After a month of daily Just Stop Oil protests, the Metropolitan Assistant Commissioner, Matt Twist, released a statement asking the public not to take matters into their own hands, and claiming that 7,900 officer shifts had been needed to respond to protest in that month alone.
Conflating Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil together, an article in The Sun claimed that since 2019, a three year period, the policing bill has been around £60 million, but that only 1 in 10 of thousands of arrests have led to charges.
So how does that bill compare to other taxpayer expenditure?
According to an article in Police Professional, the cost of policing football matches in one year was £48 million, with only £5.5 million recoverable from clubs. Road closures, traffic jams and public inconvenience are common on fixture days, and these figures suggest that over three years, the policing costs far exceed those of climate protests, at roughly £126 million.
But if you’re worried about taxpayer expenditure, you might want to consider the subsidies given to the richest corporations on the planet. According to figures from the OECD, support from the UK government over three years amounts to around eight BILLION pounds. That is roughly 133 times the cost of policing climate protests, and enough to pay the salaries of around 29,300 NHS consultants over three years.
Major oil companies have just published their third quarter profits. BP posted profits of £7 billion in three months, double the same period last year. Shell posted similar figures and admitted they paid NO tax in the UK because of built-in windfall tax.
Our UK taxes are going straight out of the country to companies like Norwegian Equinor, who have been donated a £500 million subsidy to develop the Rosebank field despite posting profits of £21bn for the last three months. This has become so embarrassing that even the CEO of Equinor has started asking to be taxed more.
Not many many of the Real Media audience probably reads The Sun themselves, but next time you hear someone complaining about the policing costs of protests, please share this film and article.
