The first thing to say about yesterday is my fears proved to be foundationless, and the apprehension I’d been feeling melted away quite quickly. Pretty much immediately after posting yesterday’s entry, I decided to cut the crap, grab the bull by the horns and head up to central London. After all, events like this don’t happen very often. I got the Elisabeth Line up to bond Street, then the Jubilee one stop to Green Park, mainly because I like the interchange tunnels at bond street. From there, it was just a short trundle through Green Park, beautiful in the spring, before reaching Horseguards and then Westminster.

It was at that point that I started to feel slightly nervous: in the distance I could see a seething mass of people, waving England flags and chanting. Quite frankly it was a repugnant sight. I’ve had my dealings with such p’tahks before, and part of me wanted to go up to them and tell them to naff off home – they had no place there, in the heart of this great, metropolitan, multicultural world city.

But instead I walked on in search of the other protest. It wasn’t that long before I began to see people waving Palestinian flags. It was at that point that I began to feel a slightly different kind of apprehension – did I really want to get involved in this? I know how contentious the issues around Israel and Palestine can become, and that there will be people who perceive participating in such marches as itself a form of bigotry and intolerance. Yet I have also seen the images of the devastation in Gaza; I know what the Israeli government is doing there, with many people saying it amounts to aphartied or genocide. This is no longer an issue we can remain passive and silent over. Therefore at that point I joined the march.

Apart from a few uncomfortably loud speaker systems, the march was very peaceful and friendly. There was a huge diversity of people there, giving me the impression that this was the march, rather than the gathering in Parliament Square, which actually represented London. There was a lot of singing and chanting. At one point there was a group of Orthodox Jews showing their support – a vital detail, given Israel and it’s lackeys have gone to so much effort to denigrate such marches as somehow antisemitic. The action I participated in was about love, not hate; it was about standing up for an oppressed people against tyranny. The people I was wheeling alongside didn’t loathe or despise anyone simply for being who they are; they, like me, simply find the sight of brutal, overt oppression repugnant. Not only that, but the protest I participated in yesterday was about opposing all forms of bigotry, intolerance and fascism, wherever it manifests itself. I fear that this action will now be slandered as being as violent, uncouth and discriminatory as the one in Parliament Square, but what I saw yesterday was precisely the opposite: nobody was causing damage, nobody was shouting abuse. I didn’t manage to speak to anyone, but got plenty of fist bumps and complements on my ‘Make America Think Again’ cap.

At the end of the protest route a stage had been set up, where people like Jeremy Corbyn and Dianne Abbot were giving speeches. When I got there, I stayed for an hour or so, listening – I couldn’t see anything for all the people standing in front of me. Most of the speeches were very interesting and extremely powerful, giving me an urge to look into the history of the conflict being discussed a bit more deeply. At one point, the attendance figures of both marches were announced: 250,000 on the Palestinian march, vs. just 25,000 for the other one, causing a massive cheer from the crowd.*

At about half four, my appetite building, I decided it was time to head home. It had been a fascinating day, and my concerns about going to check it out had proven entirely unfounded. Yet the fact remains that what we saw yesterday is symptomatic of a fractured, divided society. Two mutually opposed protests took place, one advocating love and tolerance, the other division, arrogance and hate. As much as I felt compelled to participate, we must all be concerned about such social and cultural fractures.

*According to the Beeb, “An early police estimate was that the numbers on the Unite The Kingdom march were around 60,000, less than half the numbers estimated for September’s march.”