ON Friday I went to the Conservative Party leadership hustings at the Winter Gardens in Eastbourne with a number of other members of the local resistance against the Covid regime which has removed fundamental freedoms over the past two and half years. We found ourselves outnumbered by those do not have any interest in the enlightenment value of liberty – as most Conservative Party members do at least nominally. Of 150 anti-Tory campaigners, about half were bearing Socialist Worker Party placards and chanting ‘refugees are welcome’, while the other half were hard-core Extinction Rebellion ‘terrorists’ with their accompanying flags and banners who proceeded to disrupt the meeting.
So we found ourselves protesting not only against the Truss and Sunak supporters entering the venue, but also counter-protesting against the shrill sanctimony of people who want more fear and more control. Between their parroted chants led by a man with a megaphone, we asked these middle-class Trotskyists and carbon nihilists whether they cared about older people struggling to heat their homes, or that billions of taxpayers’ money was being splurged not on public services but on missiles for Ukraine. Answers came there none.
Earlier, before the rabble appeared, we had taken pole position outside the hall entrance. The queue was a captive audience for our satirical utterances: ‘Welcome to the World Economic Forum puppet show’, and ‘If the answer is Truss or Sunak, you’re asking the wrong question.’
Eastbourne’s Tory MP Caroline Ansell came out, concerned at us being allowed so close to respectable party members and clearly embarrassed by our ‘conspiracy’ theories about a new world order. Tory MPs would have us pretend that the WEF doesn’t exist, despite both candidates for next prime minister having unashamedly signed up to a globalist organisation which is developing a technocracy of digital surveillance and resource rationing.
The atmosphere remained good-natured and good-humoured. That was until the SWP/XR followers arrived. Most of their chanting was about immigrants, who they believe should be allowed to come as freely and numerously as they like, while Tories should be ‘thrown in the sea’. A handful of UKIP activists stood yards away from this noisy, diametrically-opposed group of people ashamed of their country and its heritage. The SWP leader abusively railed against the elderly white Tory members attending the hustings, though his own gathering was, ironically but unsurprisingly, entirely white (and many of them looking pretty wrinkled!).
A Labour supporter asked why we were targeting the other protesters – ‘aren’t we all on the same side?’ Sadly, we are not. The SWP/XR combo are the type of people who wanted harsher lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates. They have no interest in individual liberties: their cause is collectivist, in the naïve belief that the state means the people. They appear oblivious to the history of communism under Stalin and Mao. The difference between us could not have been wider: a gulf that reflected not just our opposing values but our sense of democratic citizenship. We were trying to appeal to the Tory members, to talk and to make them aware of our concerns. The SWP mob had nothing but contempt for them. Though police officers were positioned at the entrance, and joined by more, a female XR protester with flag still got into the building and sat in the doorway. Before she could use glue to cement herself, two security guards managed to drag her out. This did not stop her from another successful dodge through the police line, while we later heard that other XR activists had infiltrated the audience where they disrupted Liz Truss by shouting ‘shame on you’.
While the SWP contingent seemed to be fighting the last war, stuck in the old dichotomy of Left versus Right, the XR standard bearers are uncannily up to date and on a roll. Everything has been going their way, with the huge strides made by the Great Reset during the last three years of the contrived coronavirus emergency. The Ukraine war has threatened energy supply, and heating bills are already rising exponentially. They don’t care: it is what they want, a subsistence economy. The political establishment has been dutifully pursuing the same agenda of these activists, albeit less rapidly, in the name of wokedom and apparently oblivious to the economic, social and political crisis it’s fast heralding. The only difference is that the government are working towards Net Zero tomorrow, while XR are demanding Net Zero today. Pity the elderly in their freezing homes this coming winter.
Our good-humoured but vocal protest was worth it. The stage should not be left to these revolutionaries. We punched above our weight, facing both Tory members and eco-socialist protesters with points they found hard to face or unable to respond to. They certainly heard us, and saw our large placards. The irony of these Tory ticket-holders and their green-on-red opponents, supporting the same globalist project that will enslave them as well as majority or ordinary people while an elite lives on in protected luxury, cannot be overstressed.
