‘Na-zi scum!’ Na-zi scum!’ ‘Na-zi scum!’ Who? Me? How come? I’m on my way to a genteel picnic in St James’s Park and appear to have strayed into the path of a virtue-signalling tsunami. A wall of raggedy demonstrators clutching anti-fascist banners inch their way towards me, faces contorted with self-righteous fury. ‘Move to the side NOW’ a truncheon-wielding cop leaps to my rescue, manhandling me to the safety of a tourist-laden Whitehall pavement. ‘What’s going on?’ I ask, as a pot of humus spills from my Sainsbury’s bag. ‘Freedom of speech rally,’ he replies, handing me the broken tub of dip. ‘The anti-fascists aren’t happy about it.’ ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Dunno mate, I just want to go home.’
At the other end of Whitehall behind a more sedate line of weary-looking cops, I find a well-behaved, mainly middle-aged crowd quietly waving union jacks. One supporter outside the gates of Downing Street is holding aloft a tatty homemade sign written in scratchy biro that reads: ‘The Establishment is undermining democracy’. None of your glossy expensively-produced Socialist Worker signage over on this side of the argument. A crowd of several hundred listen intently as a young Muslim woman makes an impassioned speech about what she sees as the mayor’s relaxed attitude to Islamic extremism: ‘Sadiq Khan’s London is open to unmonitored mosques where girls are beaten, raped and sexually abused,’ she claims. The crowd boo their disapproval. ‘Sadiq Khan’s London,’ she continues, ‘is open to those who wish to practice FGM and to rape gangs with no intervention from the law.’ Referring to the chanting anti-fascist mob the other side of the cenotaph, she poses the question: ‘Who are the real Nazis here? Us? Or the thugs trying to close down our freedom of speech.’ You know you’ve arrived at some kind of politically polarised crossroads when a moderate Muslim woman is accusing a group of tolerance-and-diversity-obsessed, anti-islamophobes of being Nazis…at a rally for free speech.
Expectations of the ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’ crowd before me are further shattered when they welcome to the stage a butch drag queen who proceeds to belt out a camp show-tune-style eulogy to freedom of expression. The new leader of Ukip, Gerard Batten, has the tricky task of bringing the slightly bewildered crowd back to earth with a sober examination of what free speech actually means in practice. He begins by reading from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the passage about everyone having the right to freedom of opinion and expression. At which point I overhear a fresh-faced comedian from Birmingham telling a Football Lads Alliance supporter about how he recently had his freedom of speech curtailed after posting a joke about Muhammad on Facebook: ‘It was a sunny Saturday morning and I was sitting in my dressing gown feeling hung over. Suddenly, five police officers appeared at my front door and proceeded to search the house for weapons.’ During the search, one of the cops spotted a breadknife and asked what it was for, ‘I told him it was for cutting bread and occasionally pizza.’ Next thing he knows, the young man is at his local police station being questioned for fifteen hours without, he claims, access to a solicitor. Back on stage, Batten is bemoaning the left’s tendency to name-call anyone they happen to disagree with. He seems particularly outraged by the woolly-worded Crown Prosecution Service’s definition of a hate crime. To demonstrate the absurdity of what he sees as the latest infringement of civil liberties, Batten decides to commit a hate crime of his own, live, in front of hundreds of witnesses and an army of tetchy coppers. A small platoon of plods marches nervously through the crowd in anticipation. ‘I hate Communism,’ Batten declares proudly, ‘and I hate what communism has done to the world.’ It remains to be seen whether Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell will be offended enough to press charges.
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