Unite for Freedom March 28th August 2021

Protesters going under a bridge reading 'Come in Love', London.

So I finally, after months of saying I was going to go to one of the big anti-medical tyranny protests in London, actually went to one.

I arrived at Hyde Park about 1 o’clock, so most of the crowd had already gathered at this point. I don’t want to hazard a guess as to the size. Later on, I filmed some of it walking past but I don’t think I got close to the actual size.

Protesters in Hyde Park, London. The image is framed by foliage.

The approach taken by the organisers this time was a march throughout London (a long one at that). There was criticism of the last event for having speakers not likely to appeal to ordinary people (such as Gareth Icke) and having the same line up as a year ago. It was also criticised for bringing up issues that don’t seem obviously related to medical tyranny to the ordinary person.

I don’t know the organisers, but I would guess that they took this criticism into account when organising this protest. There were no speakers this time, just a march that lasted from 1.15 until 4.00. The advertising also seemed a bit more focussed on specifically vaccine passports and medical tyranny. Before the march, there were also people handing out free t-shirts stating ‘Against Vaccine Passports’ (this is the website). Quite a few people had them on. It did make the message a bit more focussed, although the signs still varied.

I ended up near the front of the march because I arrived near dead last.

Man in front wearing a blue 'Against Vaccine Passports' T shirt, Sikh man wearing a turban waves a flag. Union Jack is present in the background.

The walking route from Hyde Park to Clapham Common is quite long anyway, over an hour apparently. The route taken by the march was not the most direct one, as it went via The Oval and Brixton.

The march started off going through Wellington Arch.

Wellington Arch, London, with protesters walking through it. Police vans are on the left.

I don’t exactly know what route the march took, all I can say is that I wasn’t familiar with the landmarks. Which doesn’t mean much as I’m not a Londoner.

Instead I will offer some reflections on the march.

The mainstream media like to portray people who are sceptical of the Official Covid Narrative as fitting into a particular box – generally middle-aged white people sympathetic to Brexit (or ‘Gammons’ as they are mocked by the woke brigade). Having attended this march, and other previous anti-lockdown events in Birmingham, this is not true. The mix of people was pretty broad, including all ages and races and different religions.

As far as I could tell there were also different political ideologies at the march – though of course you cannot tell political ideologies by looking at people. Right wing people were more prominent in the symbols displayed. There were a couple of pro-Trump flags and the Heritage Party – led by David Kurten – were also in attendance. There were also a few signs referring to medical tyranny as ‘communism’ – though also some (more accurately) analogising medical tyranny to Nazism.* The established left wing groups – as I have pointed out in previous articles – are supporters of medical tyranny making any left wing presence there much less obvious. But there were a few indications of anarchist presense there as well. Independent media – such as UK Column and 21 Wire – were also represented in the tshirts. Most people did not seem to be promoting a specific ideology.

The second impression that mainstream media likes to give of people sceptical of the Official Covid Narrative is that they are a crazy mob of people that are full of hatred and want people to die. Again, this is not true. I saw no examples of violence or any aggression towards police or bystanders. There were a few examples of a random person from the march telling people to take off the mask, that is the most ‘aggressive’ that it got.

The third impression the mainstream media likes to give is that people who question the narrative are an extreme lunatic fringe. Again, this is not true. Of course there were people there who believe in ‘conspiracy theories’ that the general public reject (or even that I personally reject).

Large crowd of protesters. Yellow and Union Jack flags are present.

However, most passersby seemed either neutral towards the march or supportive of it. There were several examples of bystanders cheering the march that I saw, however I saw no examples of hostility such as people calling us covidiots, anti-vaxxers, or any other slurs used by the mainstream media. Now, of course, individuals could have thought that privately and not expressed that view.

In terms of the approach to the protest, I think that a march may have helped to get the anti-vaccine passport message out to more people. It would have been helpful, however, for the organisers to have announced where the march was going to end up beforehand. I did not know where I was going, which is why I stayed relatively near the front, and the only plan I had to get home was hoping that I ended up by a Tube station. Fortunately Clapham Common is on the Northern Charing Cross route so it was okay in the end, but it would have been much more convienient to know, especially for people with disabilities.

To close I will state that footage of the march is available on my Bitchute account.

[*End note: I know that someone will try to strawman this argument and claim that I am saying that Boris Johnson is Hitler, or disrespecting the Holocaust by stating this opinion. What I mean specifically by stating that this analogy is more accurate is that both Nazi Germany and modern medical tyranny demonise a group of people as unclean disease spreaders that infect the body politic with their mere presense.]

Boycott Puma Day of Action

Collection of Palestine signs propped against a tree: Boycott Puma, Free Palestine

A quick post about the Boycott Puma Day of Action that took place on the 10th of July for Palestine.

The Boycott Puma idea comes from the fact that Puma sponsors the Israeli Football Association.

As one of the world’s top athletic apparel makers and the only international sponsor of the Israel Football Association, Puma’s sponsorship brings international legitimacy to the IFA’s actions. The IFA, as documented by Human Rights Watch, includes football clubs based in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Puma’s current and past exclusive licensees in Israel have operations in illegal Israeli settlements.

The Boycott Puma action was taking place as part of a set of actions across 8th-10th July. Yesterday there was a student protest in London, going to different universities that support Israeli apartheid.

The Boycott Puma Day of Action was taking place in many different cities around the country.

There was an action in London at the Puma store located there, but most of the other actions were outside retailers that stock Puma products such as JD Sports and Sports Direct.

The Birmingham event was outside the JD sports shop in the town centre.

The event was very small. There was a table for Birmingham Stop the War coalition and one for the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. It mainly consisted of handing out leaflets to passers by. One of the organisers did try to speak through a loudspeaker on a few occasions. Unfortunately there seemed to be problems with the microphone, as it kept cutting out. Here is some footage:

(Bitchute equivalent)

Free Palestine Birmingham (Plus a little bit of Anti-Lockdown protests)

Protesters with Palestine flags in Victoria Square, Birmingham

It looks like there have been protests all over Europe in support of Palestine, from Dublin, to Amsterdam, to France. There have also been protests in the UK as well, including in London.

The actions in the UK happened to be on the same date as anti-lockdown protests. I was not aware of any organised anti-lockdown protests in Birmingham, because although the weekend of the 15th May was the regional protests as well as London, there was no Birmingham protest mentioned on the list I saw.

I went into town because I wanted to pick up some stuff, though I was on the lookout for any protest actions. At 2:30pm I started hearing a lot of noise and had a look outside, there was a reasonably large group of anti-lockdown protesters near the Waterstones bookshop.

Protesters were holding banners and signs saying ‘No More Lockdown’, signs defending children and one woman with a sign reading ‘There’s nothing more unattractive than a muzzled up obedient man’. There was also someone with one of those smiley face flags that I saw in the London protest imagery.

Woman holding sign "Wake Up! Don't be a mug. You don't need permission to have a hug." in a crowd of protesters

I assume the protest took place earlier in the day and dispersed after this because I did not see them about afterwards. I finished what I was doing in town and then decided to look around to see if there were any protest actions still going on, I started walking towards Victoria Square. I could see a large number of Palestinian flags so I moved in that direction.

As I walked towards the square, the crowd began to walk in my direction. The crowd was way larger than I expected.

Large crowd of Palestine protesters marching through the city centre. Many in the front are wearing blue masks. Sign in the background says "Stop Funding Israel".
Crowd of protesters leaving Victoria Square

The march route. I believe it was this. Marked on the Wikimedia commons (ancient) Birmingham City Centre map:

Complex image showing the route of march from Victoria Square, round the back of Victoria Magistrates' Court near the Children's Hospital and back to Victoria Square.

The crowd must have been made up of a few thousand people. This was surprising to me because when I have been to or seen Free Palestine events in the past they have been small.

It took about an hour for the crowd to get round that route and back to Victoria Square. Here are a few more photos.

Large crowd of protesters coming into Colmore Row. Signs saying Freedom for Palestine. Barclays bank is in the distance.
Colmore Row.
Protesters holding Palestine flags opposite Lloyds Bank in Birmingham City Centre
Near Station entrance (old Pallisades)
Crowd approaching Victoria square with Palestine flags. Protesters are facing the camera.
Approaching Victoria Square.

The crowd reached Victoria Square and there was chanting but there wasn’t any speeches or anything like that. There is thus not much to comment on in that regard.

Here’s Victoria Square.

Protesters in Victoria Square with Palestine Flags.

It was good to see such large protest events in support of Palestine around the country and the world. The size of such protests compared to in the past perhaps warrants further examination as to why but would require further research.

Kill The Bill Birmingham 1st May 2021

Image of Victoria Square Birmingham with protesters in background

In a previous article about Kill the Bill, I expressed my reservations about this movement. The article, hosted on OffGuardian, agreed that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is an assault on human rights and the right to protest. My disagreements with the Kill the Bill movement focused upon its failure to challenge the Official Covid Narrative – and indeed, their reinforcement of that narrative via compliance with masks and speeches supporting that narrative.

For this reason, I believe that the anti-lockdown/vaccine passport movement is the most important movement to support – along with the Free Julian Assange movement – in order to truly protect our freedoms. (In my own activism I largely focus on Assange).

I decided to attend this event in order to cover it for this website.

I was pleased to see that someone had taped up a ‘Don’t Extradite Assange’ sign among the various other taped up signs (mainly ‘Stop the War’ Coalition signs).

Tweet from my Assange account

There were not many there until about 2:10. It was tipping it down between about 1:00 and 2:00, meaning that the only people in Victoria Square were huddled at the back:

A wet Victoria Square with a few people walking towards the camera
Victoria Square about 1:30pm.

The speeches started about 2:15 and lasted until about 3:15. The rain stopped, fortunately.

The crowd size was not that large. I would guess a bit smaller than the two anti-lockdown events I have attended at Victoria Square. Guessing how large a crowd is is notoriously difficult and annoying. I would give a ballpark of 500.

A crowd in Victoria Square, Birmingham. On the left woman with a large red flag. A Palestine flag is in the background.
Victoria Square about 2:40.

Most of the speeches were pretty short, a few minutes each.

I did see aspects of the same hypocrisies in terms of Covid-19 as I highlighted in my OffGuardian article, though these were less in-your-face than at the London event. Most though not all of the attendees were complying with wearing a mask. The last speaker was the main person to address Covid directly, saying that the Tories want to ‘make us pay for the Covid crisis’. The correct thing to do, of course, is to oppose the manufacturing of the ‘Covid crisis’, rather than support that narrative. After complaining that there is no opposition in Parliament, the speaker then went on to state he was going to quote Lenin. Say what you want about Lenin, but I don’t think he would have advocated ‘Pandemic’ capitalist narratives.

The first speaker mentioned the repression at the Sarah Everard vigil as the spark for these protests. The fact that the Left reacted to this but ignored the police harassment of Piers Corbyn or even harassment of Assange supporters highlights the hypocrisy on this point. There has been no shortage of police overreach to trigger action, but the ‘nutter’ Corbyn is not deemed worth defending by the left even when he is on the receiving end of unwarranted repression. The left barely defends Assange (the likes of the Socialist Workers’ Party shack up at everything but I didn’t see many people affiliated with these socialist groups outside the Old Bailey in September/October 2020 on the four days I was able to attend the protests).

A couple of side points. Another speaker, talking about Traveller communities, compared Priti Patel to Hitler. The quote was (paraphrasing) ‘Hitler did not succeed in destroying the Romany peoples, don’t let Priti Patel succeed’ or something similar, that was the implication. I can only imagine how quickly I would get cancelled if I used a Hitler analogy in relation to Covid Tyranny. Another person talked about free speech on campuses and honest discussions of colonialism. (I agree with protecting free speech and being able to speak the truth about the British Empire, but given that this is a woke milieu, I have to wonder their view on Maya Forstater).

I did not see any examples of repression from the police though I left at 3:15 and did not go on the march afterwards.

I would rather people protest this bill than not protest it. I do not want this bill to pass because of its restrictions on protests – it says that protests can be shut down for noise reasons, which in reality means any protests that the state does not like will be called ‘too noisy’ and shut down.

But I would even more rather the left get off its arse and realise that the Official Covid Narrative has to be opposed along with the Coronavirus Act 2020. We all need to unite to oppose tyranny, and that is going to involve left wing activists uniting with the anti-lockdown movement. If this does not happen, the left will become even more irrelevant in the face of more and more ordinary people getting utterly fed up of this ‘Covid’ nonsense. Despite media manipulation, this is evident in the hundreds of thousands of attendees at the large London events against lockdowns and vaccine passports. Once you add in people who sympathise with the protests you are looking at millions of people and that number will only likely get larger as the government pushes more and more authoritarian policies.

We are in a race against time to stop the vaccine passport. If the vaccine passport is introduced, even if in a limited capacity, freedom will most likely come to an end. As Neil Clark outlines:

But if vaccine passports are introduced, even for the most limited circumstances, we can be sure of two things. The scheme won’t be ‘limited’ but will be expanded over time into a full-scale digitalised Chinese-style social credit restricted access system, AND it won’t be ‘temporary’.

Without linking up in order to fight against all forms of capitalist state tyranny I can only feel that this movement will be a failure. It’s high time the majority of the left admitted they got it wrong on Covid 19, and work to actually correct their mistake by opposing lockdowns, mandatory masks, and vaccine passports. I am forced to stick with the original conclusion of my OffGuardian piece:

Focusing entirely on this one bill is a distraction that precludes a true recognition of the biosecurity state being foisted on us through lockdowns, mandatory masks, social distancing and vaccine passports.