In stark contrast to the previous protest that I attended a few weeks before, I decided again to travel to London and bear witness to an event quite reflective of the contemporary tuning of our society. The nation’s football lads, lads who love football and just anyone who really loves their country were called upon to protect the nation’s statuary embodiments of Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph. “We don’t want to see any clashes on the streets”, the dogmatic Tommy Robinson had declared the night before the protests; pretext for their presence had been to thwart any attempt of protestors vandalising the statues, despite Westminster Council having already done that quite effectively by cladding them in bolstered sheets of thick metal.

I assumed that the event was due to proceed regardless, despite not being publicised on Facebook (I learned that day many right-leaning/skinhead/patriotic accounts and events had been removed and prohibited on Facebook the previous Tuesday) – nevertheless my plans remained unchanged. On the train into St. Pancras Intl. I observed small groups of lads already putting away the tinnies (guzzling down beer) on their journey, as they scuttled toward what was to be a convention of patriots, truly a fine display of those who are proudest of our country.

I emerged from Westminster Station under the behemoth shadow cast by a scaffolded Big Ben, the sun was beaming over the Houses of Parliament, warming the undulating Thames and slowly singeing and diminishing the verdancy of the trimmed grass carpeting Parliament Square (it may as well have been renamed Parliament pitch for this day, however). Moving in front of the house, I began to circumnavigate the small group that was present, noticing ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattoos on the knuckles of many men. Fags and booze were not in short supply. After chatting with other photographers about any issues that had already occurred, the etiquette established by one photographer advised anyone with a nice and highly smashable camera (such as myself) to keep their distance. I took this into consideration.

Just after I arrived into Westminster a man was being mollified by gentle pats from a member of Britain First, following a flared fracas with another individual. A man stands with a ‘hands off our history’ sign in the background.

At around 10:30AM a gauntlet had formed on Parliament Square and small piles of litter were beginning to accumulate. By 11:50AM a commotion began to stir because a long group of veterans marching towards the Cenotaph from Great George Street had presented itself, cries of “GO ON LADS!” and “GOOD ON YOU BOYS!” were projected across the square. The veterans and trailing protestors then turned left down Parliament Street and streamed past tags on the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport building reading ‘BLM’ from earlier turnouts.

It was at 11:00AM that the tumult really turned into a crescendo. The police quickly kettled the guardians of the cenotaph away from the rest of the group, who had begun bellowing England football chants. Using considerable force, lines of police attempted to shift the frontline of protestors back towards the square – beer bottles and cans quickly fledged and took flight. The tertiary sound of pale brown glass shards shattering into smithereens could be heard beneath the loud shrills of the police and the louder united angry gargle of the gaggle.

Over the next few hours, irate processions of ‘proud’ sons, dads and granddads alike ran from one police blockade to another, dragging their knuckles to scream and stomp their feet at the jakes until everyone got a bit bored, all the while pissing up (and all over) the streets of Westminster. There was a broad span of ages in attendance: from young lads embellished in C.P. Company t-shirts, balaclavas and Stone Island jackets drunkenly lumbering in Adidas Gazelles or nouveau Nike trainers, to fresh-shaven codgers whose thick fingers were hugged by thicker rings and whose arms were imprinted with tattoos of a forgotten era of comfortable racism. All demographics in attendance equally seemed to be able to slur and squall at the police, were equally as geysering in their dousing of Parliament Square corners and were equally as misinformed and bigoted.

However, I must admit that not all of the people in attendance were racist, or quite as racist as the next.

One lad that I met was called Dan, who’d broken his wrist a few days prior by standing on the handlebars of his bike while going down a hill. He was by himself and felt quite frustrated at the whole national furore about the statues. This is what he said to me as we sat opposite the Churchill statue:

I went to the last black Lives Matter march and I was in support of the Edward Colston situation, until they touched the Winston Churchill statue, that was when I’d had enough of it. Colston was a slave trader. Take it down, I completely agree with that. Everyone is saying Winston Churchill was a racist, but then everyone was a racist! It was the norm, if you’re a racist now and they made a statue of you then that would be different.
It makes me feel a little bit sick to the stomach that, you know, he saved us from the Nazis and from SS officers and swastikas being on every street corner – they really need to understand (BLM) what he did for us. I’ve tried to stay in the middle of it… yes, I support the BLM but…
Me: But do you agree with what’s happening here? Are you in support of Britain First and what these people are here for?
To be honest, I saw Paul Golding and I don’t like him. I’m from his area and I think he’s a tosser. Each one to their own for their opinion, as I think that it’s a matter of free speech. You could call me a patriotic person as I support this, but as soon as it turns violent again then I think it’s too much. I think your community is as bad as the people you are fighting against, as soon as you start attacking people.
[firecrackers are set off on the road by protestors]
I heard this morning that the reason they blocked up Mandela’s statue was because they were gonna put a rope around his neck and take him down in retaliation. It shouldn’t be about one side against the other though, it should be about preserving history but also about respecting our culture.
These people have travelled far and wide from across the country because they respect that man there and what he did for us. I think the fact that these people (BLM) can come along and deface his statue, just for their agenda… what happened to George Floyd is awful and it shouldn’t happen to anyone. But when the looting starts and the police are attacked…
I reject the notion that there is systemic racism within our police. Everyone who goes through the police academy doesn’t get handed a racism badge, you know, my sister is a policewoman. She lives in Essex but if she got attacked because of what someone did in America, I would be distraught. The racism within the police is on an individual basis.
I think things like ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) and saying all UK police are racist, no they’re not! The police here today are the reason that there has been like two fights maximum; if they weren’t here, there would’ve been hundreds.
It’s a difficult one, you have to find the balance between what’s right and what’s wrong. In BLM and this there a few rotten apples that ruin the whole crate. You get the occasional one who wants to start a fight

I found his idea of respecting our culture interesting. A definition of culture is ‘the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society.’ If our British culture today is dependent on and was founded upon the extortion and extraction from colonial powers until less than one hundred years ago, and remains reliant on global influences (the popularity of curry, chinese food, reggae music), then who are we as English people? Are we just forever to be remembered as the power that ruled over 80% of the world at one point? This irony was deepened by the fact that most protestors were drinking cheap Polish beer.

Another unimpressed individual I met was Mark, or as everyone apparently knows him ‘Skin’:

They’re a load of right-wing, football hooligans, beer-drinking animals.
What’s the reason you came here today?
Because All Lives Matter, mate. Black, white, whatever – it don’t matter where you’re from…
This way (points to his skinhead t-shirt) is not about extremism or racism. When we were first skinheads, for me it was about Harry J and the All Stars, Liquidator, Long Shot (kick de bucket). Not all Skinheads are racist. We got banned from Facebook on Tuesday, a lot of the skinheads all over, all of our accounts taken down.
I put on there ‘Boots and braces don’t make you racist!’
What’s your opinion about the Churchill statue?
That’s got to stay. I fought for this country, so I know the hardship.

It is notable and pertinent for Skin to have told me this. A defining group of the ska/skinhead era were the Specials, a multi-instrumental band comprised of Jamaican, Cuban and English members – a direct contradiction of any racist agenda. But one man that I noticed and photographed on the 13th had a number of Specials tattoos, but was cowled in a Britain First flag. He even had a skinhead phone case.

Britain First made a large appearance, with flags and t-shirts on show; their leader Paul Golding could also been seen amid the crowds bowing his head as the Last Post was played. His pudgy entourage cushioned the embrace of his loyal supporters.

As is visible here, he was wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ t-shirt.

In the pictures below a cyclist attempted to pass peacefully through the crowds with a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign across his rucksack, to which he was met with confrontation and a soaking of beer. He just managed to scarper before a huge amount of protestors noticed him.

Following that flurry of excitement, the crowd kept moving and groaning like zombies towards the last source of stimulation. I assumed a sideline position but continued with the flow, until a young photographer grabbed my arm and said “not a good idea, mate.” We both turned around to observe a photographer (who I later found out was Italian and named Corrado Amitrano) bleeding profusely from a gash on the bridge of his nose. He had been submerged in the slurry and had snapped a series of images, drawing the body of his camera away from his face to be met with a firm fist planted between his eyes.

As he was assisted by police medics behind the gates of Westminster to receive first aid, the onslaught screeched “RAT!”

An attack on an impartial observer perturbed me, I remember feeling the blood in my body pumping as if bullet trains were driving through my veins. As I stood in awe, another protestor said “keep your distance or you’ll be next mate.”

What was the wherewithal for these people to come together? Many travelled nearly 300 miles from Sunderland just to make an appearance. Was it truly to show that they are uncomfortable with the state of racial relations in this country? To make a real stand against the suppression of our imperial and dominant political influence of the past? Or to just get absolutely steaming, punch members of the media in the face, smash back a few bags of coke (I noticed many people sniffing up) and forget which statue it was they were protecting.

It seemed as if many didn’t at all know why they were there or what they were doing, as the black power salute was given in large quantity and many suspicious-looking flat hands out in the air (Nazi salutes) were gracing the air surrounding a leader whose ferocity against the Nazis is what defined him.

In my personal opinion, many of the individuals present this day are stains on British society. I find it much to my consternation that people of such hateful designation can exist comfortably and unnoticed in the same society as me. I think it’s important to ask ourselves how it is that hatred and racism can be bred behind the cross-section of red, white and blue which symbolises the multi-cultural mosaic that we live within.

Doing balloons next to the statue of Jan Christian Smuts.

The man in white kept telling his very inebriated friend “get your head back in the game!”

The ubiquity of football team tattoos on the legs, arms and even the backs of some men suggested to me something more deeply burrowed into English society. It made me question why football and its intrinsic culture are so imbued with hate and streaks of racism. These men would return home that night, to get in to bed with their wives, to kiss their childrens’ heads in the morning and to greet 90-year-old Mrs. Davis next door as if they hadn’t atavistically reverted to slobbering, racist animals over the weekend. They would comfortably slot back into the framework of their communities.

Find here a series of images, not only of football tattoos, but of many patriotic/English themes:

The pervasive reverence for veterans, soldiers and military men was very clear. In this picture above, a young man grabs the arm of a veteran who served abroad. Before this moment, he had kissed the top of the man’s hand while his carrier-bag of beers dangled below their interlocked fingers.

There was a constant presence on the square, but excited rushes towards the police would intermittently break out. As the sky slowly became insipid and drizzle began to precipitate, the crowds became scarce and the police opened one kettle blockade at a time to allow hungry (and thirsty) attendees to decamp from the square. Tesco also stopped served alcohol at midday after realising that it makes people with racist tendencies considerably more outspoken, excitable and racist.

Near my departure, I came across this gentleman who wouldn’t tell me his name or allow me to take a picture of him (I did secretly). As we conversed and I naturally queried why he still had a drip hanging from his arm, he told me that he wanted to make a statement. Emphatically, he wanted to show that things that become so out of hand in regard to disrespecting history, that he was willing to walk out of hospital just to make an appearance.

Before I decided to leave the scattered remainder, I chatted to this man, Sid from Stoke. I was originally just going to ask to take a picture of him, but as I was approaching him I changed my tactic entirely and enquired about the red hands on his polo shirt and head.

Excuse me mate, I’ve seen this hand repeated on so many t-shirts and flags today, what does it mean?
Well, the hand is the red hand of Ulster. In 1654 there were three kings, brothers and they were racing to the shores of Ireland to conquer and invade it [lore contains different versions of the story, some say the kings were Spanish with Celtic roots, others say they were Vikings] and the land was promised to the first one of them to touch the soil of the land. As they were rowing to the beach, one of them cut his hand off and threw it onto the beach. Of course it was all covered in blood and it landed on the beaches of Ulster, which now forms Northern Ireland.
The red hand means the red hand loyalists, who are loyal to their country and that. I’ll tell you what, you will never get anybody more loyal than the loyalists in Belfast. They stand there at 12 O’clock every night to sing God Save the Queen.
Then you get these cunts here, coming and defacing the statues. I’m a veteran, as I was in the RAF and that’s why I’m here. I’m here to protect the statues today. We had permission from the government to go down there [pointing in the direction of the cenotaph] and stand until 5 O’clock, then the police come and by 12 O’clock they all showed up and took the piss. They were trying to incite trouble, the police today.
How do you feel about people throwing bottles and things like that?
Fucking stupid, in’t it. It’s daft.
The police who are down there, when we were down there singing by the monument and then the police came along. If they’d have just left them alone, and let them carry on singing their songs like God Save the Queen it would’ve been alright. They weren’t doing anything other than singing. The police then started pushing and pushing and pushing, and so we pushed back. We’re fed up of being pushed around by people like that. That’s why we’re here today.
I mean, when there are people going on about Black Lives Matter and about slaves and that, when the biggest slave traders were the blacks. Around from now back to the 15th century that’s how it was. You see, people don’t know their history. This is where people are getting it all wrong. Like these Antifa people, they don’t know their history. They haven’t gone and thought about it. You can’t protest if you don’t know your history. A lot of them will have mums and dads, who look after them, give them a cuddle and that, let them do what they want. But let me tell you what, if my mother or my father, god rest their souls they’re both dead, saw me defacing Churchill’s monument, spraying it, I’d have got whacked in. And I mean a good hiding, me mam would have given me. No problems.
If the fucking police were down here like they were last week, in short-sleeves, no jackets on, just a truncheon, and they say come on come down, would it have turned out like it did today? They’d have been throwing tear gas and that at people. What did they expect? They brought it on themselves.

How did you feel when you’d heard that the monument had been defaced?
I was pissed off, when I saw it on the telly and that.
Now… I’ve got loads of black mates, me. But you see that middle column over there is Nelson Mandela, and they’ve covered it over, know what I mean?
Is that because Antifa wanted to pull it down or did the people here want to deface it?
No one here wanted to deface it! Nobody here today wanted to deface it. Antifa wanted to pull statues down all over the place, calling different people racist. Why’re they racist? It doesn’t mean Mandela was a racist because his great great great grandpa was a slave trader, that doesn’t make that man a racist. I mean you could be a racist, that doesn’t make me a racist. Does it?
What did you think of the Edward Colston statue being taken down? And the fact that he was a slave trader?
I don’t believe in it. It’s like how the Mayor of London wants to change all the names of the streets after all this. What the fucking hell’s that about? The streets of Great Britain have had their names for hundreds of years so why should we change it now?
I mean I know you’re probably with them [meaning I am a left-wing/not right-wing journalist], but at the end of the day mate, the British people have now had enough. You can push and push and push, and you wouldn’t push the British far over. We don’t fucking budge. That’s why we won the wars. I mean, if you took a look at our history, we once owned 80% of the world, Great Britain did. Because we’re fighters, we don’t give up. The only reason we gave it back was because of what’s going on. We gave a bit of this here and a bit of that there. Biggest thing we did was getting out of fucking Europe.
Worst thing we ever did was going in Europe, sixty billion pound a year we were paying. That should be NHS and pensioner’s money, they’re taking the piss out of them.
It’s easy to forget that we’re in the midst of this virus isn’t it? It doesn’t seem like lockdown at all.
Yeah it is. But I mean, to be truthful, if I told you that you had to kneel down at 6 O’clock on Wednesday night would you kneel down?
Nobody tells me what I’ve got to do, nobody. I’m me own person. I am 65 year old male, so why should I listen to some man saying you’ve got to kneel down. It’s not just Black Lives Matter, it’s All Lives Matter. Chinese, Blacks, Asians, everyone, British, French.
We are a multicultural country now, aren’t we?
I mean, we are now. This government has ruined us. The police are being told what to do. My friend is an inspector in Staffordshire and he’s told by the government if the muslims start having a go at anybody and the whites retaliate, you should arrest the whites. You can’t trust them.

He told me about the tattoo on his back, which is of a skinhead getting arresting by a policeman from the 70s and he told me that he had skinhead across his stomach, but he didn’t want to show me either of them. He said that his mate had started it, and they had discussed finishing it after he had got back from a holiday in Benidorm. But unfortunately his friend passed away, so he now won’t have it finished as that is a memory of him. “He was one of my best mates.”

Why is it that skinheadism and racism seem to be linked by today’s standards?
I am a 1969 original skinhead, me and I don’t understand it. How can a skinhead be racist when the basis of the movement was on reggae music, ska.
But people think you’re a thug mate, that’s why it is. You’ve got big boots on and you look intimidating. In the 80s, when the skinhead look came back into fashion, it tweaked a bit. It became part-punk and then the NF came in. The skinheads got a bad name through the NF. I’ve still got my badge today though, that says ‘whites against racism.’ And that’s how it is pal…
I was out every night clapping for the NHS, as my wife is a care worker. Every Thursday night, banging the pots, cheering and that. Two weeks ago it stopped, look what’s happened in the last two weeks. It split because someone 4000 miles away got killed by a copper, what the fuck has it got to do with Great Britain? That happened over there.
When Lee Rigby got killed by them two black men, everything was brushed under the carpet. Didn’t see any riots over that. When the policeman got killed in the race riots, nothing. When that policewoman got killed, nothing. Why aren’t they rioting for them. They still deserve to get thought about don’t they?
In my eyes mate, everything is this world is based on respect. If you respect me, then I’ll respect you. If you don’t respect me, then you’ve got a fucking problem.
That’s how I was brought up.

The UDA and UFF acronyms can be seen on this man’s leg. A kneeling prisoner with a bag over his head can also be seen.

I later learnt that the red hand of Ulster is the symbol that the Ulster Defence Force/Ulster Freedom Fighters adopted. They were/are a paramilitary group formed to protect Belfast, who were responsible for over 400 deaths during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They were known to target pubs that were identified as places frequented by catholics; on one occasion a pub in Greysteel, County Londonderry was sprayed with gunfire, killing 8 people and wounding 19.

The UDA/UFF have both been branded as terrorist organisations.

I thought it was interesting to notice people who aligned with an organisation of this sort mixing with football lads, whose racist agenda seemed more primal than that of an actual militant group.

This recent cause célèbre of what statues embody has been a real sign of the times. Considering our inhabitance among burgeoning waves of often excessive political correctness and demands to alter things in the name of being universally accepting, I can say that to some extent I agree with points highlighted at this protest. I think to remove vestiges of our past and of significant figures could be argued against, as they are traces of the journey that we have travelled to surmount times of inequity, discrimination and intolerance. Whether they propagate all values and virtues of the person forever frozen, elevated above their observers, is perhaps irrelevant. I do think that a man like Edward Colston did not deserve to have his occupation or actions materialised in Bristol Harbour, but I think to forget about him is wrong.

I, as a member of the unaffected, have the opportunity to be blind to the effects of racism, because I am not directly under their duress; nonetheless my eyes have been opened in recent times. However, would allowing Churchill’s statue to remain in situ mean we are remaining blind? A man of his demeanour leading the country now would not be what was needed and his rhetoric and persuasion would not fit with modern standards: Britain is no longer the Britain of my grandma’s time. What would taking down his statue have accomplished anyway? The collective memory of WWII cannot be owed purely to Churchill.