There was definitely a presence of some dodgy far-right characters who
others have documented. I personally saw adrenochrome and ‘save the children’ QAnon stuff, anti-semitic ZOG conspiracist stuff, a ‘Don’t tread on me’ Gadsden flag, and a bunch of Union Jack waving types. But… also people of colour, Sikhs, hippies, some anarchists, Anonymous types, young and old. All united by conspiracism. This almost made it more disturbing than if it had just been a far-right demo.
Conspiracism is not inherently tied to left or right, which makes it a space of cross-over and convergence. This makes it dangerous but also unpredictable and changeable. This big new movement that has coalesced over anti-lockdownism feels very amorphous like lots of people have been newly politicised and might move in all sorts of directions. So it is probably very open to the far-right trying to pull it more into their orbit. But, in this respect, the conspiracism here seems very different to the USA. In the States, all the anti-lockdown stuff seems quite associated with the (far) right. Trump no doubt helped by massively signal-boosting it to all his credulous supporters. Here the far-right has not massively gone for anti-lockdown conspiracism. There is some far-right presence but far more David Icke types, hippies etc etc. You aren’t getting Tommy Robinson, the DFLA, Britain First etc falling in behind it. Although if they did, TBH I can see them being welcomed with open arms.
So, as well as some far-right, there are a load of people in this conspiracist movement who are effectively ‘our’ sort of people. Unfortunately, conspiracism seems to have this logic of increasing credulousness as believers ‘join the dots’ and ‘follow the breadcrumbs’ – people who start off with one conspiracist belief become introduced to others and add them together. So there is a danger of people who start out more or less on the left being sucked into this increasingly dodgy greyzone, moving from one thing to another, until they pop up in a couple of years’ time as fully fledged loons thinking George Soros is paying Antifa to bring the New World Order or something.
It all feels quite a lot like Occupy back in 2011. That was a political moment that drew in a lot of new people very quickly. And there were a lot of crazies and conspiraloons, which sometimes made it hard to know how to engage with it. The difference is that Occupy was inherently our territory so we had some basis to be there and to argue with people. By contrast it does not feel possible to get involved with this anti-lockdown conspiracist movement in order to try and influence it in a good direction, given that the fundamental premises of the whole thing are dangerous and wrong. On what basis would it be possible for the left / anarchists to turn up and get involved?
This then leaves a problem of how we relate to this. Should be opposing them and having counter-demos? Ignoring it and hoping it will go away? It feels problematic that this is not something that the left has got a handle on yet. And this task is made more urgent in that this anti-lockdown movement does not seem to be going away with the ending of lockdown. The question is – where will this movement go after covid? Will it fizzle out or will it transmute into something new and worse?
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