Nobody is above the law

My "Quote of the day" this morning was a phrase which was coined about over-mighty Kings, governments and rulers and repeated by Lord Denning in the last century as a warning aginst over-mighty trade unions.

Both of those warnings still apply but now there is a third group of people to whom it also applies - protesters who think the cause for which they are demonstrating or protesting puts them above the law.

Animal Rights protesters have been in this space for some decades, and ironically their own actions have sometimes caused huge damage to Britain's natural environment and animal population, as when animal rights protesters broke into fur farms and released mink into the wild - introducing an alien, vicious and highly dangerous carnivore into the ecosystem which wreaked massive damage on native animal species whose natural defences were not attuned to this threat.

However, the most common examples at the moment are anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown protesters (and those opposed to both who don't appear to see the contradiction that without the vaccination programme we'd be facing almost permanent lockdowns,) anti-globalisation protesters, and in particular extreme environmentalist groups such as Extinction Rebellion,

I believe that the balance of evidence and the precautionary principle suggest substantial grounds to think that human activity is having significant negative effects on the environment and that we need to take action both to reduce these effects and to increase our resilience in dealing with climate change. One of my reasons for not approving of Extinction Rebellion is that their extremism risks discrediting the arguments for action on the environment,

There is a powerful article on the subject,

"Will London put up with protesters who think they are above the law?"

by Daniel Johnson, which you can read on "The Article" website here.

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