And meanwhile in the USA today has seen a range of further No Kings marches & demonstrations - if the Right thinks people will walk quietly into the fascist state they are wrong - we know what they are doing & we will not be quiet about it!

#protest #fascism #politics

@ChrisMayLA6 The worrying thing is the same police force claim the Unite the Kingdom far right hate march last year was 110,000-150,000, vs 50,000 for Together. In fact it's smaller even than Restore Nature Now - and very possibly smaller than The Big One (Earth Day 2023, XR and others), though there are no police numbers for that (probably because there were no arrests).

If that is true, it is difficult to see any hope, period. It implies the left is utterly exhausted and incompetent, or that the tactics of the left are fundamentally broken.

It means that the 70% of the population who don't want Nigel Farage as dictator for life can't even organise a protest half the size of the fascist, openly xenophobic rally last year at which there was significant violence, even with considerable help from the recent actions of the Donald, demonstrating once again that fascist strongmen always start illegal wars sooner or later.

Most of the 25 arrests today were for Palestine Action which wasn't really part of the main march; those 18 arrests will probably become irrelevant when the appeal finally goes through, and the others were small fry.

And sure, there are some people who buy into the whole "flags equals patriotism" thing. So you could argue that numbers for Unite the Kingdom are explained by misplaced patriotism.

But that implies that the so-called patriots, presumably the kind that think the British Empire was a good idea, also ignore the whole burning down hotels with intent to cause death thing (granted not at Unite the Kingdom, but there were 27 arrests mostly for somewhat serious violence, as you'd expect with "Tommy Robinson"'s brownshirts). Plus Unite the Kingdom of course saw the usual "all immigrants are paedophiles" incitement to violence, as we've seen in many recent far right / anti-refugee protests. So people who attended Unite the Kingdom can reasonably be described as fascists.

People who attended Together are, mostly, anti-fascists. (The view across the Atlantic is obviously horrifying!)

If the Met numbers are correct, the far right demo last year was twice the size of today's march. And that's *extremely* worrying.

Meanwhile the organisers claim half a million for Together, while Farage claims half a million for Unite the Kingdom, though others claim 150,000.

Who to believe? This is a classic case of flooding the zone with shit, but I suspect political bias on the part of the Met here. If so, we have to ask why - 1) infiltration by the far right, 2) pressure from government (which part of it?), or 3) some misguided attempt to compensate for accusations of "two-tier policing" (there are good reasons why the DFLA et al tend to get a heavier police presence than many left wing groups!)...

Nonetheless it felt big. It started two hours over schedule because of a large feed-in from the Palestine/Iran contingent.

(Sorry for the number of edits, it's been a very long day!)

@ChrisMayLA6 It felt big, but not as big as the Brexit protests back in the day. Hard to judge if it was bigger or smaller than the ‘Tommy' march. Borderline maybe. Didn't feel like half a million... but much bigger than 50k.

For context I am a protest photographer who often sees both the front and back of protests and have a rough idea how long it takes them all to file into whitehall.

The music event in Trafalgar Square also made judging numbers difficult since people were going into that before the march even arrived.

@ChrisMayLA6 The police figure should be ignored as it is a bareface lie. I've attended large protests in London (with 10,000, 50,000, 70,000, 100,000, 500,000) for decades, and only an idiot would imagine as low as 50,000 attending this one. The march was still filtering into Whitehall when the end of the event was announced from the stage!

Some unknown number of people never even made it to Whitehall or Trafalgar before they had to return to their coaches. So don't "average" from a falsehood!