As an antidote to all the b***s*** which usually permeates this country where the Monarchy is concerned, I decided to join the Republican protest on the South Bank of the Thames, near Tower Bridge. Both sides of the Thames were cordoned off, tickets only. Most of the flag-waving crowd had been allowed onto the site first, with a couple of hundred protesters getting in early. Mid-day was the official start time, but the gates to the area were closed long before that. When I arrived, I noticed a small group with T-shirts and loudhailers and followed them, but, after trying to get through the cordon, we ended up outside a gate where we were told we were not to be admitted for health and safety reasons as too many had already gone through. Someone on the inside was contacted and came along with banners for us to hold and we staged our own little demo:
All very well and good, but hardly a real protest. We numbered about fifty until another, much larger, group joined us, swelling the numbers to about two hundred:
In the end it was claimed about a thousand, but five hundred, inside and out, was about right.
As for the cause, well, personally, I don't like the idea of being told, literally or otherwise, to know my place. If this country is going to be one worth living in, and it
is the country of William Blake and Thomas Paine, all the unearned and inherited privilege and corruption (witness the tip of the iceberg that is the
Leveson Inquiry) has to be got rid of. And that starts at the top. When people say that this is not a popular protest it's worth remembering that appeasing Hitler in the 1930's was a very popular government policy and that overwhelming majority were
against legalising homosexuality in the 1960's. The majority are not always right.
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