Nick Ferrari's Enough Is Enough: Iain Duncan Smith backs campaign
4 February 2020, 08:20 | Updated: 4 February 2020, 08:22
Former Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith has given his backing to Nick Ferrari's Enough Is Enough campaign to give police more powers to deal with protests which cause public disorder.
Yesterday, Nick launched his campaign, in which he is asking for the Public Order Act to be amended to give the police power to ban any protest which will cause serious public disorder.
Last year's Extinction Rebellion protests cost the Metropolitan Police alone more than £40million, while every police force in England sent officers to the capital to help control the demonstrations.
Nick Ferrari says Enough Is Enough.
And he had support from the former Conservative leader, who suggested that people disrupted should be able to sue the protesters.
He said: "During the very, very prolonged Extinction Rebellion takeovers of the streets around Central London - and a quite deliberate determination to take over more and more streets and stop people getting to work - you can understand it is a protest, but it went on for days and days
He said: "During the very, very prolonged Extinction Rebellion takeovers of the streets around Central London - and a quite deliberate determination to take over more and more streets and stop people getting to work - you can understand it is a protest, but it went on for day after day after day.
"I was struck by how many people wrote to me, many of them self-employed, whose livelihoods collapsed as a result of that. They simply couldn't get to the places they needed to.
"They complained that it's all well and good for these people to come from out of London and stop them getting to work, but it becomes more than a protest when it becomes day after day after day.
"The police should have powers to move people on and to make sure this doesn't end up blocking the arteries of London.
"But at the same time, someone suggested to me that people who are self-employed should be able to sue those who go beyond a certain limit and actually try to get some of their livelihood back.
"Of course protest is important as part of a democratic society, it's important that you're able to make your point.
"But lots of my constituents said it went beyond that. And it became eventually an affair where they said 'We're going to try to stop you because we think you're wrong.'"
Nick Ferrari's Enough Is Enough campaign continues all this week on LBC.
