The referendum was 10 years ago, but I’ve been campaigning for seven and a half years. Why did it take two and a half years to get my bum into gear? Well, perhaps I can best describe my state of mind back then as being in a state of bewildered shock, because, foolish as it now seems, I’d simply assumed that, ultimately, people in power might disagree about how to go about it, but they would put the country first. And, as the chaos presented soon after the vote, I feared I’d been wrong.
Brexit is about EU membership. But is it?
I remember the night of the referendum and realising that the country had decided – if narrowly – that the kind of people who could assassinate young mothers in the street were to be our future. You’ll say that’s unfair, but it isn’t. It is crude and un-nuanced, and there’s a lot more to the situation than that, but that doesn’t mean that stupid brutality isn’t an aspect of the situation, a real thing, and something important that must be taken into account. 17 million people decided that when brutality and stupidity smacked them in the face, it was something they’d pass on to their children. And I was stuck on an island with them.
After all, what was the point of Winston Churchill instigating what would, over decades, develop into what we now know as the EU? Way back in 1948, having defeated fascism in Europe, he convened The Council of Europe and avowedly and expressly insisted that the brutality and stupidity that had twice torn the world apart over a 30-year period must not be repeated. Even though we’d had a few thousand years of stupid brutality as the default setting of Europe, we would come together in a grand and heroic plan that ran contrary to all human experience of recorded time. We would end war between member states in Europe, at least.
For decades, it did work. It even brought an admittedly uneasy peace to Northern Ireland.
And then, some chancers with no aversion to taking Russian money, even as Russia softened up Europe preparatory to invasion, asked people to gamble their nation’s security and prosperity for a fistful of slogans, and in contempt of the sacrifice of our war fallen.
And people just voted for it.
Brexit says more about the UK than it says about the EU
I studied law once and therefore understood that the matter wasn’t settled. Parliament was sovereign, and what this means is that in the UK it is impossible for a referendum to be binding in law. I also understood, however, that law was not the same as politics. Politics is more about managing perceptions and expectations than about facts, and so there would have to be a political mechanism found to permit the assertion of law.
For surely the government would not seek to use the law to harm the nation, would it?
And that’s when it started getting truly dark, because Gina Miller had to go to court to force Theresa May’s government to even permit parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit Bill.
Which is nonsense, but an instructive one: the government of the day sought to effectively bypass the sovereign parliament because it feared the political fallout should parliament assert the very sovereignty the Brexiters had claimed they were defending.
It was that dark absurdity rather than the result itself that actually chilled me. It chilled me because of what it told me about the establishment, and what it told me about my neighbours.
It told me that the establishment regarded our constitutional protections as entirely dispensable the moment the establishment felt at all threatened (and the prorogation debacle would later confirm this), and it told me that the vast majority, indeed, almost all, of the people of Britain – almost everyone reading this – were entirely ignorant of the very bare basics of the nature of power in the UK, and their relationship to it. There was an abject quality to the citizenry of the UK, a sense of betters and lessers, an abiding tendency that I came to identify as a propensity for forelock tugging. It wasn’t universal, but it was prevalent.
I had, of course, been aware of certain deficiencies to our civic life for some time, so that none of this was a complete and utter surprise, but it was nevertheless clear that I had grossly underestimated our deficiencies, their depths, their ubiquity, this stranglehold of vested interests.
We were barely a democracy at all. Posh boys were in charge. As the BBC documentary Brexit: A Very British Civil War (aired June 2026 and available on iPlayer) would later make abundantly clear, we plebs were just pawns in their vainglorious Game of Thrones. Our last fingerhold on any claim to be a democracy at all was going to be prised away before this was over.
And so, it became time to DO something
Which is why, on Tuesday 11 December 2018, I rocked up at Westminster as part of the protest outside parliament in anticipation of the much vaunted “meaningful vote”. I joined the crowds. We filled the space.
However, the government deferred the vote, simply because they knew they wouldn’t win it. The entrenched vested interests of the ruling class had long maintained their position by honouring the forms of a democracy, and had been compelled to observance of the mechanisms by Miller’s action, so the bill had to go through parliament. They could, however, decide when, choose a moment that suited them, so they just decided to leave it a few weeks until after Christmas.
l decided I’d be back for January. And I was. And I kept coming back. All through 2019. At the time I lived at the very periphery of greater London, just inside the M25, at the far extreme of the transport zones, far from tubes, and a 40 minute bus trip from the nearest rail station. However, I also had a friend who lived in Camberwell who was entirely content to permit me the use of his sofa bed. So, as 2019 progressed, I got into a rhythm of being in Westminster early, scurrying over to the Docklands for work at midday, scurrying back to Westminster for about 21.00, helping with the night protests in front of the stilted studios on College Green and getting our flags and banners on screen for the 10.00 News and Newsnight, then down to Camberwell and the sofa bed and up at 7 to do it all again, Monday to Thursday (parliament not usually sitting on a Friday). From winter into spring into summer, making myself useful to Steve Bray and his crew, known as SODEM.
DOING something becomes a raison d’etre (excuse my French)
This protesting has carried on for seven and a half years now. Through pandemic and war and leadership challenges and elections. Us lot, SODEM, were the ones playing Bye-bye Boris as Johnson’s government resigned around his ears, and the theme from Benny Hill at the behest of Hugh Grant, and Things Can Only Get Better as a sodden Sunak announced the last general election. We’re the guys who put Sooty behind Robert Jenrick. And we’re the guys who have been deploying flags and banners behind politicians whist they were being interviewed, compelling newscasters to deploy studios on stilts, so we put our placards and flags on longer poles, or singing Ode to Joy from the street as various BBC news presenters gamely attempt to report from Westminster six floors up on the roof of No. 4 Millbank. We’re there outside parliament every PMQs, and we also attend other key events such as party conferences and the US christian fundamentalist backed shindigs held at The Emmanuel Centre known variously as PopCon or NatCon (the latter inviting the abbreviation NatCs).
If there is a way of summing up how SODEM operates, it’s this: pricking the pomposity and entitlement of the elite.
We also assist fellow resistors, such as the people organising the National Rejoin March, and the people putting the blue spangley flags into The Last Night of the Proms. We’re happy to help, it’s all for the same ultimate aim.
Photos of us and our placards have appeared in the British press hundreds of times, and the international press just as often. We’ve given interviews that have screened all over the world. The iconography we provide has become the visual shorthand for Brexit, understood immediately across the globe.
We’ve driven authoritarian Home Secretaries to instigate oppressive laws that we’ve then seen off in the courts, establishing exactly the rights of protest outside Parliament. We’ve had our amplifiers seized and ultimately returned because the seizure was proved unlawful. I’ve been arrested, although not charged, because yes, we resist, but peacefully, and within the law.
If you’re a pompous ass authoritarian in power, you’ll find us to be very annoying.
But, as we have proven through persistence and argument and, ultimately, in a court, there’s no law against being annoying as much as – unfortunately – plenty of people with power would wish there to be. The pompous entitled are like that.
The many strands of resistance
I would say that we – by which I mean the pro EU lobby in general – are a protest movement that has shown Britishness at its best. We have a deep grievance, but we don’t shoot people, we don’t riot, we don’t wear masks, we don’t hound people out of their home. We infiltrate the Royal Albert Hall and wave flags, we march, we present placards and banners, we sing silly songs, we put puppets behind politicians, but, more than anything – we persist. We’ve got stamina.
We are scientists, we are musicians. We write, we make videos, it has been known for some of us to dance. We march, we shout, we sing.
We’re there. And people know we’re there. And, around the globe, we’re recognised as a dissent that just isn’t going away.
And in doing all this we express what is best about the British tradition of dissent, which has often been wry, humorous, has shown a stoic persistence in good humour.
There’s a bit more shouting, singing, marching and flag waving yet to do, but, essentially, we’ve won. Because we were right. Because Brexit is perverse and regressive. And because we’ve just been more British about how we’ve carried ourselves.
What we’ve won, or are winning at least, is not merely membership of the EU. When that comes to pass it will be totemic of something deeper, which is this – we are not the playthings of posh boys, we are not an elite’s cannon fodder, our children’s futures are not expendable. Enough of us now decline to tug the forelock. The elite can muster and steer a mob, but that just shows that they rely on brutality and stupidity, and are not very good at being British. We are good at being British – we counter with reason and culture (I mean, they want to start a culture war, but appear to have turned up unarmed) and – most importantly – stamina. We, the pro-EU lobby, who have resisted and rejected the decadent elite’s attempt to keep us from the levers of power, represent the better aspect of what it is to be British – wry, good humoured, intelligent, educated, cultured and, most importantly, persistent.
The next National Rejoin March is on Saturday 20 June in London
