A turning point?

Dave – the editor

This is the photo essay / write up of the last anti-vaccine passport protest I went on: “Humanity stands together” – a photo essay of a protest – December 19, 2021. Because I was handing out printed copies of The Stirrer and doing some stickering along the route on Saturday’s protest (22.1), the images above are limited to when we were outside Downing Street. So, this is more of a snapshot of one part of the protest than a complete, end to end photo essay.

Will this protest and the many others that took place around the country and also, around the globe, be a turning point? I can only speak based on what I witnessed at the London one and the conversations I had. My gut feeling is that yes, it will be.

While the December protest was quite a positive experience compared to one or two of the previous ones I’d been on, today felt very different and was arguably one of the best and hopefully, more effective protests. That was because of the huge number of NHS workers and carers who turned up to protest against the vaccine mandate (currently paused) they’ve been subjected to. While the push for them to get vaccinated or face the sack has been temporarily paused to avoid a cliff edge loss of tens of thousands of NHS workers, they want the demand to be vaccinated and the threat of the sack if they don’t to be completely removed.

It was the presence of these NHS workers and carers that seems to have finally woken up a few sections of the mainstream media into providing some fairly reasonable coverage of the protest, unlike many of the previous ones which had been pretty much ignored. The sight of hundreds of NHS workers and carers sick of being threatened in the way they have been, laying their uniforms down in Trafalgar Square or throwing them over the barriers is something the mainstream media can’t afford to ignore if they want to retain some degree of credibility.

As for my experience of the day, it was good, albeit tiring. I shifted a few hundred printed copies of The Stirrer. I bumped into a few old comrades and had some interesting catch up chats with them. I had some very interesting conversations with people I handed the paper out to. After shifting the papers, I got a bit of stickering in on the route down to Downing Street. Given the greater than normal mix of people who turned out and the overall dynamic of the day, I came away with a degree of optimism about the way things are going. Onwards and upwards…