First of all let me apologise for not getting this piece about Sunday’s Brexit Betrayal march up earlier. I’ve had a long journey back from London and have also picked up my son’s bad cold which has knocked me back a bit.

I attended the Great Brexit Betrayal march in London on Sunday that was called by UKIP and Mr Tommy Robinson. Surprisingly for a demonstration called at such short notice, not more than a few weeks, it was very well attended. I reckon about 12,000 people attended this demonstration by the time everyone had got to the rally point at Parliament Street.

When I got to the meeting point outside the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane about an hour before set off time there was about one thousand people there. This number swiftly grew to about 2.5k just outside the hotel and when the march stretched out to its full length in Victoria Street and others had joined in, it was about 8000 strong.

One thing that was very obvious about this demonstration was how much it differed from Mr Nigel Farage’s description of what this would turn out to be. He said that this would be a gathering of ‘tattooed thugs’ because of the involvement of Mr Robinson in it. This was plainly not the case. There were very few ‘tattooed thugs’ to be seen, the vast majority of those attending were surprisingly normal. Most of those attending were plainly motivated by disgust at and hatred of the European Union and the damage it is doing to the national sovereignty of its members. The people attending were black, white, Christian, Jewish and of many other faiths and none. The one commonality I found for the majority of the demonstrators is that they were working class or lower middle class. This is not surprising as it is these classes that have often suffered the most from the EU’s influence on British life and governance. It is the working British man or woman who finds that their areas have been changed beyond recognition by excessive migration from both within the EU and from without, and who have had to live with the negative consequences of such migration. The lower middle classes, especially small business owners, have also suffered under EU regulations that increase costs and make it harder to trade for smaller businesses but are costs that are easily absorbed by larger businesses. This drives the small and medium sized enterprise to the wall.

Most of the marchers were, as far as I could see, focussed on the betrayal of the Brexit vote that Prime Minister May’s ‘deal’ with the EU represents. Although this was a very good natured march, there was an undercurrent of anger at the way the Government has behaved primarily over Brexit and the way it has been handled. Anger was particularly directed at a political class that is apparently horrified by the vote to Leave, as they expected that people would fear to leave ‘nurse’ and vote to Remain in the EU. The fear among many is that the political classes are so horrified in fact by the rejection of the EU that they would plot to annul the Referendum Vote. It’s not an unreasonable fear to have bearing in mind that on several other occasions in EU history when EU policies have been rejected by referenda in various nations, the EU has told the nation to vote again until the ‘right’ result is obtained.

The speakers were mostly excellent and there were brilliant contributions from Gerard Batten the leader of UKIP, Sargon of Akkad, Lord Pearson of Rannoch and of course Tommy Robinson. Despite Mr Robinson’s involvement in this demonstration, this was not the ‘Tommy Robinson Show’, far from it. As I said the primary motivation from what I could gather was the matter of the Government not honouring what we voted for, which was to leave the EU completely. There were people there who were concerned about Islamisation but this is to be expected as there is crossover between the views of both the Leave camps and the anti Islamisation camps. The working class focus of this march is bound also to include many who are opposed to Islam as it is the working class families that have to suffer when Islam is facilitated and appeased by government both local and national. Like any demonstration there are always ‘outliers’ people who turn up to promote their own particular conspiracy theory. On Leftist marches it’s often the ‘Stalin Society’ who fit the description ‘outliers’, on Patriot marches this niche is filled by the ‘Free Melanie Shaw’ lot, about which I wrote HERE and the Freemen of the Land types. However, the outlier groups, which are a factor in demonstrations of both the Right and the Left, represented a tiny minority of those attending. This was primarily a demonstration by ordinary people, frustrated by the influence over UK government policies by the European Union and extremely angry at Theresa May’s utter and complete failure to deliver what we the people voted for, which was to leave the EU.

From what I could observe, there was no trouble at all caused by the attendees of the Brexit Betrayal march. Everyone was respectful to one another and this was definitely NOT the ‘bunch of racists’ that the Left had portrayed this march to be. On the subject of ‘the opposition’, to be frank I didn’t see any at all. The police quite rightly kept this bunch of Middle Class Leftists out of the way of the Brexit demonstrators, but there were not even any breakaway groups of leftists screaming abuse from the pavement as can often happen. As I said I did not get to see first hand any of the Opposition but others have. Brendan O’Neil for example wrote a brilliant article about the counter demonstrators and said that it was very bad optics for a small bunch of middle class leftists to scream abuse, including the word ‘fascist’ at working class people. He’s right and it does look really bad, it smacks of a ‘know your place pleb’ attitude that rankles with people. As regards arrests and other trouble, I didn’t see anything from our side and neither have I heard any credible reports of such from others at the time of writing. However, as Sargon reports, that was not the case with the Leftists. They were fighting with the police in the road next to the Canadian High Commission. On our side, the situation regarding the police was much different, the police were praised for their assistance from the state and I saw one police officer look surprised when a woman went up to him and thanked him and his officers for keeping us safe during the demonstration.

This was a very successful demonstration despite being called at very short notice. It was well attended, well behaved, coherent and most of the speakers seemed to know their stuff and put over their ideas well. Both those who attended and those who organised it all played their part in making this a successful demonstration against a Brexit in name only which is increasingly being seen as a betrayal of the electorates choice.