Since the phenomenon of the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement started up I have, unlike some, not given this movement my whole support. Sure, I can see the value in a demonstration having a coherent corporate image and projecting that cohesive image in a demo can help to promote a cause or highlight an issue.

But. I’ve been troubled by the sort of groups and individuals that the Yellow Vest movement is both attracting and facilitating. Some evidence of this comes from France, the home of the Yellow Vest movement, where groups like Conspiracy Watch have found that a significant number of Yellow Vest protesters are in agreement with the idea that there is a ‘worldwide Zionist plot’. The fact that so many of those who wish to promote the ‘Zionist plot’ fallacy or hold to such ideas are involved in the Yellow Vest movement, should give sensible people a clue that not all is quite right with the Yellow Vest movement. Others, such as the Make Britain Great Again (MBGA) crew, have quite rightly pointed out that far from being heralds of small state conservatism, many of the French Yellow Vests seem to be favourable to more state intervention and control of the economy. The MBGA group are correct in this area, the Yellow Vests contain a large group of people who are not of the political Right and it is wrong to claim that this is the case.

It seems that the Yellow Vest can be whatever any individual group, whether of the Left or of the Right, want it to be. This is not, in my opinion, something that is going to end well. We have the same emblem taken by Left and Right and a few eccentrics (of which more later) and there are those who are commenting on them from a conservative viewpoint are treating all the Yellow Vest protests and protesters as coming from what an American may call ‘constitutional conservatism’. This is plainly not the case. What is motivating the protesters varies from place to place and the prime mover for a Yellow Vest movement may be one thing in one EU country and something different in another. Because of this factor it is all too easy to read the Yellow Vest protests as whatever you want them to see them, depending on your own biases. Seeing only the broad picture with little granular detail leads to misconceptions.

A big picture vision also misses out the fact that some Yellow Vest groups have been taken over almost completely by those who are very much ‘out there’ when it comes to political sanity. Now I’m not talking here about political extremists of either the Left or the right, although these are present in some yellow vest protests, but the deluded. I’m speaking of the likes of conspiracy theorists, followers of quack doctors along with those who may have some genuine grievances but who seem to be being exploited by the purveyors of pseudo-law.

I took a look at a yellow vest protest in London last weekend and what I saw worried me greatly. First off what got me was the difference from how this demonstration was being promoted online and the reality of it on the ground. The demo was being promoted as a genuine working class mass demonstration about Britain’s problems and the graphics used to promote this gig made it look as if it was going to be the biggest street political gig since the Chartists and their big meetings. The reality was very different.

My wife, myself and our son Laughing Boy were in London for other reasons and when we came out of the National Gallery we saw police lights flashing two thirds of the way down Whitehall. I remarked to my wife that this was the Yellow Vests UK lot, let’s go and take a look. What we found was not the mass movement of ordinary hard working Britons, but a collection of fraggles supporting disparate and ‘out there’ conspiraloon causes. There were people there marching for an imprisoned quack doctor, another couple promoting some six degrees of separation conspiracy theory centred on a business accommodation address in Finchley Road along with the tragic but legally misinformed ‘Justice for our Boys’ campaign. Sadly, these groups and causes did not constitute extreme or otherwise deluded outliers on this demonstration, they seemed to make up most of the one hundred or slightly less protesters who took part. You get outlier causes on every demonstration, whether the demo be organised by a group of the Left or the Right. However, these outliers, whether they be right wing ethnostatists or propagandists for Joseph Stalin, are recognised as a minority and appear as a minority on such demonstrations. This was not the case with the UK Yellow Vests demo in London, it was fraggles all the way through. This demonstration was about as far as one could get from being what it was advertised, which was a mass working class demonstration. Most of the working class people I grew up alongside and whom I mix with daily, would want nothing to do with this demo.

When we caught up with the demo I went ahead and grabbed a few snaps of the demo and to get some idea of its size and make up. I expected a few outliers to be present, but this was nearly all those with outlier ideas. This demo progressed down Whitehall with the demonstrators occasionally and I’m afraid half heartedly shouting out ‘what do we want, Brexit, when do we want it? Now’. My wife who was walking behind with the pushchair took the time to listen to the public’s reaction to the demonstration and she said that people were just laughing at the Yellow Vest demo. They were treating the demonstrators not as those with a political point to make, but as being in the great tradition of British eccentrics, like the Protein Man who for many years used to carry a placard around London’s West End decrying the eating of protein. There were ordinary people, people sitting in pubs enjoying a beer who were taking the piss out of these Yellow Vest demonstrators. They were laughing at the decorated yellow jackets promoting quacks and lost causes and also laughing at the admittedly laughably small numbers who turned up.

Now I’ve done small demonstrations and I’ve organised such demo’s in the past and they can be effective but in order to be so, they have to be coherent and make people passing by think about the issue that you are promoting. This yellow vest demo was neither coherent nor did it engage with people or make people think anything other than ‘there goes a bunch of eccentric idiots’.

Personally I was both horrified and saddened to see this demo dominated by those promoting causes that can be easily debunked or have less than solid grounding. I know Britain is in a bit of a state at the moment, we have a whole host of problems that need to be protested by the ordinary people of Britain that suffer the bulk of such problems, but this Yellow Vest lot are not the way to do it.

Let’s take a quick look at the groups that gave me the impression that the London Yellow Vest demo on Saturday was full of people whom I would feel uncomfortable supporting by marching with, or by wearing a yellow vest.

The first and most numerous of this small demo was the ‘Justice for our Boys’ campaign. Although I feel immensely sorry for the families who lost their children in a horrific road traffic incident in 2018 and I pray that one day they will have succour for their terrible grief, I fail to see how they will ever be able to prove that their children were murdered. Those promoting the Justice for our Boys campaign are, as I have observed it, a mixture of those who have been bereaved in the most terrible way, along with those who may be exploiting this tragedy for their own political or personal ends.

The main thrust of some of the statements that some of the family members in the Three Boys case have made about this incident, are that it was not an accident but instead it was terrorist murder. But, I’ve read enough of the Appeal Court judgement to ascertain that there is little enough evidence to prove intent to murder let alone terrorism on the part of the defendant. It’s plain to me hat this tragic case was not terrorism, even if this was not discounted at the early stage of the investigation, but instead the work of a drunken man, a man who should not even be in this country, getting behind the wheel of a car, driving like a maniac, losing control and killing three innocent young boys.

I can understand why the families cling onto conspiracy theories about their children’s deaths, lots of people would, especially at a time where there are lot of allegations, some well founded and some not so, about police corruption. However, I’ve looked over the précis of the accident investigation and there is nothing that suggests to me that this was a deliberate intent to kill. If there is no intent to kill then there is no possible charge of murder. The Justice for Our Boys campaign is also I’m afraid being overly influenced and possibly exploited by various pseudo-legal types such as the Freemen of the Land lot. This can be shown by a statement given by one family member to the Appeal Court that they will be taking the case to the ‘Middlesex Grand Jury’. Unfortunately this particular court has not existed since the 1930’s and is a popular pseudo-legal topic among various ‘Freemen’ and ‘Sovereign Citizen’ groups.

The next group to come to my notice was someone promoting a ‘six degrees of separation’ type conspiracy theory about a massive fraud. This conspiracy theory suggests that there is a massive fraud, undertaken by the ‘elites’ and specifically the current Prime Minister Theresa May, to steal people’s pensions and defraud the taxpayer. The gist for this particular conspiracy theory is that there is a business accommodation address in London’s Finchley Road that is hosting companies that are ‘ripping us off’. The address in Finchley Road does indeed contain a large number of companies but that is quite normal for an accommodation address, lots of companies will register at one company registration facilitation address. It doesn’t mean that any of these companies are linked in any way, let alone in any nefarious enterprise. Of course some companies are linked by shared directors but again this is normal. One company director may be a director of a number of companies either subsidiary ones to a primary company, a separate company to manage a specific product or project, or as a legitimate tax minimisation scheme. The Finchley Road address is one among dozens upon dozens of similar accommodation addresses for businesses in London hosting hundreds of different businesses, often sole traders who don’t want their home address to also be their business address.

I’ve dug into this particular conspiracy theory and it seems to have either originated or been publicised by a man called Gordon Bowden, who himself runs his company from an accommodation address, but this time one in Britain’s Midlands. A search for Bowden’s allegations of a ‘massive fraud’ of course throws up the usual ‘Zionist plot’ and ‘Rothschild’ guff, but little that is credible to back up claims made by Bowden and his acolytes.

Bowden claims on his website that his partner was ripped off in an investment scam based in Finchley Road and that led him to investigate it. However, this address is home to a number of businesses, including plumbers, builders and other tradespeople and not just fraudulent or negligent financial companies. For Bowden to go after an accommodation address just because one of the companies ripped him and his family off, is as pointless as going after an accommodation address because a plumber whose business is registered there gave bad service. Bowden’s conspiracy theory for me fails the Occam’s Razor test. To take Bowden’s allegations seriously requires much more speculation than the other, far more sensible, explanation would do. That explanation is that Finchley Road, like all manner of other business accommodation addresses, contain a multitude of companies. Some of these companies will be big,some small, some stand-alone, some as subsidiaries to bigger companies. Some of these businesses will be run well and some run badly and possibly losing their investors’ money in the process. However few, if any, would be vehicles for ‘elites’ to rip off the public.

I must admit when I saw this conspiracy theory being promoted on the Yellow Vests demo my heart sank a bit more. It would have been good for this to have been a half decent demonstration, well attended by ordinary and mostly non-politically aligned people, but the high profile presence of tin foilers like the supporters of Bowden, just makes people laugh at their delusions. This group, like the other fringe types had an overblown influence over the image of what was a very small demo.

The final straw for me was seeing the promoters of medical quacks speaking their brains, or rather lack of them,using Yellow Vests to promote a cancer cure charlatan called David Noakes. There was one man in particular wearing a Yellow Vest emblazoned with the words ‘David Noakes Jailed for Curing Cancer’. I thought, that’s an odd thing to wear on a demo that keeps getting promoted by its supporters as a ‘Brexit protest’. I did wonder whether this David Noakes fellow was some sort of woo peddler and the wearer of the ‘Noakes’ yellow vest was a woo acolyte? Little to my surprise as it turned out, I was correct and I did recall where I had come across the name ‘David Noakes’ before. He was indeed a woo peddler, a former computer consultant turned biotech CEO, cooking unproven ‘cures’ for cancer and HIV among other things and doing so in an environment that didn’t pass sanitary inspection.

Noakes was caught out using blood products unfit for human consumption in his products and was alleged on occasion to have decanted his own blood onto his company’s production line. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulation Agency impounded his products and eventually prosecuted Noakes for breaches of medicine production protocols. Noakes ducked and dived a bit promoting his woo elsewhere, including in Switzerland, where a clinic used his cancer treatment ideas right up until the Swiss authorities closed the clinic down after five patients died. Noakes was gaoled for 15 months in November 2018 at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty to charges of money laundering and of manufacturing, supplying and selling an unlicensed medicine.

It was the presence of those promoting a cancer cure charlatan quack on this demo that firmly put the tin foil hat on this demo for me. I looked at this man and thought to myself that marching for a known cancer quack showed me that this was not a serious protest but merely a jolly for the small number of people involved. I’ve marched for some odd causes over the years in Whitehall. I’ve turned out for everything from ‘Release Tommy’ right through to protesting for the right for adult men to nail their scrota to a floorboard if that is what they so choose to do for kicks. However out of all the causes I’ve supported over the years, and some like nuclear disarmament I repent of, at least I’ve never marched in support of a cancer quack charlatan, like one of the Yellow Vest protesters did.

When the Yellow Vest movement started out in Britain I had a little hope that it could have grown and attracted the vast majority of people who suffer because of bad government policies but feel alienated from politics. I gave the Yellow Vest movement a very cautious welcome because I knew it could go either one of two ways. It could be broad enough to appeal to those outside of friendship groups and political activists, promote sensible policies that stood a reasonable chance of getting support and gave a voice to the many Britons who sadly today consider themselves to be voiceless. If it had done that, it could have grown. Unfortunately the Yellow Vest movement has done the opposite. It has become a haven for those with very niche political axes to grind and also those conspiraloons who see the Yellow Vest movement as a new soapbox from which to promulgate their ideas.

I am a conservative, a patriot, an opponent of the ideology of Islam. I am a Brexiteer, I believe in freedom of speech and the right to practise peaceful religions, I even, unlike some, want freedom of speech for conspiraloons, but I see nothing in this particular incarnation of the Yellow Vest movement that makes me want to don a Yellow Vest and join them. I have nothing in common with those who march in support of quacks in possession of a death toll, or conspiracy theorists (some with a distinct ‘Rothschild’ flavour) or those whose grief is being exploited and on whom legal fantasies are being pushed. The only thing Brexit related about this demo is the aforementioned half hearted Brexit chant.

This Yellow Vest demo was promoted by many, including from what I can gather the organisers, as an authentic working class Brexit demonstration. It was nothing like that. It was an embarrassment. I’m all in favour of Britain taking control of our laws, finances and borders. I want to see Islam put back in its box and its threat to us reduced just as many other Britons want and I’m quite prepared to go out and peacefully demonstrate for that if necessary. However I will not turn out and protest with a group like the UK Yellow Vests in their current incarnation. They have become a magnet for those with insane conspiracy theories about fraud, the law and the state gaoling cancer doctors. I really don’t want to be associated with crap like that, I think I’ve got more sense than that. If I’m going to protest these days, I like to turn out to protest real problems such as Islamic terror, and Islamic Rape Gangs. Things like these along with electoral fraud, and freedom of speech are worth protesting about, as is the increasing encroachment of ‘offence culture’ into Britain’s legal system.

I worried that when the Yellow Vest movement started in the UK it could end up as a loon magnet and I’m afraid that judging by the result of Saturday’s demonstration,that is what it has become. I do think that there is a need to protest for Brexit and to protest against the myriad problems that ordinary people face in Britain today, but these Yellow Vest groups attract too many oddballs to enable this to be the most effective vehicle of protest. As I said at the beginning of this article, an overview of the Yellow Vest movements only gives one picture but quite another when examined more closely. With regards to the British Yellow vest movement, when examined closer up, it seems that only the gullible and those with very niche axes to grind seem to be flocking to their cause.

I am glad that we got to see this demo but I am also glad that we were all dressed conservatively enough not to be mistaken as participants in it This was less a Brexit demo than it was entertainment for those enjoying a pint outside the pubs and for the tourists. It would be unkind, but sadly accurate, to wonder whether some of the tourists went away with the impression that this was a day out for the more trustworthy inmates of an asylum or some sort of conceptual art performance. After all marching for lost causes, iffy conspiracy theories and quack doctors interspersed with shouting the word ‘Brexit’, could indeed look like some conceptual art project, it certainly looked mad to me.

Take my word for it. I was there. If you are a sensible Brexiteer and want to protest then find another way of doing so, rather than get dragged into a yellow vest movement that is achieving nothing apart from calling mockery onto themselves. Brexiteers deserve a much better protest than this yellow vest shit show.

Below are a couple of rough (very rough) images and video showing the small size of this demo.