Fergus Finlay: Authentic fuel price protest was distorted by its tactics — and a torrent of abuse

Protesting reduced oil supplies by reducing oil supplies is a mad strategy, and it was accompanied by vile abuse from some of the protesters and their supporters 

Prof John Crown’s post on X that cancer patients had suffered delays getting to hospital for appointments attracted a cascade of foul abuse. Picture: iStock

John Crown treats people with who are ill with cancer. The other day, in obvious frustration because so many of his patients were struggling to keep their appointments, he posted this on X: “Never dawned on me that so many of my cancer patients who suffered delays getting to hospital due to the protests had been personally responsible for the global energy crisis. How naive I was.”

Someone told me he’d been subject to a lot of abuse for saying that, so I swallowed hard and went into the slurry pit called X to see if I could find it. There it was. There were a lot of retweets, a lot of likes, and 288 comments.