Heathrow Black Lives Matter protest disrupts traffic in co-ordinated day of action

Black Lives Matter protesters blocked a motorway route to Heathrow airport, causing chaos on Friday morning in a co-ordinated day of action.

Traffic ground to a halt, as protesters laid down the middle of the road on the way to a Heathrow terminal with a banner reading ‘Black lives matter, this is a crisis’.

The protest came during a busy period for the airport as people embarked for their summer holidays. The airport advised people using the M4 to use the A312 to avoid traffic.

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Heathrow supports the right to peaceful protest within the law, but the safety and security of our passengers, aircraft and colleagues together with the smooth running of the operation is paramount.

“We are sorry to those passengers whose journeys are being disrupted and we are working with the authorities to resolve the issue.”

Similar protests have been reported in Birmingham and Nottingham in a co-ordinated day of action across the UK.

In Nottingham, protesters laid across trams line in the centre of the city. In Birmingham protestors also blocked traffic on approach to the city’s airport.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement started in 2013 to highlight systematic racism and violence towards black people in the US. It started on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of teen Trayvon Martin and has grown after several police killings of black people over the last three years.

The protests at Heathrow, Birmingham and Nottingham come on the fifth anniversary of the shooting of Mark Dugan by police, which sparked riots in 2011.

Black Lives Matter organiser Joshua Virasami told the BBC: "We need black people all over the world to come together, groups and individuals, to build this movement to achieve justice and equality in Britain and all over the world. We're asking the government to take responsibility, not just to investigate the statistics but to hear the demands of the communities."

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Friday, Dr Tony Sewell from the Youth Justice Board said 21% of young men in England and Wales under 18 in custody were black, even though they make up only 4% of the population, in comparison, 62% of men under 18 in custody were white, about 82% of the population.

Sewell said: "That is a scandal, that's what we should really be looking at."

He said in there has not been a police killing since the death of Mark Duggan and the black Lives Matter offshoot in the UK should look at the country as whole and not follow the US.

“They have missed a trick here in a sense in that we can look really at Black Lives Matters as really an issue about trying to address the whole issue of disportionality of black young people in our custody service, and we should really be looking at this as a UK matter not really just following the US, which is a different context, a different matter entirely”.