Today was the much heralded and expected Day For Freedom march and rally in Central London, and what a day it was. It was supurb, moving, informative, exciting and above all impressive.
Thousands and thousands of people turned out, I reckon a rough estimate of about four thousand, but I may be wrong. I was hemmed in to a certain extent by the throng of like minded freedom fanciers at the side of the stage and could only get the briefest of glimpses from my vantage point of the extent of the crowd. It could even have been bigger than four thousand as far as I know as several of the speakers sounded astonished at the size of the audience they were speaking to. As Tommy Robinson, who has addressed thousands of people at various events, himself remarked about the crowd size, then this must be a sizable one.
However, it’s not the sheer size of the crowd turning out to call for the return of our freedom of speech and the repeal of the increasingly hated ‘hate speech’ laws that is impressive. As a former Leftie myself I know that it’s easy to get thousands of brainwashed lefty students out to protest about ‘cuts’ or ‘Islamophobia’, the SWP is pretty good at ‘moron management’, But this demo was different, this was not left wing morons following the orders of their chief, this was people who had thought about the dangerous road that we are all on by restricting the rights of the citizen or subject to speak freely. What was impressive about this demonstratons was the calibre of people who were there, not just on the stage speaking with passion and and clarity, but those who attended. These people were, despite their diversity of viewpoint, politics, religion and race, ordinary people who have been pissed off enough to give up a day, come to Sadiq Khan’s London and say, ‘give us back our voices’.
This was truly a festival of intellectual diversity. I saw and in some cases chatted to, every possible poliical persuasion under the sun, from Israel supporting Ulstermen, through liberatarians, conservatives, liberals and liberalists. There was even a guy flying an EU flag and although he was occasionally gently mocked, his view was also welcome in this physical clarion call for our rights to be returned and the death of that mockery of justice that is Britain’s ‘hate speech’ censorship laws. The two groups that were missing were the hard Left and the genuine far right, but as these these two factions, these mirror images of ideological extremism, are opposed to free speech in principle maybe I should not be surprised. On the subject of fascist extremists, there was ‘antifa’ and ‘leftist’ opposition sited further down Whitehall near Parliament Square, but they posed no problem either for the demonstrators or the police, whom I thank for keeping the demostration safe.
On the matter of thanks, I’d like to thank the organisers of this demonstration. They did a fantastic job and it was well coordinated with marchers who came down from a meeting point at Speaker’s Corner. I understand what goes into putting on something like this and it’s not easy or cheap and consumes immense amounts of time. The organising team, Lucy, George Caolin, and Tommy, really did the cause of free speech proud today, and the cause of free speech is an important one, probably the one that is key to sorting out many of the problems that face the people of the United Kingdom today.
We cannot for example solve the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs wihtout being able to freely debate the role that Islam plays in the issue of these gangs or on Islamic terror, wthout fear that we will be arrested for’Islamophobia’. We also cannot decide as a society whether the practise of paedicatric is bad or good (personally I think it’s awful) without being able to debate it and not having an ‘offended; someone shouting ‘transphobe’ and running to police forces that are now mired in political correctness and getting the ‘speech offender’, a police visit.
I will, of course, do a more fuller post on this demonstration tomorow with video and more pictures, but I just wanted to get my initial impressions down and these are that this demostration is one of those ‘key points’ in history. This is ordinary people, not those from political cults who are easy to get out on the streets, turning out because they realise that an important and keystone right is being lost. Whatever the final numbers of those who attended turn out to be, it is the fact that those who attended had something to lose if they were falsely smeared as being ‘racist’ or ‘far right’ by leftists if they were exposed as attending this demonstration, that should give Her Majesty’s Government pause for thought.
It is never a good position for a government to be in if ordinary people, of diverse class and political thought, cleave to a common cause and demonstrate. It shows the government that they have lost the confidence of what used to, in former times, be called ‘the Yeomanry’, the ordinary bod with a bit of land or a stake in society. Theresa May’s government, on the issue of free speech at least, is losing the confidence of that section of society and the composition of this demonstration goes somewhy to showing that.
Every speaker on the stage moved me to some extent and evey speaker made logical calls for our rights to speak freely. rights that have been stolen from us, to be returned. We have allowed the authoritarians both of secular and Islamic religous paths to silence us when all we want to do is debate the issues. It is time that we refuse this silencing, it’s time to speak the words that have been forbidden to us by a coterie of politicians, activists, authoritarian Islamic clerics and the far too easily offended over recent decades.
I came away from this demonstration enthused and I got the distinct impression that others felt similarily. This demo was an absolute success as far as I saw it and I’ve little doubt tht those who attended will tell others about it and more importantly why they attended.
We need to get back our rights to speak freely and this demonstration went a long way to showing not just why this issue is impotant, but also that people are prepared to turn out an defend it.
