A St George's Day scout parade banned for health and safety reasons... so why are they allowing the al Quds headbangers to gather in London and cause chaos?
The authorities are adamant. The march will not go ahead on elf ’n’ safety grounds because the Met refuses to police it.
‘Due to public safety concerns, the Council cannot endorse an event that involves participants walking in the road without an appropriate traffic management plan and a valid Traffic Management Order in place.
‘The Metropolitan Police have made it clear... that due to decreasing resources and budget constraints, they are no longer able to support parades by carrying out temporary road closures or using police vehicles to block roads, as they have done in previous years.’
So that’s what put the kibosh on the al Quds hate march through London in support of Iran this weekend?
Er, not as such.
It’s Havering Council’s justification for banning the Boy Scouts’ annual St George’s Day parade through Romford, unless the organisers can rustle up £9,000 to hire a private traffic management company.
Nine grand? Where are the Scouts supposed to find that kind of money? That’s 180,000 Bob-A-Jobs.
It’s come to this. Boy Scouts are being stopped from staging a parade celebrating England’s patron saint in what remains one of England’s most English towns.
Boy Scouts are being stopped from staging a parade celebrating England’s patron saint, St George
Boy Scouts are being stopped from staging a parade celebrating England’s patron saint in what remains one of England’s most English towns
Romford is technically in Greater London, although most people who live there still consider it an integral part of the great county of Essex.
Although the demographic make-up of the area has changed recently as a result of mass immigration, Romford is still 75 per cent ‘white British’ according to the last census, and home to the East End diaspora.
When I was the labour and industrial correspondent on the Evening Standard, I spent many a happy hour downing pints of local John Bull bitter with my old union official friend, the late Del Horn, in the pub next door to the brewery, which dated back to 1708.
The brewery shut in 1993, but the John Bull spirit is still going strong. Romford’s MP is the fiercely patriotic Brexiteer former Tory-turned-Reform defector Andrew Rosindell, famous for campaigning at election time in the company of a bull terrier called Spike, draped in a Union Jack.
Rosindell said: ‘It would be outrageous if this long-standing celebration of St George’s Day had to be cancelled because of unnecessary red tape.’
And there’s the rub. The council is citing ‘safety’ reasons for banning the parade – the same excuse councils across the country have given for ripping down Union Jacks and St George’s flags from lamp-posts.
The suspicion has to be that the real reason is because the Left-wing Guardianistas who run local authorities, regardless of which party is in charge, hate the very idea of any overt display of English/British patriotism.
Havering is currently a minority-led administration, with 24 members from the independent Havering Residents Association, 14 Tories, eight Labour and eight others, including three Reform UK. But the power lies, as always, with the standing bureaucracy. And these are the kind of people who regard English/British patriots as knuckle-scraping ‘far-Right’ racists, while dishonestly hiding their bigotry behind ridiculous elf ’n’ safety protocols.
Romford, pictured, is still 75 per cent ‘white British’ according to the last census, and home to the East End diaspora
While Palestinian flags flutter unmolested in heavily Muslim areas, St George’s and Union Jacks are ruthlessly pulled down.
The police can’t close a few roads to allow a Boy Scouts’ parade to go ahead but have regularly been happy to accommodate vile anti-Israel/pro-Gaza/Hamas hate fests in Central London for the past few years.
We are invited to celebrate the fact that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the Met have now banned the pro-Iranian al Quds march planned for this weekend and organised by the militant Islamic Human Rights Commission – a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one.
But only up to a point. The police have no power to prevent a ‘static’ demonstration, which will inevitably be attended by the same keffiyeh-flaunting far-Left headbangers.
And while they are technically prevented from ‘marching’, they’ll still have to get there, by train, by Tube, by bus. And how does thousands of people walking to a ‘static’ demo from the same railway station – waving Iranian, Hezbollah and Palestinian flags and chanting their vile slogans (Death to the IDF etc) – differ from a ‘march’? Answer on TikTok to the Home Office and Scotland Yard.
The Met say they will come down hard on ‘serious disorder’. Let’s hope so. But I wouldn’t bet against it all kicking off, especially once the ‘static’ bit of the demo is over.
Meanwhile a Boy Scouts’ St George’s Day parade through Romford, which has been taking place peacefully for as long as anyone can remember, is being banned on ‘safety’ grounds – unless they can come up with nine grand in the next couple of weeks.
Makes You Proud To Be British.
The Bank of England is replacing the portraits of historical British heroes on banknotes with images of animals. Out go Sir Winston Churchill, Jane Austen and Alan Turing. In come badgers, puffins and hedgehogs. Since most people under 30 think Churchill is the dog off the insurance adverts, I suppose it was only a matter of time.
Petie Files: Starmer should publish and be damned
Follow the money. To trace the downfall of Peter Mandelson, always apply the famous Deep Throat advice to Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate dramatisation All The President’s Men.
As I’ve been telling you all along, for the past 40 years his rapacious appetite for other people’s money has been apparent to anyone with half a brain. Yet, for goodness knows what reasons, powerful men have continued to indulge him.
What they saw in this odious creep remains a mystery. Yet they filled his boots with their cash. Even when he was first rumbled for buying a house he couldn’t afford with an undeclared loan from Geoffrey Robinson and a false mortgage application, he still managed to keep the profit when it was sold. Every time he’s been forced to resign in disgrace he’s walked away with a fat pay-off.
We’re told that despite his greed, his moral flaws and his deeply unpleasant, parasitic relationship with paedophile Epstein, he was a gifted, competent minister.
So what? The Kray Twins were good to their old mum and did a lot of work for charidee. But they didn’t warrant a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
Keir Starmer was just one of the gullible fools taken in by Mandelson. The notion that the PM didn’t know about his sordid past before sending him to Washington is cobblers – even if he now admits he ‘made a mistake’ – especially coming from someone who claims to be a top, forensic prosecutor. He only had to read the papers.
As for the idea that crucial details of the Petie Files must be redacted at the request of the Met because they could prejudice any future prosecution, that too is absurd. Hasn’t Starmer heard of Parliamentary privilege, which allowed his mate Tom Watson, the Nonce Finder General, to make utterly false and disgusting allegations of paedophilia and even murder against blameless Tories?
He didn’t care then, obviously, since he has since sent Watson to the Lords – an even more shameful decision than sending Mandelson to Washington. And as Petie is already trying to spin his way out of a possible prison sentence in public, hiring expensive Rumpoles to argue that he can’t get a fair trial, why not publish and be damned?
He even had the nerve to demand a £500,000 golden goodbye this time, when he should have been summarily escorted from the embassy by security without a penny and with his belongings in a cardboard box.
In the event they bunged him £75,000 to keep shtumm, calling it ‘good value for money’. Which makes me wonder: What’s he got on Starmer?
Mandelson has always been a wrong ’un. And you don’t need to be Deep Throat to work that out.
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