Police have been called to Jeremy Corbyn’s north London home, where two men are staging a protest on his roof.
The pair, from New Fathers for Justice, climbed onto the Labour leader’s house in Islington just after 10am and are refusing to move until he talks to them.
Police cordoned off the street as a large crowd gathered to watch the protest, which comes weeks after a similar demonstration on the roof of Labour MP Angela Eagle’s office.
One of the protesters, Bobby Smith, told LBC radio he would not come down until Corbyn listened to their complaints about fathers’ rights.
He said: “I tried to talk to Jeremy in March and he was very rude to me. I wanted to talk to him about his role in blocking shared parenting of 50-50 contact back in 2011.
“He was part of a panel that blocked the Children and Families Act.”
Asked how long he planned to stay on the roof, Smith said: “Easily the rest of the day.”
He added: “We’ve got all food and water and everything like that. We’ll stay here as long as we have to. We would do anything for our children.
“Both of us would rather be home with our children right now, on the summer holidays, but we’re not – we have no choice but to do this.”
A tweet posted by the New Fathers For Justice group showed a crowd gathering beyond the police cordon near Corbyn’s home.
Trending on Twitter, big crowd, told the negotiators we are not leaving. Time for change or we will keep doing it! pic.twitter.com/3PsJrMzib5
— New FFJ (@New_FFJ) August 5, 2016
The New Fathers for Justice website quoted an activist, Steven Rowland, 32, who said he had travelled from Crawley to support the protest.
Dressed in a Spiderman costume, he said: “I run ‘Stop the family courts and Cafcas from destroying our children’s future’.
“You are not going to beat the system. It’s been going for years. A lot of fathers are angry, they are hurt. How can this happen? We have to try a new way now.”
