Police snipers on central London rooftops in ring of steel for King's Speech opening Parliament
Police snipers are set to be deployed on Whitehall rooftops in a ring of steel for the State Opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech.
A huge security operation will be put in place in central London for Wednesday when King Charles III will travel from Buckingham Palace to Westminster to open Parliament.
Barriers were on Monday already going up outside Parliament ahead of one of the great ceremony’s of Britain’s democracy.
Hundreds of police officers will be deployed along Whitehall and nearby streets, including some in plain clothes.
Snipers will be located on key buildings to protect the Monarch.
The police operation is expected to be heightened following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in America.
A full dress rehearsal of the procession normally takes place ahead of the event which is beamed around the world in its full pomp and circumstance.
Re-elected Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told last week how the parliamentary authorities were working with the police to step up protection for MPs after the growing level of abuse thrown at them.
He said: “I’m very concerned that people feel that they have the right to intimidate members, or people who are putting themselves up for election, the fact that MPs who are elected also suffer abuse they should never suffer, threats, intimidation.
“I won’t stand for it.
“I will support all the MPs.
“We will be working with the police.”
British politics has been left stunned and appalled by the murder of two MPs in recent years, Jo Cox in 2016, and Sir David Amess in 2021.Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy stressed on Monday that politics needed “far less heat and far more light”.
“In Britain as in the United States over the last decade and a half we have been through a very dark, divisive time,” she told Times Radio.
“We have seen inflammatory rhetoric becoming at times the norm in the Houses of Parliament, certainly at the height of Brexit we saw accusations that we were traitors flying from all sides.
“It is no surprise then that language is repeated back to us on the streets of Britain.”
Shadow foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell emphasised that there was “too much playing the man and not the ball” in politics.
He said: “On both sides of the Atlantic, during my 35 years in politics the tone of the debate has coarsened.
“Of my 11 general elections that I have now fought in, the last one hit a particular low in terms of the abuse that candidates on all sides of the political discourse in the UK had to put up with.
“The call for a better quality debate, and also the call from the Speaker of the House of Commons when he said just before the weekend that we should respect politicians more but that they need to respect each other more I thought he put it very succinctly and very well.”
He partly blamed social media for part of the “coarsening” of the political debate.
Measures to boost housebuilding and infrastructure, improve transport and create more jobs will also be included, Number 10 said.
Ms Nandy also all but confirmed that there would be a bill on football governance.
Sir Keir Starmer described the package of new laws as “the down payment” on the change his Government is seeking to deliver, with economic growth its top priority.
The strengthening of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which was outlined in Labour’s manifesto, is designed to ensure “nobody can play fast and loose with the public finances ever again”, Downing Street said.
Ahead of the King’s Speech, the new Prime Minister said: “Our work is urgent. There is no time to waste.
“We are hitting the ground running by bringing forward the laws we will need to rebuild our country for the long-term - and our ambitious, fully costed agenda is the down payment on that change.”
Meanwhile, legislation to enact policies such as Labour’s national wealth fund and a new “mission control” tasked with turbo-charging the UK to clean power by 2030 will also feature in the legal package.
