A jazz band played, and suffragettes and orang-utans danced in the street outside the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair as profiteers from global despoliation were having their own party inside.

Tropical forests are being felled, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, to grow biofuel crops such as palm oil. Global corporations are making huge profits, indigenous peoples are illegally forced off their land and wildlife in these areas is largely eliminated.

As the Climate Rush flyer states, "90% of orangutans have disappeared since the Suffragettes first appeared 100 years ago.

The event started with a picnic in the park, the garden of Grosvenor Square opposite the hotel. Then the jazz band began to play and people moved out onto half of the street, rejecting the pen police had created "for your safety". Many demonstrators waved and posed and shouted greetings to Neil, the police photographer who was photographing and filming the event.

After dancing on the street for around half an hour there was a "rush" across the street to the hotel doorway, which made little impression on the row of police across its front. Many of the police seemed rather amused throughout the event, although there were one or two who slightly lost their temper in the rush itself, and at one point two people were rather roughly thrown to the ground by a small police charge. Neither seemed badly injured.

Following this, a number of the demonstrators sat down on the road for a while. Half of the police then withdrew and watched from around 100 yards down the road. Eventually people got up and briefly danced a conga, then decided to go back into the park to continue their picnic, and I went home for dinner.

More pictures and text on My London Diary later:
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