Walking through Parliament Square this afternoon, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether some kind of bomb threat had been made on Westminster Palace. The fleets of police vans and hoards of fluorescent-jacketed officers seemed absurdly disproportionate to the motley pickets of public sector strikers gathered serenely outside parliament’s gates. ‘Actually, I shouldn’t be working today,’ one officer told me, chuckling. ‘It’s my day off. That’s ironic, isn’t it?’
As Pete remarked this morning, there wasn’t a huge amount to see along the Westminster picket lines, apart from the policemen. ‘There’d be more of us, but we’re only allowed to gather in groups of five or six,’ a woman from the Met’s security department sighed. The real action, I learned, would be taking place along the embankment opposite The Eye, where 22,000 protestors were due to convene at 14:00, at the end of their march from Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
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