If you weren’t ‘taking a knee for Henry Nowak’ outside Parliament this evening, someone’s angry finger and their iPhone was soon in your face demanding to know why.
Tommy Robinson announced last-minute protests this evening across the country, including at Parliament Square.
What started as around 50 people flimsily waving the Union Flag suddenly turned much more aggressive as far-right protesters charged into the road, setting off red smoke flares.
Dropping to take a knee, the same way US citizens have protested racism, the crowd, consisting mainly of men, began chanting.
‘Sink the boats’ was shouted, followed by ‘we want our country back’. Their attentions soon turned on the police officers and journalists, demanding to know, ‘Why aren’t you taking the knee, do you hate Henry Nowak?’
All the while, cyclists awkwardly swerved around the crouched crowd, while black cabs and double-decker buses were forced to wait. Some 20 minutes later, they were ordered to U-turn and leave the area.
Two women passing by, having just left a nearby pro-Palestine protest, were the focus of everyone’s attentions.
Zahra Ali and Monday Rosenfeld were quite literally swarmed. What started as one woman going up to the girls, which was a ‘friendly discussion of differences of opinion’ ended up as the epicenter of the road’s vile racism.
Monday, 23, told Metro: ‘I have genuinely never seen anything like this before. That was some of the worst abuse I have ever heard.’
Men, claiming they were there to ‘protect our women and girls’, told her they were going to take her away, drown her and behead her.
Zahra, 19, was asked repeatedly if she read the Quran. Despite the UK being the only country she has ever known, she was told repeatedly to go back to Somalia.
Another woman also suffered racist abuse, except she was there for the far-right.
Jennifer, entering the main crowd, allegedly accused Zahra of ‘being brainwashed to support grooming gangs’.
But one man in the crowd only saw Jennifer for her race.
Her curly hair in a top knot, he shouted, ‘You’ve got a Black woman arguing with a blue-haired girl, whose side is who?’
That same man took out his racist frustrations on a police officer as well. Seeing one of the officers, who was wearing a Sikh turban, he demanded to know how many kirpans he had on him.
Metro spoke with Jennifer later. She insisted ‘the people are being ignored’ and the road block was necessary to get people’s attention.
‘The people have had enough,’ she said.
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