Enter the new fascists
Sir: Since correspondence on the 'demo' con- tinues in your columns, it may be of interest to record the opinions of the patients in a large ward of a major London hospital in which I happened to be recovering from an operation on 27 October. They were: (a) That the procession would prove to be an undisciplined shambles through the need of so many marchers to pause and inject themselves with drugs at half-mile intervals.
(b) that Tariq Ali was a fat something (the `something' ranged from the slanderous to the obscene) who would be better employed in fomenting idiocy in his own country than in this one.
(c) That the demonstrators, in usurping a large part of London for their antics at the expense of the taxpayer, were guilty of arro- gant buffoonery. (d) That those of them who were not the dupes of communist agitators were concerned • solely with 'getting in the papers or on the telly.' Had reporters and cameramen been banned from the route there would have been no `demo.'
(e) That the police were deserving of every sympathy in their instructions not to provoke the marchers, since it was the natural and entirely healthy impulse of most people in the United Kingdom (though one naturally re- pressed in the interests of public order) to hit bearded guitarists in fancy dress whether or not they were offering violence. (f) That 'it all began with the Beatles.'
These views were expressed by men who formed a genuine cross-section of society—my immediate neighbours in the ward were a lorry driver, a tennis coach and the owner of a small business. But the majority of them came—and would proudly have acknowledged the fact— from the working class which those responsible for the demonstration try so plaintively and hopelessly to enrol on their side. If the earnest boobies who marched on 27 October really suppose that their capers had the remotest effect on British public opinion, they are even crazier than my ward-mates held them to be.
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