March of the unbeleavers
What did they want? A ‘People’s Vote’... with a nice Waitrose picnic
FOR A moment, I thought I’d stumbled into a vast camping expedition – a slow-moving tide of fleeces, anoraks, walking boots and sandwiches.
Yesterday’s People’s Vote march was a resolutely middle-class affair.
From all across the UK, they came to demand we overturn the largest democratic vote in the history of our nation.
They were all hell-bent on having a second referendum.
Many on the packed pavements of Central London were decidedly mature in years, flasks of tea and Waitrose quiche at the ready.
One sported a blue beret decorated with yellow stars, armed with a banner reading: ‘Listen to the young!’ Irony alert: she was about 80. Even the dogs were decked out in EU flags.
There was a younger, Instagramfriendly crowd, too, dressed in hipster tracksuits. And a proliferation of young children draped in EU propaganda and waving placards about safeguarding their future, hastily put together at the family craft table.
Joining proceedings were comedians Steve Coogan and Sandi Toksvig, while a predictable entourage of Remain politicians, including Sadiq Khan, Anna Soubry and Caroline Lucas, were also there.
We were told, breathlessly, that the initial count showed more than a million people were marching. The biggest protest march in UK history!
But, well, it wouldn’t be the first time such figures have been inflated. Let’s not forget the second Brexit referendum march in October 2018, which organisers claimed had more than 700,000 marchers, when the Greater London Authority put the number at a far more realistic 250,000.
Sophisticated analysis by the website countingcrowds.co.uk, using images of October’s march, suggested the true number was closer to 82,000. Should the same apply to yesterday’s rally, there might have been as few as 120,000 on the streets.
What I will concede, however, is that – for a political protest – the People’s Vote was by far one of the politest events I’ve ever been to.
For every rude poster – shouting ‘Brexs**t’, for instance – there were placards that merely fawned over the EU. Even when the crowds chanted ‘b ******* to Brexit’ there was no snarl.
They could have been ordering the gnocchi in Carluccio’s.
To catch my breath amid the wellordered chaos, I did what any trueblooded Brit would do – I went off in search of a restorative cup of tea. The elegant cafes of Mayfair were thronging with ravenous Remainers and their salads were laced with bulgur wheat.
Inside a particularly posh joint, I listened as all hell broke loose when a revolutionary told a waiter off for getting her latte order wrong.
Her hand was decorated in flashy silver rings; on her bosom was a badge reading ‘Cancel Brexit’.
Suitably refreshed, I continued along the protest route, which took Europhiles away from Park Lane towards St James’s Street and Pall Mall.
If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I might be inclined to suggest the march was designed to promote London’s most elite retail establishments.
It was a veritable tour of the best in bespoke men’s tailoring, cigar finery and the most expensive shaving sets I’ve ever seen. And no one even tried to loot them!
Music kept everyone’s spirits up, even if it was sometimes the theme tune from EastEnders, being blasted from a megaphone by two teenage girls.
‘Why are you playing that?’ I asked one of them. ‘Why not?’ she replied, nonchalant, her revolutionary spirit spilling over into outright confrontation.
Otherwise, it was classical music with all its pomp and circumstance that kept the crowds marching.
A man boldly played the 9th Symphony by Beethoven, the EU’s anthem, albeit without the support of an orchestra. In fact, his musical device looked a bit like a kazoo.
He messed it up, much to the amusement of the hundreds within earshot.
Of course, many Remainers came across as rational in their protests – they adore the EU and don’t want to leave. But a lot appeared to have completely lost the plot. There was, for instance, the man whose placard read: ‘If Brexit is the will of the people, then I’m a giraffe’. He wore a plastic giraffe mask.
Others seemed to be using the occasion as an excuse for fancy dress; there was a little boy dressed as an astronaut and someone with a pineapple on their head. An Elvis impersonator weaved through the crowds on a bicycle, a Welsh flag protruding from his panier.
For a moment, I could almost forget the real revolution happening just down the road in Westminster – where hard choices and intransigence could soon cost us a Prime Minister and leave the fate of Britain on a knife edge.
For some, yesterday seemed to be a jolly excuse for a day trip to London.
At another popular refuge point – the Hard Rock Cafe – I talked to Emma Fry, 44, who told me she had come in from Bristol, with an army of friends from other parts of the country.
A young couple said they’d come from Hampshire, and Marrion Welham, from the Norfolk-Suffolk border, warned ominously that ‘this
whole saga had been dictated by hard Right-wing Research Group MPs...’ and that Remainers had been ‘not really been given a voice’.
Clearly she hasn’t been watching too many shows on the BBC.
I worried, as a woman who – at 5ft 2in – is far from imposing, that I’d feel intimidated in these crowds. On the contrary, I was rather embraced. I even made the ultimate faux pas: I told people I’d voted for Brexit. It could easily have got ugly. Expecting looks of horror – and perhaps a thrown quiche – I received only sympathetic glances and civility.
This was strangely reassuring – the country may be divided, but at least we’re not thumping each other. Yet.