RENT-A-MOB BRINGS HATRED TO THE STREETS
AT MANCHESTER’S Piccadilly railway station, a ‘F*** the Tories flash mob’ led by a ‘commoners’ choir’ from Leeds greeted delegates with such catchy numbers as: ‘People ask what makes me tick; it’s Boris Johnson’s head upon a stick!’
On nearby streets, shouty trade unionists carried large black placards that read ‘Tory scum out!’
Some of the more inventive ones included an image of Jacob ReesMogg with a crossbow bolt buried in his head and the word ‘c***’ etched on his forehead. charmingly, young children sat just in front of this grisly image waving anti-Tory placards of their own.
Such were the highlights of the welcome that greeted conservatives arriving for this week’s annual conference. Those delegates had already been treated to the sight of a banner spanning the River Irwell in Salford, which read ‘hang the Tories’, along with a couple of effigies of men in suits wearing nooses round their necks.
The well-organised demonstration of Jeremy corbyn’s ‘kinder, gentler politics’ has seen the city centre transformed into a fortress, with several blocks encased in riot fencing, concrete bollards, and checkpoints manned by 1,000 coppers.
At a cost of £2million, police have created a ‘ring of steel’ to prevent a repeat of scenes that occurred last
time Britain’s governing party chose to grace Manchester with its presence. That was in 2015, four months after the Tories had won an election, when delegates queuing up for security checkpoints were pelted with eggs, and journalists including the BBC’s Michael Crick were spat at.
Yesterday’s fun and games consisted of not one but two separate mass protest marches.
One was an anti-Brexit affair headlined by the Lib Dem leader Vince Cable; the other an edgier demonstration by assorted trade unionists, communists, Maoists, and anarchists, which was officially laid on by a group called the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
The pro-EU shindig was an orderly, metropolitan affair, attended by lots of middle-class white people who brought proper picnics and marched behind an expensive-looking carnival float topped with a papier-mache model of various Cabinet ministers.
The anti-austerity gang were an altogether more threatening lot who spent their afternoon shouting ‘Tory Scum Out!’, and included a hard core of several dozen angry young people who decided to dress from head to toe in black and cover their faces with balaclavas.
Conference delegates unfortunate to cross their path were met with a volley of abuse. The BBC’s political correspondent Chris Mason was, for example, invited to ‘go f*** off out of our city!’
At one point, things threatened to turn ugly as around 50 officers blocked off a side street to prevent a van covered in loudspeakers playing drum and bass music from joining the march. Its owners, a group wearing face masks and black overalls, duly spent an hour chanting ‘let us out!’
As tensions rose, a police helicopter began circling overhead, while a second group of protestpoint
‘Faces covered in balaclavas’
ers carrying Soviet flags started letting off red smoke bombs.
Later, the same group popped up in St Peter’s Square, carrying a banner urging opponents of socialism to ‘get in the sea’.
Riot police on horses eventually forced them to disperse. Journalists are supposed, at this stage, to out that this minority of trouble-makers had nothing to do with the vast majority of marchers hoping to exercise their right to peaceful protest.
But spend an afternoon hanging out with Mr Corbyn’s foot-soldiers and you’ll quickly realise things aren’t quite as simple as that.
For all their energy, there is a dark underbelly to their brand of protest-driven politics.
The Labour Party is, after all, being run by John McDonnell, a man who in 2010 described violent protesters as ‘the best of our movement’. It’s a sentiment that goes a long way to explaining the zealotry of the Corbynist Left.
They are the lot responsible for the fact that the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg (alleged to be insufficiently anti-Tory) had to attend last week’s Labour conference in Brighton with a bodyguard.
They are also the faction who champion such MPs as newlyelected Laura Pidcock, who charmingly declared the other day that she refuses to be friends with her Tory counterparts on the grounds that she regards them as ‘an enemy to lots of women’.
Turnout at yesterday’s protests was far smaller than organisers predicted. Told to expect more than 50,000 demonstrators, police said last night that the overall tally had been ‘up to 30,000’.
This week’s mass protests are scheduled to continue until the conference winds up on Wednesday night. A member of the ‘commoners choir’ said he was hoping for some arrests by then.