WELL, what a week it’s been, not helped for me by tripping on an uneven pavement on Wednesday morning and whacking my kneecap. Was I mad even to think about going to the Unite the Kingdom rally on Saturday, I asked myself on Wednesday night as I stuck on another ice pack and swallowed two more Nurofen. But for Starmer’s tyrannical crackdown on free speech – banning 13 overseas politicians and journalists from attending I think I might have chickened out and watched it on the live stream.
I was still hobbling and in pain on Thursday when the news came that the Met Police were going to deploy facial recognition ‘oppression’ for this protest but not a nearby Palestinian protest (booked and, extraordinarily, agreed to much later in the day). Friday morning brought the news that the Canadian journalist and broadcaster Ezra Levant, friend of Tommy Robinson, had also been banned from entering the country and reporting the rally. Another person Starmer and Shabana deemed to be ‘not conducive to the public good’. Suddenly just turning up, in defiance of these Stasi tactics, became a matter of the utmost freedom-of-speech principle in and of itself.
All that on my mind on Friday evening, ice-packing my knee in preparation while watching David Starkey’s interview with Tommy Robinson, the phone rang. One of the Rally’s organisers was on the other end of line. Would I speak? Losing 13 planned speakers had left a bit of a hole. I agreed. We have to close ranks. Letting Starmer win is not an option.
But it meant shelving the TCW ‘week in review’ if I was going to have time to write a speech instead. Which is why am handing you over to the great Dr David Starkey and the interview I’d just been watching. His introductory comments couldn’t set the scene better:
‘As the country watches the pitiful and inevitable collapse of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership, one aspect of his paltry attempts to revive his leadership went unnoticed. Speaking on Monday in his last frenzied bid to turn things around, the Prime Minister singled out a particular event for opprobrium and a crackdown using the full force of the Home Office. The Unite the Kingdom march, an event organised by Tommy Robinson, stunned the establishment last year when it brought some 150,000 [Kathy’s note – aerial photography of last year’s march suggested nearer a million, contrary to legacy media reporting] people on to the streets of London to call for a reclamation of and a renewed pride in our national identity. This Saturday the march returns to London for a second time. While the Metropolitan Police has decided it can go ahead, left-wing MPs have been clamouring for a harder line. Starmer, desperate to appease them after the drubbing he took in the local elections, has given in to them: banning several overseas activists from entering the country to attend the protest on the grounds that their presence in the UK is “not conducive to the public good”. These include members of the European Parliament. Today, I’m speaking to the event organiser Tommy Robinson to get his views about why he became the subject of the Prime Minister’s attention, even amid the collapse of his entire government. It would appear that to his very last breath, the Prime Minister is determined to uphold the two-tier system he has been so instrumental in creating.’
Starkey opens by asking Robinson: ‘What are you actually marching for that Starmer is so hostile to? Why are they so frightened?’
It’s a good question, and Robinson’s answers deserve a hearing and discussion that should be out in the open, publicly discussed and debated and not otherwise repressed or censored. You can see the interview here.
When you read this the rally will be over. Please check the website to read my report tomorrow.
