"Met tries to distract from its own horrendous recent record, while pitching for yet more power to clamp down on whoever they feel like"

I mean…good? People work with oil because it’s cheap. If protests are a way of making it costly, then it’s doing its job.

Why is the default thought to just “Wait until the protests are over”?

I want to say this makes me happy but who am I kidding, the Met's obviously saying this to justify demanding more police funding.

Well, just stop oil then :)

That's still got to be orders of magnitude less than the externalized costs of the oil companies in the same time period - even just counting the costs to the UK gov't and population.

Those are rookie numbers; gotta pump those numbers up.

Oh no... Anyway

I’m sure they can sell or loan of one or two stolen artifacts to pay for what amounts to a drop of money in their annual spending.