Tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated tonight outside the Prime Minister's residence in Downing Street against the invitation of Donald Trump, the US President, to a state visit in the UK. The protest comes in the wake of Trump's ban on Muslim people entering the USA.
The protest was called at short notice, and when I've been to that type of protest before, you may get a few hundred, maybe a thousand or so people attending. This evening, I would say that there was about 20,000 people there.
When I left at around 6.15pm there was still protesters arriving down Whitehall.
The crowd was so large that it seeped onto the road and traffic was brought to a standstill on Whitehall.
Some of the protesters that I spoke to said it was the first protest that they had ever been on, but they just had to come tonight.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim himself wrote in tonight's Evening Standard:
“I don’t believe the people of London will support rolling out the red carpet until this ban is reversed. Great friends must warn each other when they are making a mistake.”
Mr Khan said the ban was “shameful and cruel” would be ultimately “self-defeating” because it would play into the hands of extremists. He writes: “I fear it will be used to act as a recruiting sergeant for so called Isis and other like minded groups.”
All as a petition calling for the invite to Trump to be cancelled, reached 1.5 million signatures.
No comments:
Post a Comment