Tommy's Triumph

by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Britain

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Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I shall endeavour to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.

~Four years ago the last weeks of Rush Limbaugh's life played out against the ructions attending America's phony-baloney presidential "election". Rush was doubtful about the plans for a stop-the-steal rally on January 6th, and suggested that, in order for it to achieve anything, you would have to put two million people on the streets of the capital. I said I agreed: Mass protest is a numbers game.

Well, the US has a population about five times the size of the UK - although, thanks to a corrupt ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic, nobody can give a reliable figure for either country. Nevertheless, a fifth of two million is 400,000, and on Saturday Tommy Robinson certainly put that many warm bodies in front of his Unite The Kingdom rally. Indeed, at certain points in the day the crowds on the streets of Central London surging (in the face of the Brit Wanker Coppers' "incompetence") to get to the event surpassed Rush's target in actual numbers. The Guardian's preposterous estimate of 110,000 was belied by their own helicopter footage:

Donors to the event enabled Unite the Kingdom also to have their own helicopter:

For my own part, I compared the overhead shots with crowds in the Mall for coronations and Royal jubilees. There were an estimated half-a-million people on the streets of the capital for the Queen's funeral, and rather fewer for her plonker heir's grim and semi-blasphemous Coronation. Tommy Robinson the "far-right" "thug" outdrew both, combined. Millions more watched the livestreams by Dan Wootton and others.

This was all the more remarkable given the way the "authorities" jerked the organisers around. The ever more sinister Metropolitan Police randomly closed streets, bridges and Tube stations that were supposed to be open - as several attendees have noted in our comments. If after queuing for hours you did eventually make it to the north side of the Thames, it was to be shuffled along the Embankment and back south off another bridge. The most charitable interpretation of the Brit Wanker Coppers' purported "incompetence" is that Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Wanker at Scotland Yard, wished to depress turnout; the less kindly explanation is that his ad hoc idiocies were intended to provoke the attendees to mass violence - or even, given the crowd density on the streets they were permitted to enter, incite panic stampedes that would crush numerous attendees to death.

Given all the above, the forbearance and self-discipline of the protesters was amazing. And all this in a capital city in which, unlike Washington DC, the native population is all but extinct. The vast majority had, as her late Majesty used to say, "come far", and waited patiently for long hours.

On the other hand, the "Stand Up to Racism" counter-demo concede they flopped out:

Your mileage may vary. Still, I don't know why we should accept analysis of the event from "mainstream" media who weren't even there. Unlike our pal Kathy Gyngell, head honcho at the indispensable Conservative Woman, who writes:

Despite the scale of Saturday's Unite the Kingdom protest in London there were no MSM reporters there. No anchors... No BBC, ITV or Sky outside broadcast units with their celebrity reporters trying to grab interviews with the key speakers or any of the million-odd throng...

Indeed. Yet Sir Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was curious enough to show up and give a fair-minded report:

Sir Trevor's remarks were so unexceptional and obviously true that Sky News immediately took down the clip. I hope the poor chap has learned his lesson. Otherwise, he'll go the way that niche Canadian did.

Also present were a gay Jew and his husband, whose column in The Spectator is also reasonably balanced.

Nevertheless, despite pulling off the biggest free-speech rally in British history, Tommy Robinson remains persona non grata on the telly couches of the BBC, ITV, Sky and, naturally, GB News. So do all his speakers, from Katie Hopkins to Eva Vlaardingerbroek. To their credit, the dull-witted containment media seem, belatedly, to be realising that just shrieking "Fascists!" ever more queenily isn't working. The ex-BBC panjandrums from The News Agents are now fretting over whether the "convicted criminal" will be invited on the Beeb's most prestigious yakfest. But the "far-right thug" lui-même isn't exactly panting with excitement:

Agreed. Why would you want to reward media outlets that have never acted in good faith? Over the weekend, however you estimate it, the biggest free-speech rally ever held in the British Isles was covered minimally by the Beeb and others, and only from the usual skewed perspective: "Tonight on Bollocks Tonight a bare-knuckles panel of a leftie, a centre-leftie, an extreme leftie and a total nutso leftie will join me to duke it out on whether we should re-gaol Tommy Robinson or just keep him off the airwaves for another twenty years..."

One noted, even in perfunctory reports of the event, there was zero coverage of any of the issues or the content of any of the speakers.

But that isn't going to work either, is it? At the very least, it's time for Reform's Richard Tice to amend his dismissive sneer of "that lot" to "that's rather a lot". Aside from anything else, Tommy Robinson is super-focused and professional. Do you know how hard it is to organise events in the street - especially when Sir Mark Rowley's Brit Wanker Coppers keep switching thoroughfares on you? Katie Hopkins has more on that here, and she's right. The entire event went off so so smoothly that everyone thinks it's entirely normal to have giant video monitors linking Elon Musk live from the other side of the Atlantic with perfectly matched audio and in a split-screen two-shot with Tommy. As I came to know well, the craparse tosspot tech guys at GB News can't reliably do that from their own sodding control-room. When we tried to do the show from Enniskillen - which, for those who think it's in the jungles of New Guinea, is actually in the United Kingdom - the whole bloody thing collapsed after ten minutes. Tommy had just one shot to get it all right, in the face of constant provocation from coppers and jobsworths - and he pulled it off.

There will be more to say about this in the days ahead, but for now I'll leave you with two of many friends who were there for the big day. Sammy Woodhouse has had a bloody awful life, filled both with years of rape and then years of obfuscation from a corrupt establishment that has always been on the side of the rapists. When I first met her a decade ago, I enjoyed her company immensely, but remember worrying on the flight back across the Atlantic that she seemed "fragile". Ten years later, I'm the one who's totally fragile, and Sammy is one of the strongest people I've ever known. I love the shot here, a few seconds in, taken from behind, of the indomitable Miss Woodhouse looking out at the crowd:

Another Steyn Show favourite, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, was also on very good form, and plans to post the full video of her remarks. The only excerpt that's available right now has been bollocked up by some tosser adding music to the clip. Her words are powerful enough. Could you just leave them alone instead of trying to turn it into On Golden Pond?

More on all this on tomorrow's Q&A.

~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.

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