I Don't Predict A Riot

“I dislike rallies and it might get ugly if we haven’t left.”, said a friend when I asked if he’d be joining me on the Leave Means Leave rally on the 29^th  March. I assured him the average age of the crowd would be about 50 and if in the unlikely event of ugliness we could simply scarper.

My friend is no shrinking violet and far from a hand-wringing liberal; he voted Leave and has ribbed me as a ‘pussy’ ever since for failing to do the same. But my sanguinity was not from any particular natural bullishness either. I’d simply been on enough rallies in my misspent late teens to know that a big enough crowd equals a diverse crowd. If there is one thing that brings large diverse groups of people together – other than the cause or attraction for which they’ve congregated in the first place – it is their aversion to violence in general and being hit in the face in particular. Furthermore I had seen the awe-inspiring pictures and videos from the March to Leave, of people with enough anger and motivation to march on the capital, in some cases all the way from Sunderland. That this was a collection of people naturally disinclined to anarchy was the most obvious thing in the world. As I’d snarkily reminded my friend, many of them were of a certain advanced age – which of course only increases the regard in which they should be held. Even the Jarrow Marchers were, by definition, of working age. And yet it was by no means a Grey Army. Every generation is visible in the images from the March, along with - as ever in this country – a pleasing array of ‘doggos’.

Perhaps it was for that reason that sections of the Twitterati launched into such venomous apoplexy at the sight of these people. Lefties – I know from when I was one – tend to see marching as ‘their thing’. Those who dare march for the other side, for traditional values or ways of life, must be in one of two categories. Either they are brutish thugs, remnants of the EDL or some other bone-headed football hooligan outfit. This the March to Leave was self-evidently not so they must be of the (seemingly) more benign ‘fruitcakes and loonies’ variety of the Great Misguided; the old, the uneducated, the idle; hideously white, tweedy and for bringing back the cane. Because this latter category looks pretty much like anybody else, the commentators must work all the harder to squeeze the offending individuals into it, as some of the more vicious comments on the photos attest: “This is basically a photo of everyone that would’ve fallen for the Nigerian prince scam.”, one said (flagrant Eurocentricity surely? But then so is the EU) A personal Twitter pest of mine @TMLindsay86 decided that they were all “angry old people”. I would’ve expected more compassionate Midlands common sense from someone who has Bovril as their profile picture

When I met the marchers in Fulham for the final leg of their journey (actually more like Chelsea by the time I caught up with them. Apparently my admiration of their efforts stopped short of forcing me to join them on time), the event was - sure enough - a gentle, good-humoured affair, despite the palpable anger. And the anticipated eclecticism was there too: I encountered a group of students from the University of Lincoln who had the distinction of having formed the first student Leave Means Leave society in the country; an august Ukipper whose walking shoes had given way at Fulham, held together only by elastic bands before he made the valiant decision to shed the soles altogether in Pimlico lending a hint of the devotional feel of a medieval pilgrimage to the affair; sash-wearing, Red Hand-bearing Ulstermen all the way from Londonderry (one of whom coldly insisted that 200 years ago Theresa May would’ve been beheaded. Probably correctly, but the enthusiasm for the idea set off my metropolitan nervousness). Truckers and cabbies loudly tooted their support as they drove by, receiving rapturous cheers in response. The only negativity that I noticed by being hurled our way was when we headed past the Tate Britain, resplendently flanked by ‘Van Gogh in Britain’ banners, where a crowd had emerged onto the steps to see what the noise was about, and a smaller portion of whom were giving us emphatic thumbs-downs (I couldn’t resist the wry suspicion that 2 or 3 of them probably thought Van Gogh only came to Britain thanks to the EU) As we approached Parliament we were buoyed by the news that the ‘deal’ had been voted down on its ludicrously unprecedented third attempt.

More eclecticism: within minutes and yards of each other, I spoke to an evangelical Christian lady convinced that Brexit is scriptural prophecy, followed by – a blast from the past for me - a troupe of comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist. In a fit of endorphin-charged fellow feeling, I bought their magazine, despite not having had the slightest communist sympathy in approaching a decade. This was followed again by a brief chat with a former serviceman who had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, whom I thanked whole-heartedly “and not just for the march”. A chat with a genial pair of well-spoken Tories then opened into a discussion with a no-nonsense working-class businessman, whose experience trading on WTO rules across the world and for many years gave him every confidence that the UK would thrive with no deal.

I won’t recount the details of the rally as the speeches are all available on YouTube and this post is too long anyway, other than that by a head my favourite was Mr Ian Paisley Jnr with his impassioned cry for the Union, ending (eerily recalling the dockyards of Antrim in the 1970s) with a most called-far ‘No Surrender!’ The heroic Mark Francois with his quotation of Pericles and reading from ‘If…’ was another highlight.

As the crowd dispersed, I met a chap I had met a few weeks previously at a Blue Labour event and he alerted my attention to the Frexit contingent. As if to belie all the nonsense about Little England parochialism and xenophobia, there they were, thirty of them at the very least, bearing their banners along with the flags of their Republic, of the Free French in WWII and of Quebec and treating us to a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise.

My Blue Labour friend and I then ventured into the mouth of Whitehall, where an altogether different gathering had ensued. The crowd was younger, rougher, more male-dominated (though by no means exclusively and from my unscientific observation I could swear more racially diverse than the Leave Means Leave crowd) We had been aware of speakers up to that point but they had been eminently ignorable. As we approached the stand to pass by and head to the Wetherspoons however, the man the crowd had been waiting for took to the stage. It was of course Tommy Robinson, with his reinvented ‘Panodrama’ branding, featuring his initials with a microphone helping form the R. In an excruciatingly high pitched rant he swore that he would bleed and die for his followers there assembled, many of whom responded with a chillingly focused football chant: “Tommy. Tommy. Tommy”. 
 


All in all I left feeling grateful that, while Leave Means Leave had certainly been more my cup of tea, I live in a country where the macho eccentricity of Robinson’s acolytes is as pretty much as bad as it gets for mass expressions of civil discontent. The testosterone in the air had been palpable and yet my friend’s prediction of violence had still not come to pass. Two weeks on however and in the wake of another, longer extension to Article 50, I wonder how much longer this can hold. I will be attending the WTO Brexit protest in Parliament Square today, which looks to be the first of many more rambunctious, angier events. No more pacific a figure than the Rev. Martin Luther King called riots "a distorted form of social protest", an option turned to by the desperate. I'm sure today will hold but we shouldn't imagine that our country - blessed as it is with a moderate political temperament - is immune from such avenues of despair.