morning peak.
It took police four hours to clear the four roads, the Daily Telegraph reports, but not before some motorists took matters into their own hands and dragged some protesters from the road themselves. The paper specifically notes footage shared to social media — one of which was highlighted by actor-turned Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox which showed confrontations as members of the public attempted to clear the road for an ambulance to get through.
The Metropolitan Police said in an update that 38 people has been arrested for “disruption of the highway and conspiracy to cause public nuisance” and that they were on the scene at the Blackwall Tunnel protest within nine minutes of the disruption beginning.
Like many left-wing extremist groups, Insulate Britain wants the government to spend more money. In this case, the protesters are calling on the government to make money available to insulate 29 million houses. This is no mean feat — at an average cost of insulation retrofitting to a family home of £26,000, an analysis published by The Conversation blog estimated the price of Insulate Britain’s demands on the government at £676 billion ($920 billion).
Spending commitments of such enormous proportions may be assumed to need the support of the public, especially given the degree to which the UK government is already in debt after its’ costly coronavirus lockdown policies. Nevertheless, Insulate Britain has taken a rather hard-nosed attitude towards the general public, treating people being delayed getting to emergency hospital care as expendable collateral damage. Members of the public who disagree with the group’s aims or methods are treated with contempt, too — group spokesman Liam Norton comparing opponents to Hitler appeasers and Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s.