The Met has admitted to making mistakes during the pro-Palestine protests, a report released by Policy Exchange reveals today. Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist told the think tank that the force “didn’t get everything right,” admitting, “on occasion, we did not move quickly to make arrests — for example, the man chanting for ‘jihad.’” A reminder: policing these protests from October until June still cost the taxpayer £42.9 million…

Unsurprisingly, the report also shows that three-quarters of people polled believe the police should actually do their jobs and step in when roads are blocked, public transport grinds to a halt, or when protestors climb a monument (something eco-activists and pro-Palestinians had a penchant for doing). Twist, however, brushed off any talk of “two-tier” policing, offering the baffling claim that there are actually an “infinite number of tiers of policing” instead. Hardly reassuring…

Just Stop Oil’s protests have cost the taxpayer more than £7.7 million in Met Police funding over the last 13 weeks, with 150 officers a day having to respond to their pointless stunts. Met Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist revealed the equivalent of a whopping 23,500 officer shifts had been wasted on attending to the eco-loons – even though the officers have often just stood around idly as the unwashed tribe glue themselves to the road… 

Twist told LBC:

“…When you get into deliberately causing serious disruption to the public of London, stopping people from going about their daily business, disrupting people from going to work or hospital or taking their children to school then that tips over into crime… One of the challenges we have with Just Stop Oil is they don’t tell us where they’re going to protest, they don’t tell us when they’re going to take action.”

£7.7 million could pay the salaries of around 200 officers…