Anger outside the American Embassy

    by Siobhan Kelly

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd there have been protests all around the world. London was no exception. The protest at the United States embassy in Nine Elms on Sunday was scheduled to start at 2 pm but it was already in progress by 1:30. The crowd was diverse and outraged; all standing (and kneeling) in unity to oppose the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, police killings of people from minority ethnic groups and the violent reaction of police to the mostly peaceful protests that continue across the United States.

We chanted “Black Lives Matter”, “We Can’t Breathe”, “Teach Black History”, “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police”, “Say their name” which was followed by the names of victims that were killed by police including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. There were even a brief chants of “Boris Johnson is a wanker” and “Fuck Trump” although the chants of “Fuck White Privilege” quickly died out.

The crowd stood outside the US embassy for about 90 minutes, then people started to turn around and walked back up Nine Elms lane to Vauxhall Bridge. A man was walked through the crowd saying “walk with me to the New Scotland Yard”. The crowd then walked over the bridge, disrupting traffic for about a mile in its wake for nearly an hour.

The atmosphere was angry and yet peaceful. There were very few people who were not wearing face masks, and at least where I stood people kept about a metre distance between themselves and those not in their group. The cautious protestors came out in droves despite the urging by Health Secretary Matt Hancock not to attend the protests while we are still in the midst of a pandemic. There were volunteers giving out masks, gloves and squirting hand sanitiser.

Once the crowd left the street, apart from a few stragglers like myself, the police walked down the street along with “Legal Observers”. The police weren’t intimidating and didn’t even clear the street of all the protesters. Behind the line of police walking and their vans there was another smaller group of protesters.

It is astonishing that even with cameras recording police brutality in America it still continues. They don’t care that you film them attacking civilians and the press – especially civilians that are non-violent and only exercising their constitutional right to peacefully protest.

But is encouraging to see such support for the victims of these racist cops, all over the UK and the world, as a result of the killing of George Floyd and the protests in America.

Black lives matter in London

By New Worker correspondent

Londoners gathered in Trafalgar Square on Sunday to protest the death of George Floyd, the Black man whose murder in Minneapolis by police officers has triggered off a week of protests and rioting across the USA. Following clashes with the police after they tried to clear a junction in Parliament Square blocked by protesters, 23 people were arrested.

One protester, who chose to remain nameless, said the demonstrators had been protesting peacefully: “We came out here peacefully to protest the injustice in the UK, it's now a global issue with the murder of George Floyd, everything that's going on in the world," the protester said. “The police came and they made it violent. They came and antagonised us; we were protesting peacefully.”

Time to Go!

Aides by their very definition are expendable. They get their money and they’re paid off when they are no longer needed. If they become an embarrassment to their masters they are expected to go quietly in return for some sort of reward for keeping their mouths shut. But when they get too big for their boots, others may intervene to help them on their way.

Rasputin went down in a hail of bullets when he became an embarrassment to prominent members of the Russian aristocracy during the First World War. We’ve moved on from those days and, in any case, most minions have played the bourgeois game in Britain to abide by the unwritten code of conduct that governs the behaviour of the Establishment. Dominic Cummings, however, thinks he’s a different breed that can flout the norms of the ruling class he claims to serve.

The Johnson camp claim that there’s a hidden Remainer agenda behind the campaign to get rid of Cummings. This is largely based on the childish belief that you can kick prominent Tories, including two former Chancellors, eight former Cabinet ministers and the grandson of Winston Churchill, out of the Conservative Party with impunity.

This may well be pay-back time for the Tory grandees who were purged last September for opposing Brexit. But there are plenty more who hate him.

This is the man who spouts on about “Odyssean education” and “super-forecasters”, and allegedly claimed that "a child's performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education”.

This is the man that the Sunday Times claimed had told a private meeting in February that the Government's plan for dealing with the coronavirus plague was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.

Johnson’s grief has clearly been brought on through Cummings’ own selfish actions. By breaking the lock-down rules he helped to devise he’s undermined the Government’s efforts to enforce the emergency regulations and made the Prime Minister look a fool. There cannot be one rule for Dominic Cummings and another for the British people.

Cummings is mocked in some sections of the Tory press. He’s jeered on the street where he lives and over 760,000 people have signed a petition calling for his dismissal. Labour and the other opposition parties are demanding the dismissal of the “chief adviser” to the Prime Minister. Some senior Tories and prominent members of the Church of England have also joined the chorus calling for Cummings to go. They can see that the Cummings affair has undermined public confidence in the lock-down regime as well as the credibility of the Tory Government.

“This is a fundamental test of character for Johnson,” John MacDonnell, the left Labour MP, said last week. “He’s dramatically failing it by defending the indefensible and doing it by obfuscation and avoidance. This is the sort of event from which the reputations of Prime Ministers do not recover.”

Once the story broke any other Prime Minister would have immediately told Cummings to fall on his sword to avoid embarrassing the Government. But Johnson is a weak man who likes to be surrounded by people lesser than himself.

Both men are rubbish. They should both go. The sooner the better.