Jacques is at home in a protest, calmly walking a few paces ahead of the red and black Socialist Students banner. He stands out from the Palestine flags and furious children in keffiyehs – chanting “Keir Starmer, here I say, how many kids did you starve today?” – owing to his shock of curly white hair and comparative serenity. As they all march down Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square, I learn that Jacques has been “protesting humanitarian injustice his entire life” – Gaza, climate, asylum seekers, Trump, you name it. We speak via an interpreter, Henrik, because Jacques is a Goldendoodle.
The Trump Not Welcome demonstration, a slow walk from Marylebone to Parliament Square on Wednesday afternoon, is the kind of thing you can take your three-part-poodle-to-one-part-labrador to. I saw a similarly concerned spaniel in the crowd too, patiently weaving through some men with Ukrainian flags. There are only a couple thousand people here – I suspect a ratio of one police officer to every 6 protestors, the horses seemed like overkill – and some of them very obviously vote Lib Dem. In contrast to the Unite the Kingdom rally, organised by far right agitator and ambulant thug Tommy Robinson last Saturday, it is a muted affair. I didn’t see anyone throw a can of lager.
The group behind the march on Wednesday, the Stop Trump Coalition, is loosely incoherent. The front of the pack is thick with Palestine flags; accusations of genocide waft via a megaphone-delivery-system. But as I make my way back through the protest, walking against the grain, the “Stop arming Israel” placards ebb and Extinction Rebellion banners come into view. Trump the climate criminal is public enemy number one among these guys, predominately middle-aged men with grey beards and sandals. Behind them I find Amnesty International’s shocking yellow-on-black logo and an ambient concern for human rights. And at the rear, the anger about the President morphs into distaste for Putin – I am in a sea of Ukrainian blue and yellow, the spaniel crops up at my ankles again.
Donald Trump’s last state visit was in 2019: the Tories were in power, Brexit was reaching a crescendo in parliament, and liberal England seemed a lot more cross about Number 10 rolling out the red carpet treatment for the President. Police then estimated an attendance of at least 100,000, compared to today’s 5,000. I asked Christina, a German-Londoner in her 50s, what was different. “I was hopeful then, at that march, now I am just sad”. Derek – conspicuously out-of-fashion in his “I’m still European” t-shirt – says similar. His wife Jane, a life long Lib-Demmer, tells me that she doesn’t think the world would be a better place if the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last summer had been a success, but only because “JD Vance is worse”.
If there is a coherent rage behind liberal Britain – something that a progressive populist could marshall into a serious electoral movement – I did not detect it here. Middle-aged Veronique considers herself a moderate and votes Green; Anne – holding a “Cuba Solidarity Campaign” (Brighton chapter) sign – says she does not have anyone to vote for. The lack of single-issue Che Guevara Was Right candidates makes it hard for someone of her persuasion.
Meanwhile Nigel holds the end of a banner that reads “Russian Troops Out! Solidarity With Ukraine!”. He describes himself to me as a rooted conservative and an English patriot who doesn’t like “what’s happening to Ukraine” because it “could happen to England”. He used to like the idea of Nigel Farage but now thinks he’s an elitist like the rest of ‘em. None of this would have sounded out of place at Tommy Robinson’s ethnonationalist street party on Saturday.
On Tuesday evening four men from the campaign group Led By Donkeys were arrested for a stunt, which saw images of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein projected onto one of Windsor Castle’s towers. Last month, the comrades of Charlbury united in opposition to JD Vance, who was holidaying there: the demonstration took the form of a small gathering on a lawn followed by drinks in the pub; a single Ukrainian flag hanging limply from the town hall; and a post on Charlbury’s messaging forum that valiantly stated: “I think we need to let him know just because we’re in the affluent Cotswolds we don’t take kindly to him [sic].” And in the same vein as today, the brief was sprawling: this action is about “Palestine, inequality, migrants, Ukraine, trade justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights & climate”. A lot to fit on one sign.
Perhaps the energy on the right is disparate too. But there is an inchoate rage waiting to be transformed into a political movement: the England flags and Union Jacks point to a vaguely cohering patriotism; anti-immigration anxiety galvanised the 100,000 who descended on the capital that day; some will have been united in a previously latent but now outwardly expressed racism. The Conservatives and Labour are polling at less than 40 per cent between them; the left is divided and poorly organised; Nigel Farage wants Keir Starmer’s job and it isn’t unlikely that he will get it.
And so today, I found liberals marching behind a shared distaste of Donald Trump, who could have otherwise come from political andromedas separated by millions of miles: a humanitarian Goldendoodle; a moderate Green voter; an anti-Putin “rooted conservative”; some socialist students; an enterprising man selling keffiyehs at £20 a go; and 95,000 fewer of them than just six years ago. If this is what is left of England’s liberal resistance, then Farage might as well hire moving vans now.
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