let no one tell you that this was just a London crowd...“If I didn’t do something I felt I would regret it for the rest of my life,” [a marcher] said, voicing the sentiment of many....“When you talk to ardent Leavers and you meet them on the street, or by a riverbank where they are fishing or whatever, you find you can have a proper conversation,” he said. “And that’s something we all need to do in the coming days.”...Like many of the marchers, he felt that if nothing else walking had been a good way of avoiding the stress and frustrations of watching the news. “I thought, if I am sitting at home on Twitter for the next three weeks I am going to go insane.”...
That feeling was shared by those expats who had flown in from the continent ...“If no-deal happens then the next morning we will become what the Italian government now calls an ‘illegal resident’,” she said, a status that will affect everything about her life from driving a car to continuing to run her training business....I never thought I would become addicted to Parliament TV, but I have.”
Harris, a landscape designer who works on both sides of the [Irish] border every week, also felt he had to be here rather than shouting at the television. “It is clear that either no deal or her deal will leave things in Northern Ireland up in the air for years,” he said. “I fear we will spend the next decades just trying to get back the freedoms we have given away.”...Like many on the march his priority had changed in the past week or so, with the options narrowing and the cliff-edge looming, and the online petition to revoke article 50 climbing towards 5 million signatures. “Revoke would now be number one, number two people’s vote,” he said. That idea had travelled in this crowd. Variations of the three Rs populated signs and banners: revoke, remain and reform....
There have been many attempts to divide the respective Leave and Remain tribes since the referendum ...One of the simplest distinctions, however, has always seemed to come down to that division between those who relish the idea of being cheek-by-jowl with people unlike themselves, and those who feel threatened by that idea.... The people who had come to demonstrate voiced, above all, a conviction, to borrow that telling phrase from Jo Cox, “that we have more in common than that which divides us”. (Cox, it goes without saying, would have loved this event. Her killer would have loathed it.)
I had spoken to [a WW2 veteran] brigadier the day before the march about his reasons for coming. “It was an easy decision,” he said. “There is not much time left for me to do anything and I just feel if we can even at this late stage get people thinking sensibly, then it will be worthwhile.” His great anxiety, as a former controller of the Slimbridge Wildlife Trust, was that our fractured politics would deflect us from the co-operative spirit required to combat climate change.
It was impossible watching that sight not to make some comparisons with those few stubborn souls on the ill-fated “March to Leave”, moved to trudge along lonely hard-shoulders by Nigel Farage, only to find that he had turned up for the photo opportunity and left them to fend for themselves. Farage, alive to BBC requirements for “balance”, had returned to preach on Saturday to his handful of leaderless footsoldiers at a pub car park in Linby, Nottinghamshire: “You are the 17.4 million,” he told a crowd of 150...there was, contrarily, a spirit that the Brexiters have failed over the past three years ever to begin to convey: that of creative optimism. You saw it in the 100 and more tango dancers led by Matthew Cooper, who had met in growing numbers on each of the past three protest marches, aged between 20 and 80. And in the improvised speeches on freedom given by an Emmeline Pankhurst lookalike under the statue of the suffragette. And even in the bloke flogging Donald Trump toilet rolls from a shopping trolley to stockpile should the rationing begin...There was a very droll Britishness in the spirit that tempered any edges of anger from the many younger voices on the march.
Watching the crowd I was reminded of a book I reviewed for this paper not long after those electoral convulsions of 2016 here and across the Atlantic. The book, On Tyranny, by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, was a little survival guide against the digital forces of populism and the brutalist politics they promoted. Snyder called above all for a “corporeal politics” in response, for voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; for face-to-face conversation, and for marching rather than online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”
Overall:
you cannot fake an almighty crowd...the Put it to the People march represented a formidable sea of humanity, and a powerful strength of feeling....Their collective message served as a reminder that when the prime minister stands up again this week and claims to speak for “the people” with her unloved deal and her fingernails-down-the-blackboard phrases about delivering Brexit, she will not speak for the million individuals who filled the wide streets and squares of the capital yesterday, or for the millions more across the country who were with them in spirit.
I was as much interested by the apparent inlfuence of social media or TV in kindling these genuine emotions and panics; the recognition of the symbolic and therapeutic dimensions (they had to do something to feel better); the slip in the mask that this is about a PV but more about 'the three Rs'; the opportunistic commercial aspects; the propagandist link with J Cox; the phatic elements ( young, wildlife; the contrasts with Leavers (uncomfortable with foreigners, pathetic Faragists); the literary reference in contrast to the stupidly selective 'sample' (including two with special interests, an expats and an Irish borderer); fantasy politics (end Brexit to stop climate change).
More on reasons for marching in yet another article:
the world is in a very dangerous situation and leaving Europe just fragments it further – that leads to disastrous politics. So I hope – though I doubt – that Theresa May will listen to this huge objection to her strategy. So many more people now are aware of what the issues are – the collapse of our car manufacturing industry, banks going everywhere and anyone with any money is getting it out of the UK. We have to stop this or it will be disastrous for our country, our children and our future.[Blimey -- I can see the sense in this case -- it's from an Army vet aged 80]
As a person who will still be in the EU even after Britain leaves [she's an Irish student at Glasgow Uni] , I think it’s important to have connections with the country I live in [what sort of connections?]. I’m lucky that because of the Good Friday agreement I won’t have to apply for settled status after Brexit but I have friends from other European countries who don’t know what’s happening. For me, the EU means the freedom to move around [Iron curtains after Brexit?].
[A psychotherapist] This country is in crisis and what happens when people are in crisis? They come out to support each other, even if they’re stressed, even if they’re struggling. We’re not an army but we can get up on our feet like an army to let the politicians know. This march is a way of saying we care about the wellbeing of the whole country, because Brexit is going to affect everybody. [We care, oh how we care! Nasty old stressful politics!]
I’m fed up with hearing Theresa May talk about the numbers who voted to leave, when it was such a small majority [!]. The “will of the people” is not all one way. For me, the EU means being part of something bigger, not fighting each other.[ Make do with some other imagined community the? NATO? Eurovision Song Contest?]
In 2016 I campaigned to remain. Unfortunately, we lost so now I’m doing all I can to get us the best deal possible on leaving – or, if possible, have a second referendum. I think today will definitely be a success in terms of alerting the government to how many people care about this issue. So many people have been disenfranchised in this process and we want our voices to be heard...I am angry about what’s happened and I’m angry that the parties can’t put aside their politics and listen to what people have to say. This is the true voice of the people.
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