Puffins March For Freedom

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
The Puffin roams free.
Off-season Puffins,
Gopal Vijayaraghavan
Licence CC BY-SA 2.0

Saturday the 26th of June saw another well attended, not least by Puffins, anti-lockdown Freedom March in London.

As usual, the run-up to the event was embargoed by mainstream media with no advanced publicity except via social media, including your very own Going Postal website.

A brief but condescending mention was allowed on Andrew Neil’s GB News Saturday Live when presenter Darren McCaffrey dismissed the marches as events that no one attends. He was quickly slapped down by guest Esther McVey, Tory MP for Tatton and by her companion on the sofa, former bodybuilder Tonya Buxton, who reminded Darren a million people had been on the previous March for Freedom on May 29th. Later in the same segment (after Mr McCaffrey had introduced the adverts as the weather), Esther made the telling remark that, despite the Delta/Indian variant, the connection between infection and hospitalisation has been broken.

By the start of the demonstration at 1pm, GB News’ Alistair Stewart was interviewing Melvin Riley, the tinged Wolverhampton based nineteen-year-old West Midlands Police and Crime Youth Commissioner who has been invited to a United Nations conference in New York that has just been cancelled.

Meanwhile, on the usually reliable Ruptly streaming service, the live stream was from a different London march, a mixture of Free Palestine and Extinction Rebellion extremists. Judging from their pre-printed placards they were being sponsored by the trades unions to blame everything on the Tories.

Back on GB News, Brillo had marched into the studio to obsess about socially liberal London and Manchester identity and values politics, in conversation with a clone from the Labour Party, before moving on to quiz Alba Party has-been Keeny MacAskill about giving independence referendum votes to Scottish ‘ex-pats’ living in England.

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On the ticker tape below the pair of them, talk was of the new DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and a stabbed teenager in Sydenham, East London.

BBC News 24 fared no better with a long piece about the collapsed building in Miami. Later, News 24 did cover the marchers. No, not those marchers, the “Gay Action Officers Parade” marchers banned from New York Pride until 2025 due to antipathy from ‘black and brown’ members of the local LGBTQI++ community.

Ironically, Alan Gilmer of New York City, also known as drag act Banessa, received more air time than the hundreds of thousands marching past the BBC News’ very own central London Portland Place studios.

Although headlined on Twitter as the ‘London protest’ and bunched with Palestinians and climate change nuts, anti-lockdown fared much better in individual tweets with #LondonProtest and #FreedomMarch trending throughout the day.

Similarly, the BBC website did mention a march but headlined twelve arrests which, upon reading the text, turned out to be Extinction Revolution related. The Corporation’s accompanying video was of Free Palestine.

Elsewhere, the tip of an iceberg began to peep above the waves. A Daily Telegraph live blog told of ‘thousands’ of anti-lockdown protestors, albeit sandwiched between Covid stories from Spain and the central Russian region of Udmurtia.

By late afternoon, The Daily Mail was threatening to kick the closet door off its hinges with a Mail online front-page feature entitled “Tens of thousands of anti-lockdown protesters march on London in biggest demo yet.” Note the copybook blotting use of the phrase ‘tens of thousands’.

Content analysts also will cut out the word ‘yet’ and stick it in their scrapbooks as this is the first Freedom March that the Mail has bothered to give any attention to!

Closer to the action, as ever, a farthing of Puffin was worth a guinea of Fleet Street.

Swiss Bob, Going Postal
Swiss Bob is here.
© Swiss Bob, Going Postal 2021
Joe Williams, Going Postal
A fantastic afternoon. A great turnout.
© Joe Williams, Going Postal 2021
Joe Williams, Going Postal
The march at Oxford Street, total domination.
© Joe Williams, Going Postal 2021
Mrs Q, Going Postal
Q being naughty.
© Mrs Q, Going Postal 2021

Well done marching Puffins!
 

© 2021 Always Worth Saying
 

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