Over the heady late summer of 2019 and into autumn, as the battle of Brexit dragged on and Rees-Mogg ended up telling untruths to the Queen to justify the prorogation of parliament, I was one of several score of folks of all backgrounds finding themselves peacefully blocking Whitehall (we’d get five years for that now). As the warm late summer evening cooled, a lad in his twenties dressed in football kit (as in to play, not a fan), came over to question our purpose (by now stop the coup, stop the illegal prorogation, stop Johnson, as well as stop Brexit). He asked many questions, but was very sceptical, raising objections and many countering pretty much all put to him, although it was mostly stuff we’d many times before at the protests on College Green. But there was something in his keenness, his confidence, the precision with which he engaged and debated, that just seemed a little … rehearsed. Sometimes his points came in flurries, sometimes it was like he was almost too readily cutting in, giving away lines, cues, like an actor hired to hassle us.
I realised he was arguing like an under-rehearsed role player – a little under-cooked and too gamely giving lines away, which I know, being a professional role player. So, when he explained his presence “I’m just going home from football,” – where does that go on near Whitehall? Why no sweat of anything on your immaculate kit? Aha – suddenly it made sense.
Training?
He was one of the better ones sent to try us at the stop-Brexit demonstrations. Of all those who waved UKIP, Union and later Brexit Party flags, however many were leavers of conviction, but often we got people, who’d begin all reasonably, “Now I voted for Remain, but …” then go off on one about democracy and how we had to give up and on and on, and if you interjected on an inevitable contradiction, suddenly with a growly aggression to their tone they’d speak louder until you stopped, then they’d carry on. Like they’d been trained.
So it went on, until Johnson’s government began to implode, and the lunge for prorogation, then momentum swung if not behind Remain then at least a broad coalition of consensus became apparent that there was something very, very wrong with all things Leave, so the quality notably deteriorated. Increasingly, they came in the day, stinking of beer, their clothes manky, just losing it if you tutted at the point of “I voted Remain”, and very irritable when their flimsy back stories collapsed (because they weren’t prepped). We knew some of the regulars were actually homeless people paid to hassle us, they’d told us, but now it was like their recruiters were resorting to trawling any pub for anyone to ply with beer, give a few pointers to just to come and have a go.
None of it was real
At the same time it was so apparent that so many of the promises made by Leave weren’t real, while the online hordes of support for Brexit and pile on Remainers weren’t real, but were trolls and botfarms, some detectably not of these shores. It was becoming increasingly a Potemkin façade. Even the Brexit Party itself wasn’t real about fielding over 600 candidates, costing a few true believers a lot of money in wasted campaigning expenses. So what was it all about?
None of it was real, but the impacts were, and it made it all so puzzling. We could get that it didn’t make sense to, say, wreck the £4 billion British gaming industry for the sake of a £1 billion fishing industry, at the call of an MEP who’d only ever attended one fishing committee meet in all his years.
And now?
Kind of like now. In the wake of this hideous multiple stabbing of children in Southport, trying to square protesters’ drive to “protect our children” by bringing said children to what quickly become riots in which mosques are bricked, libraries burned down, people of any colour dragged from cars and beaten, scores of police are injured, libraries burned down, mobile phone and trainers’ shops looted, hotels housing asylum seekers smashed into and burned by lynch mobs, anybody or anyone black or brown but mainly Muslim is assaulted and entire communities traumatised – when the actual suspect is a British-born Christian, and the rioters dress as Crusaders and do Nazi salutes while looting Greggs … where does this add up? (One of the regular Brexiters outside the Commons would go down the line of flags trying to start trouble until well past closing time, with his very small children in tow, dressed as Crusaders).
Some of them are simply being played. But many seem to be semi-professionals, tapped into streams of thought and organised into apoplexy on 8-Chan, YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and Signal, backdropped at least by muscular thugs like ‘Tommy Robinson’ and Andrew Tate, and the likes of Farage. So we see the same people protesting lockdown and laying siege to St. Thomas’s later turning up to protest drag queen story time, when not standing with banners demanding the UK leaves the European Convention on Human Rights, or holding Trump 2024 flags, then “stop the boats”.
The same people who feel the need to protect Churchill statue in Parliament Square from ‘lefties’ living rent-free in their heads, or the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday from people marching nowhere near it (a day in which the right-wing defined “protection of hallowed ground and occasion” as “brawl with police” or even “riot”), or protect Newcastle’s Grey’s Monument from a lefty threat a la toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol – even though Grey was an abolitionist. They all seem to drink from the same poisoned well amplified if not supplied by Russian misinformation channels, both bot and broadcast.
And the deep-seated anger at the elite that supposedly millions of ignored people are now demonstrating, if you listen, say, to Richard Tice of the Reform Party (itself noted to have fielded many a phantom candidate) actually boils down to far, far fewer people who when it’s all boiled down have come to violently blame and hate people who aren’t white for all their ills. And when enough of them turn up for a ruck, in a country with decimated police numbers, the courts gunged up, the prisons exploding – thanks to austerity delivered by those elite types who (closed the libraries and youth centres and cut GP funding) and now goad them on – the rioters (think they) can act with impunity.
Poisoned by pundits in the papers and online radio and TV who now act as if, it’s justified, yet the actions of random thugs, and most importantly, they pretend it’s nothing to do with their own constant drip-drip of hate, while the MSM studios pretend the likes of Tice and Farage et al are legitimate go-to folk for answers why the streets are aflame.
The violence is real
Pretend people like Tommy Robinson, the great British patriot, who’s really Stephen Yaxley-Lennon travelling on an Irish passport, or Nigel Farage, the ex public school City broker and Russia Today star who banks at Coutts, ‘man of the people’ and his mate Donald Trump. This is truly post-truth. But the violence is real, the damage to our communities, our society, to our lives, is very, very real, and many innocent people may die
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