This world needs much more of this sort of gathering; they keep governments off guard. From Philip Patrick at dailyskeptic.org:
100,000, 150,000, 500,000, a million, three million? An estimate of the size of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in central London on Saturday is evidently challenging, perhaps impossible. (All these figures have been claimed somewhere.) The drone footage looks like a CGI representation of a massed army from Lord of the Rings. Then there are the at least one-and-a-half million who were following events on livestreams. But does the figure really matter? Suffice to say the numbers who were there, and those that would have liked to have been there, were extraordinary – historic even – and far surpassed the expectations of the police or the mainstream media. A better question might be: what does it all mean?
I was there for much of it. So packed did it become that I had to almost fight my way out. (I had a train to catch.) This was a bit of a problem as the police had sealed off most of Whitehall making it very hard to leave. The idea seemed to be to create empty buffer zones to prevent confrontations with rival protestors. Fair enough perhaps, but the cordoned-off area was simply too small, leading to gridlock and a certain amount of panic. I only got out after feigning a heart problem and claiming my wife was on the other side of the thin blue line with my medication. My Oscar-worthy performance worked, testament to what I found was the overall reasonableness of the police.
But they were close to being overwhelmed at times and one take-away message from the day is that the authorities underestimated the breadth and depth of feeling of people in UK who oppose the direction the country seems to be taking. The rally was called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ and the proliferation of Union Jacks, flags of St George, Saltires and Welsh Dragons evidenced the UK-wide appeal of this event – not just how frustrated people feel, but a renewed spirit of Unionism, too.
The few will use self inflicted Polycrisis for the police state solution?
Problem-crisis-solution because old stale playbooks is all the “elite” know.