When Martin Didn’t Meet Tommy – Speakers’ Corner

Martin Mezger, Going Postal
Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park 18th March

I started this piece last Sunday night, after the event, and was intending to finish it up and send it to Swiss Bob early in the week. But we all know what happened next. On Tuesday, Markus Meechan, better known as Count Dankula was convicted at his show trial in Scotland, for the crime of telling a joke. So, a very positive free-speech event, Speakers’ Corner, was superseded by another, this time not at all positive.

I will be travelling to Birmingham this Saturday, meeting Postalleers who were at last week’s event and going to the Football Lads Alliance. I will be livestreaming the event as much as possible. Until then, I hope you’ll enjoy my account of last Sunday’s event:

I’d like to thank all my friends at Going-Postal, those who showed up today and those who supported us (and thanks for the beer tokens, SB and others). I’m proud to be a part of this place.

I got up at 07h00 and wasn’t thrilled at all to see we’d had 2 or 3 inches of snow and it was -3C and still snowing. I cooked breakfast for me, gave dog breakfast out of a box, gave dog a mercifully brief wee/poo walk, then back to the house. I bibbled around online on GP and twatter for a bit, and set up a periscope account, shat/showered/shaved, got the gear together (macbook, two go-pros, a Lumix, phone, dog food, dog water, dog poo-bags, dog lead, dog coat, dog treats, dog, keys) and then got in the car at around 08h30.

And it was a nasty, snowy and icy drive to a railway station in Hampshire, from where I caught a train to London Waterloo.

I love walking, as does my dog. It’s one of our main forms of entertainment. We walk, on average, five miles a day here in South Somerset, so we set out from Waterloo for the meeting point, a piffling 2.4 miles off, walking into a bitingly cold wind. When we walk around down yurr, we quite often are likely to end up in a pub, sometimes more than one. I’ve become used to being able to take the mutt into any pub (the pub on the Hill frequently has as many, if not more dogs than people in it) so when I arrived at our meeting point, I was a bit miffed to discover that pubs in this part of London don’t welcome dogs.

No problem. I phoned Wooshy, thinking he would still be en route (I arrived early) only to find that he was inside, with a table-full of GPers. He came out, got me a drink, and some more Postalleers turned up. I tried to sneek back in with the dog, but got nabbed straight away and turfed out, nicely but conclusively back into the cold. More folks turned up, a kindly barmaid showed us how to work the outside heaters, and despite being out in the cold, I managed to meet some old and make some new GPer friends and have a jolly time.

One thing that came up in almost every conversation I had throughout today was how stressful the past three weeks have been. In the week before Martin Sellner and Brittany Pettibone were detained and then deported by Amber Rudd, I’d felt the strong urge to back off for a bit from being online, from Twitter and any form of mainstream or alternative news, even from Going Postal, our home. This is something I rarely do these days, but frankly, I felt I needed a break. So from Monday of that week to the beginning of Friday, I had a diminished idea of what was going on.

And when I broke the fast, it was like walking into a buzz-saw. Martin Sellner and Brittany Pettibone arrested and imprisoned for three days; my letter to my MP (still unanswered) protesting it; Lauren Southern’s deportation; the BBC’s resolute ignoring of Telford, and Superintendent Harding’s disgraceful “nothing to see here” stance; Russia’s alleged Skripal attack, for which many of the details just don’t stack up (to the point that even Alex Thomson from Channel 4 News was doubting the narrative).

We are reaching boiling point. We are being consistently betrayed by the government and by the media. Our very real fears and concerns are being ignored. It is becoming only too apparent that they’re starting to panic, because they know that we know that everything that’s going so wrong is a direct result of Westminster public policy failures and the media failing to report honestly on these failures. Their corruption, the media’s corruption, the Common Purpose corruption of policing, the judiciary and practically any other branch of government you could care to name is gradually being laid bare for all to see.

I cannot stress it enough; we are under unprecedented threat now, and this threat is coming from our own, supposedly conservative government, as if Amber Rudd and Theresa May could claim any moral right to call themselves conservative.

But the lines are blurred now, between the legacy parties (and one has now to at least contemplate UKIP as being a legacy party, post Bolton) and the wider establishment. The problem is systemic in a way that certainly defies naming and perhaps defies scale, too. It’s certainly wider than just named political parties.

Talking to people today has been very interesting. Folks I spoke to, both GPers and others, have all been feeling the tension building lately. I’m not the only one losing sleep over this, it turns out.

We walked from the pub to Speakers’ Corner. Brrrr. I’d love to be able to tell you I heard every word of TR’s (actually Martin Seller’s) speech, but I didn’t even see Tommy. But hey, it doesn’t matter. I can see it online later. It was more important just to be there, and to be with others.

I’ve seen TR speak a few times now, and met him a couple of times. Today, since I had no chance to, I spent the time looking and talking with other people. It was very striking how “diverse” the crowd was. More than a smattering of non-whites, and plenty of well-dressed middle-class men and women there, across the age range and clearly in support of the message. There were a lot of non-Londoners there too – people had travelled to get to this event.

I got talking to a journalist from Bristol, an old school one. He said he felt shamed by his profession. I talked to a younger woman standing next to me, very switched on, also very pissed off, particularly with the media, a conversation piece that was recurrent throughout the event.

I met David Kurten on the way back to the pub. I said a few disparaging things about Suzanne Evans that he ruefully agreed with. I heard later that Gerrard Batten was there, too. Paul Joseph Watson, Raheem Kassam and Katie Hopkins were also there.

God, it was cold walking back to the pub afterwards.

I was walking with Wooshy, and something happened that we both noticed, and this thing confirmed something, an opinion I’ve long held, and something I wrote about in my article about the Hanif affair. We’d just crossed Marble Arch and Oxford Street, deep in conversation, and a young woman in a hijab walking towards us looked at my dog and smiled, as so many people do. As she got closer, her smile broadened, and then she looked straight at me and kept smiling, and I smiled back. Just a brief connection, she had a kind face, not sneering or mocking at all, but well-intentioned, just enjoying the moment, as was I.

Absent the hijab and the cultural inhibition it imposes, and absent awareness of Islam’s inbuilt animus against dogs, I would probably have said something, cracked a joke maybe, as I usually do when someone reacts favourably to the mutt. Part of the reason I didn’t was mild surprise that a Muslim woman would react so positively to a canine, because this was a new and unique experience for me.

Perhaps the fault is mine … perhaps I should have said something, perhaps I should have engaged, fleeting though the moment was, and if the circumstance were to arise again, maybe I will.

I bear no enmity toward people. I only bear enmity towards ideas, and only when they are so clearly hell-bent on our destruction, as Islam is. Yet, our detractors still try to paint us as thought-criminals, “far right”, just for voicing concerns. The term “far right”, very much like the terms “fascist” and “racist” and the made-up word “Islamophobe” have all but lost their meaning, but the media, in cahoots with a corrupt establishment, still bang on with it, and if anything, the drumbeat is getting louder. What does “far right” even mean?

The unanswered question, one I’ve heard voiced more than once today, is where do we go from here? Where and how does this end?

It’s Football Lads next weekend in Birmingham. I’m going, and I know some of you are too. This time, the dog is staying at home.
Martin Mezger on Periscope at Birmingham. When it’s red, it’s ‘Live’.

@mezgerei
 

© Martin Mezger 2018