Protesters in London have just attacked a café in East London in a demonstration against the gentrification that is sweeping through the neighborhood of Shoreditch. The target of the protests was the Cereal Killer Café, a year old restaurant that serves a selection of (as the name suggests) breakfast cereals.
The establishment, which charges around $7.50 for a bowl of cereal and milk, is viewed by the protestors as a symbol of the rising socio-economic inequality engulfing the city.
The gathering, which was organized by an anarchist group called Class War, was dubbed the 'f*ck parade'. Its Facebook Event Page reads:
Our communities are being ripped apart - by Russian oligarchs, Saudi Sheiks, Israeli scumbag property developers, Texan oil-money twats and our own home-grown Eton toffs. Local authorities are coining it in, in a short sighted race for cash by "regenerating" social housing.
We don't want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing. We don't want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns - we want community.
Soon this City will be an unrecognisable, bland, yuppie infested wasteland with no room for normal (and not so normal) people like us.
— Fuck Parade (@FuckParadeLDN) September 26, 2015
The protesters plastered the café's windows with the word scum and set fire to the effigy of a policeman. Several of the store's customers, which included some young children, were forced to hide in the building's basement as smoke bombs were thrown into the premises.
Gary Keery, who founded Cereal Killer together with his brother Adam, slammed the whole incident, telling the Guardian:
It's senseless violence, isn't it? We've had some letters through the letterbox saying 'die hipsters' and stuff but nothing to this extreme. It just doesn't make sense."
"If they really believe in the protest, why are they covering their face while they're doing it? Why are they wearing pig masks? It's not just the fact that someone threw paint on the windows, there's more of a deep-rooted issue that needs to be looked at. You need to look at why they're attacking us."
