SEPTEMBER SONGS PART II

2

What Do We Want?
No SWP Placards!

Saturday and the March for Europe. London can feel like a small place sometimes for I meet my next door neighbour amongst a relatively small group assembled in Park Lane. The mood is subdued and I begin to fear that a degree of despondency and defeatism may have set in. This soon changes as we get underway and as more and more people join in; by the time we approach Trafalgar Square the mood is confident even ebullient, as the mass of people, a snake, stretching far behind and in front of me.

Regular readers will know that I am not really a marching sort of person, too self-conscious  to be shouting or singing. However this one feels different, this is not the usual 'Protests R Us ' crowd, these are people who only protest as a last resort. Disproportionately, though not exclusively , white and middle class, the atmosphere is consequently polite and we’ll mannered. After the exchanges I have recently had on Twitter, with both Corbynites and the Brexit crowd, this is a welcome relief, as is the absence of the normally ubiquitous SWP placards.

What do such protests achieve? Well, I think it depends on who’s doing the protesting. There is a difference between the mass battalions of the SWP and NHS midwives,for example, the latter likely to gain more public support and consequently put more pressure on MPs than the former.  

What governments really fear however is the reluctant middle-class protesters, in short people who vote and tend to be small c conservatives. When these people came out against the poll tax, the tax was dead. This is the strength of the March for Europe and depending how negotiations pan out may begin to make an impact on the government’s attitude towards leaving the EU.

As the devastating Japanese critique of Brexit emerged yesterday and the potential scale of the impact on the UK economy of full severance dawns, it is clear that these proceedings are far from over. 

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