If Winston Churchill was right, and the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance, then we’re eff-you-sea-kayed. I’d put Kill the Bill attendance yesterday at Nottingham’s Forest Recreation Ground at 400 tops.
Still, there was energy aplenty in those who did come. The groups most fearful, and rightly so, of this latest step – Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – of our sleepwalk to tyranny were all there. In descending order of numeric strength (by my rough and ready assessment) these included Reclaim These Streets, BLM, XR, SWP, other left groups, and a small trade union presence.
*
* * *
Not dissimilar in terms of numbers and notable absences to the Sheffield event earlier the same afternoon.
About four to six hundred. Mainly young. Contingents of students with professionally made rent strike banners etc; a few trade union banners with same. No evidence we could see of any Labour Party presence. Didn’t see a single LP banner or even home made placard referencing the LP. Nor, for that matter any of the other what might more accurately be described as the organised political gangsters like the Lib-Dems or, increasingly so these days, the Greens.
Very revealing.
Yes, interesting. Despite Reclaiming These Streets being the largest Kill Bill presence on Saturday (though I’m playing fast and loose by allotting all overtly feminist turnout to RTS) this was a markedly more youthful gathering than for the Sarah vigil two weeks earlier, though that was an overtly RTS event.
As for Labour Party attendees, maybe they’d fear expulsion as antisemites, transphobes and baby-eaters.
It would be difficult to make that latter charge stick for those remaining LP members who are either vegetarian or vegan.
Not necessarily impossible though given that the cultural zeitgeist doesn’t do neither evidence based inquiry nor due process. An allegation being sufficient for an automatic guilty verdict and the modern version of outlawing the insufficienly pure (cancelling).
I’ll just go outside and launch mesen off the ducking stool onto’t spiked railings shall I?