This has been the subject of some debate. Tommy Robinson says 3 million. The police say 150,000. That’s quite the discrepancy.
Oddly enough, I am in a rather good position to judge. I was there. Did I count them all? No, I didn’t. What I did do, however, was skulk around the back. Oh, and do some maths.
The plan was for everybody to assemble in Stamford St which, for those who don’t know, is a street in South London between Blackfriars and Waterloo Stations. Stamford St was packed and there was an overflow into Southwark Road, Blackfriars Road and Blackfriars Bridge. I was right at the back of the overflow into Southward Road. I would say that extended for – if I am being generous – 100m. (My apologies for using Nazi units but I can’t be arsed to do the conversion.)
Whitehall is 700m long. Stamford St is about the same length. So with the overflows we get 1000m of march. Stamford St is maybe 30m wide. So we get the whole march – I didn’t see many late comers – in 30,000m².
So how many people per metre? I understand the rule of thumb is 4. For comparison, Wembley manages to 90,000 people sat down in 90,000m². Four standing in the same space as one seated? Bit of a squeeze but possible.
So, 30,000 times 4 gets us to 120,000.
I’m with the police.
Next question: does it matter?
If you look at the aerial footage (about 40 mins worth) and rough grid it you get to several hundred K at its maximum extent. About the same size march as the CountySide Alliance. So 300K+ would be ballpark. Maybe even 400K. Extended sections of those march crowds are stadium density. Which really bumps up the numbers. Most marches are much lower density crowds.
The “counter march” on the other hand is short and straggly. Less than 10K
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gRMJHPy9Rs
In re: next question: It does not matter as far as normal peaceful political processes are concerned. Even if it were millions outside Whitehall, there is no indication that those in government care other than to possibly plan to incarcerate some examples to intimidate the others. What I find most noteworthy is the dead silence. Granting I am across the ocean and we do not get a lot of brit news, and we are admittedly involved in our own political assassination at the moment; but there is something missing.
As far as I can tell not one leading brit politician has stood up for those brits defending their country. Not one. I see no one in the political machinery of britain who cares and who will speak up for what is obviously a major portion of the brit population. This may be because they have all been co-opted. It may be because the functional voiding of what passed for a bill of rights and the fear of your newest population cohort whose rights, whims, etc. now officially outweigh the rights of brits there has your elites all intimidated. But normal political processes will not serve to protect your country.
Subotai Bahadur
I believe there is a body of knowledge about how to get a pretty accurate count of a large body of people, and it sounds like Patrick is conversant with it. However — he mentions latecomers — it seems to me that gatherings of this nature, protest as a big day out, will have some unknown number of early-leavers too. Not to mention non-participants who just happen to be in the area, merchants, the authorities themselves, and rubberneckers. So the wild discrepancies in estimated attendance are perhaps not all ideologicallly-driven; everyone is trying to measure a very non-static phenomenon. That said, one wd think some combination of drones and AI would be developed by now, that could get a very accurate count – at least, of the numbers on the street at one given moment.
100 nazi meters?
110 yards, there are enough road signs were I am, but operation sea lion (von metric version) never came about.
Also 220 and 328 yards.
Grok looked at the photos and video evidence, and also reckoned the police had got it about right.
If I remember rightly, around the time of the Liberty & Livelihood march in 2002, the police stopped giving estimates of crowd sizes. That was why the organisers of the march (which I did not attend but members of my family did) had some sort of system where they placed observers with clickers at a specific point and clicked for every person who passed that point. (I may have got the details wrong – perhaps someone who was there can tell me how it worked.) I remember that the demonstrations against the Iraq War, for which huge crowd sizes were claimed, did not institute such a system.
Clearly the police have started giving crowd size estimates again.
Back in 2002, I suspected that the police stopped giving estimates of crowd sizes at the behest of the then Labour government. I suspect they have started doing it again in the 2020s for the same reason.
Back in 2002, I suspected that technology existed to count the numbers of people from aerial photographs. I am entirely certain that it exists now. Of course the photographs don’t have to be new. It would be an interesting exercise to do retrospective crowd size estimates for all the London demonstrations this century.
Yeah, I did spend a few minutes trying to find a good aerial shot of the Stop The War march from 2003. I could only find one that showed part of the crowd.
Tommy Robinson’s maths are incredible. He doesn’t think 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and manages to misjudge the size of a crowd by a factor of 25 (in his favour) and we’re somehow meant to take him seriously. I’m not sure I should expect much more from an ex member of the BNP but still find myself surprised.
“He doesn’t think 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust…”
Prove it.
Patrick, having known you for many years, I am very confident that when you said “Prove it” you were referring to proof that Tommy Robinson actually said that he doesn’t think six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, not to proof that six million Jews did die in the Holocaust – but that line could be misinterpreted.
Given the tidal wave of lies about what Charlie Kirk believed, most of them based on selective quotation but some of them made up from whole cloth, I am willing to give Tommy Robinson the benefit of the doubt.
Edit: I think that Charlie Kirk was a far more respectable person than Tommy Robinson is. But, just as with Trump, I now assume that most claims against Robinson are lies.
I hadn’t thought of that!
Given Robinson’s frequent pro-Israeli statements and many Jewish and Israeli friends, I think it unlikely he is a Holocaust denier.
It’s my day for doing multiple edits. Pollo, when I said “most claims against Robinson are lies” I wasn’t accusing you of being the liar. It was blackly humorous to see how many cases there were like this one because they saw it on Twitter:
Stephen King Apologizes for Saying Charlie Kirk ‘Advocated Stoning Gays to Death’
Inaccurate maths? Make him Chancellor!
No he is not a Holocaust denier. The left lie – endlessly.
And some people fall for some of the nonsense – for example Jacob Rees-Mogg (an admirable man in many ways) is still going on about “sent to prison for mortgage fraud” – as if that case was really about “mortgage fraud” and not a matter of grasping at anything (form filling – anything) to send T.R. to prison.
How many people were at the event?
This depends whether or not you include the people who the police pushed into other areas.
So it is a matter of definition.
Will the protest do any good? I do not know.
My own fear is that the regime (which is a lot more than than the elected government) will hang on till 2029 – and that the nation will be utterly ruined by then.
Paul:
I agree that Tommy Robinson’s conviction for mortgage fraud was in the spirit of “show me the man and I will show you the crime.” As far as I know, it was a paper offence, and no actual fraud occurred. But when you are a target of the state…
Can we last until 2029? Probably, but in a much diminished state. Manufacturing industry will be decimated, and our North Sea industries ruined under the demonic policies of the mad Miliband, whom spineless Starmer cannot even sack. We only live by borrowing money from others. That cannot and will not last.
JohnK.
As you know Britain imports food (it has never been more dependent on imports of food that it is now), and raw materials, but now it also imports more manufactured goods than it exports – at least I am told so (I hope this is NOT true).
As for “The City” or “financial services” – it is a Credit Bubble.
The above leads me to believe that things will be worse than you estimate.
Let us hope that you are correct and I am mistaken – that the United Kingdom survives, although in a diminished condition.
What we can agree on is that British manufacturing is being systematically destroyed – and quite deliberately, by government policies.
If we do not have a manufacturing deficit now – we soon will.
Paul:
I am sure we have a manufacturing deficit. Our manufacturing industries have never been under such pressure, caused by mad Miliband and Net Zero.
In the 1960s we had many major industries, and we were exhorted to export as much as possible, but even then our economic performance was failing, and the pound had to be devalued from $2.80 to $2.40. Then, after 1971, when the pound and all other currencies became fiat, it declined almost to parity with the dollar. Yet compared to the current situation, Britain back then was an industrial colossus.
So I agree things will be bad by 2029. If the pound collapses then we will not be able to pay for the imports we need to survive. We are a small country with few natural resources, and our government refuses to exploit those that we do have. Not many countries have deliberately chosen such a path of national self-harm. If we do survive until 2029, an incoming Reform government will have been handed a hospital pass. We must hope that there is enough left for them to work with. It is not a given.
JohnK
You explain the situation well Sir – I can think of nothing to add.
Yes, we do have a massive deficit in manufactured goods. I asked Gemini. Now there are two VERY bad things about this…
1. We appear to have an increasing deficit in value added. Basically hi-tech stuff that sells for a huge ammount more than the cost of the raw materials or components. I build computers and have done for 25 years. I have put sent a lot of money to Taiwan. And the PRC, and Korea, Thailand…
2. And this is the biggy. When an economy loses high-end industrial capacity it doesn’t come back. The skills are gone. What Trump is trying to do in the USA is likely to fail for this reason.
PS. Net Zero means electric cars. Who makes the drive trains? China! China is keen on Net Zero as long as it doesn’t apply to China.
NickM
“Net Zero means electric cars.”
That’s the optimistic take. The less optimistic take is that Net Zero means public transport – or enserfment and not being allowed to travel at all (travel becoming a privilege of the nomenklatura/aristocracy).
The cause isn’t saving the planet from whatever ecological catastrophe comes to hand. The cause is to make the revolting peasants know their place, tug their forelocks very ‘umble sir, and quietly suffer and die in the dark.
Paul and John, channel your Thomas Sowell, it’s human capital that counts, as in Germany and Japan after WW2.
David Roberts,
That was the core of my point 2. The skills have died along with the skilled or buggered off elsewhere. Not the situation of Germany or Japan in 1945. Perhaps more like Germany in 1933. They purged the universities of Jews and introduced, amongst other things, “German Physics”. This was very popular with mediocrities who suddenly found themselves becoming a prof. Do I need to explain what this meant for the development of nuclear weapons in the USA vs. Germany…
Deep Lurker,
You might be right. But they shall be electric buses with Chinese drive-trains*… Obviously, you will have to have accrued enough social credits (which will replace money) to ride them. And if you are thinking of the “fifteen minute” city… Well, that’s never going to work if you’ve killed-off local goods and services. (Don’t) visit Oldham. It’s not quite Detroit but… Well, there’s a shed-load of KFC rip-off joints. For some reason British Pakistanis seem to eat more fried chicken than Alabamans. I know not why but it is odd. They move to England, keep their language, culture and religion and adopt en-masse the cuisine of the Southern USA. Strange because food is such a central part of culture…
*And a big red kill switch in Beijing that will make the RMT look like the amateurs they are…
There is bound to be another Unite the Kingdom March, hopefully before the end of this year.
The establishment and more importantly the legacy media have utterly failed to denigrate the most recent event. If anything they have contributed still further to the ever-growing conviction that like the government our media are not to be trusted or believed. It doesn’t matter much whether there were 110,000 there or a far larger figure as the next one will surely be larger. Those normies who attended will tell their friends it’s actually ok to go while tens of thousands who did not attend this time will do so reassured that they are far from alone in their views.
It’s not unlike the flags. Many might initially have felt uncomfortable about displaying the Cross of St George, so effectively had they been cowed by the relentless stealth/nudge campaigning of the past few decades with a generation of British children being taught to feel shame rather than pride at their nation, it’s history and its flag. That evil bubble has now been burst forever.
Deep Luker “human capital” means the skills of human beings, if they are not actually making things (because of high energy costs, high taxes, and endless regulation) then their skills are not being used – can not be used.
So the skilled “human capital”, what I prefer to call human beings, should, if they can get out of a place that will not let them use their skills.
In Britain you can no longer even be a night watchman without a “license”.
John – the English flag, the Red Cross on the white field, is especially important – for precisely the reasons the establishment hates and fears it.
They have tried to make it just about sport – because they know very well that it is really a Battle Banner.
Paul Marks – re. “human capital” we have people but nevertheless a huge skills problem. I have, for a decade or more at least, seen all the “entry level” technical jobs where young men learn the basics of the field go abroad, usually to India. The young people joining the business now start in administration (and they are noticeably mostly women). So we end up with a room full of grey-bearded techies doing fairly high level stuff, being managed by young ladies with very little actual knowledge of the matter in hand, and videoconferences with Indian centres for the low-level nuts and bolts. I’m talking about the IT industry here; perhaps others can comment about other fields.
There is also a lack of entrepreneurship; it is noticeable that the people talking about setting up a business (other than as a contractor doing the same work as a salaried employee, for a bit more money) are generally recent immigrants. I suspect those of us who have been here all our lives are too aware of the tidal wave of regulation coming at anyone starting such a thing.
Does it matter? All those unwashed poms crammmed into a small space – the smell must have been terrific.
The point about human capital, is that it is about how well a society recovers after some calamitous collapse. It is not just the knowledge and skill of one generation but the awareness of later generations of what is possible. As in, if Grandfather could it so can I. Human capital in human history has dissipated but only after multiple generations. A further thought is that in the world of the internet, YouTube and now AI; the accomplishments of the past are less likely to be forgotten. Assuming the continued existence, in some form, of these technologies.
Barbarus and David Roberts – yes and it is very concerning.
I am told that in, for example, Bavaria many people still have the basic skill and cultural foundations.
If (if) that is true, then an area can indeed recover from an economic collapse caused by terrible government policies.
But if people (a population) lack both the technical skills and the cultural principles – well then when the Credit Bubble economy collapses (which it will), then recovery can NOT occur – not till both the skills and the CULTURE are restored.
I made my own rough calculations based on lengths and widths of streets, confidently expecting to come up with a much larger number than the police estimate, and was surprised to come up with a smaller number. It shows the importance of checking one’s assumptions and avoiding wishful thinking.
I made my own very rough calculations based on lengths and widths of streets, confidently expecting to come up with a much larger number than the police estimate, and was surprised to come up with a smaller number. It shows the importance of checking one’s assumptions and avoiding wishful thinking.
(sorry about posting this twice; trouble with the capcha)