Twenty-three people were arrested in London yesterday as thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters peacefully marched on the US Embassy in London, with hundreds more taking to the streets of Cardiff and Manchester, to demonstrate against the killing of George Floyd.
Chants of, ‘I can’t breathe,’ rebounded across the Thames this afternoon, the words Floyd was heard gasping before his death as a white police officer knelt on his neck in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Monday.
They defied the ban on mass gatherings to rally at Trafalgar Square before making their way to the gates of Downing Street and then south of the river towards the US Embassy.
Three people were arrested for breaching coronavirus legislation, said police, while two others were detained for assaulting officers. The other arrests were for a range of offences from possession of an offensive weapon to assault on police, obstructing a public carriageway to breaches of COVID legislation.
In a tweet, the Metropolitan Police said: ‘The total number of arrests following gatherings in central London today is now 23, all for various offences. They remain in police custody.’
Witnesses reported seeing scuffles break out between police and protesters despite a mainly peaceful day of demonstrations. One group of officers were seen tackling protesters on Kensington High Street, with reports some activists threw traffic cones at police.
The capital wasn’t the only site of protests, with activists outside Cardiff Castle in Wales holding placards which said, ‘The UK is not innocent,’ and in Manchester hundreds flocked to show their solidarity in St. Peter’s Square.
Among those chanting at police officers guarding the gates of Number 10 was someone waving the black and red flag of Antifa (anti-fascist). Donald Trump has accused the militant left-wingers of fomenting anarchist violence during the riots in the States.
Dozens of American cities have been set ablaze over the last week amid deadly clashes with police officers over the killing of Floyd, whose death is seen as a symbol of systemic police brutality against African-Americans.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab today appealed for the US not to ‘tear itself apart’ and said that the Floyd case was ‘very distressing’.
But he insisted he would not comment on the backlash against Donald Trump’s response to a wave of furious protests across the US, merely saying he wanted the country to ‘come back together.’
Having spent the last few months in coronavirus lockdown, very few of the attendees at the protests across the UK appeared to be concerned about social distancing.
One demonstrator said the protests were ‘very important because it is sending a clear message that we have had enough racial injustice in our country’.
Isabelle Orsini, 20, is originally from New York, but now lives in Kensington. She said: ‘The US obviously has a much deeper and darker history of black discrimination compared to the UK.
‘The reason people are so angry is because this is reopening wounds that go back hundreds of years.
‘It is very important that we do whatever it takes to tell our government that racism will not be tolerated.’
After Battersea, protesters – many wearing masks – crossed the river again, and headed through affluent Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Notting Hill, before gathering at the base of Grenfell Tower where 72 people died in a 2017 fire.
A reverend at a church on Trafalgar Square, where the protest started, said she was ‘very sympathetic’ towards those marching but expressed some concern about how close they were.
Reverend Sally Hitchiner, associate vicar at St Martin-in-the-Fields, said: ‘It’s showing there are people in the UK who care passionately about the situation in the US.
‘Clearly they’re not following lockdown and social distancing, but I think there’s a huge amount of passion there and that’s overriding their concerns.
‘It’s an issue that requires passion but at the same time there’s a huge amount of risk in what they’re doing.’
The London demonstration comes after tens of thousands of people joined nightly protests across the US since the death, with at least 1,600 people arrested in 22 cities as some demonstrations descended into violence.
BLM have said of their protest in London: ‘We are doing this to place pressure on the American government and show that this is a world wide issue.’
BLM protests were also taking place at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, and at the US Embassy in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen.
After the crowd marched on from the US Embassy, a large number of them stopped under a railway bridge outside Battersea Park Station and chanted ‘black lives matter’.
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