'Everyone is divided and lazy': How the UK freedom convoy went wrong
The messy fallout of a failed protest
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Welcome to our new subscribers who joined after our post about the iron pill, where fitness routines meet far-right fantasies. Today, we’ve been looking at the UK’s Freedom Convoy protest, which has tried and failed to be as big as the one that has gridlocked Canada’s capital city.
We gained access to the invite-only social media channels where the group coordinated the demonstration, and watched as the poor turnout prompted a slanging match between organisers. If you like what we wrote, please forward this email on to a few friends and ask them to sign up too.
‘Everyone is divided and lazy’
It was supposed to unite Britain’s anti-vaxxers in a glorious act of mass defiance. The UK Freedom Convoy, taking a cue from its Canadian counterpart where thousands of truckers have blockaded Ottawa, was meant to shut down London and the M25 motorway more than a week ago.
A plan that circulated on anti-vaxx social media provided routes for 11 separate convoys to leave from different regions of the country and converge on Westminster. They would bring the capital to a standstill while protesting Covid jabs and vaccine mandates.
It did not go as planned. Apart from a brief flash of excitement when Keir Starmer was chased and called a “paedophile protector” — a reference to the conspiracy theory that as head of the CPS, Starmer refused to investigate Jimmy Savile — the UK Freedom Convoy has been a washout. After a week the protest, which is based outside New Scotland Yard by the Thames, is an encampment of about three tents and four cars. Traffic, rather than being brought to a halt by the convoy, is unimpaired.
The UK convoy is not an explicitly far-right operation, but at Scout we’re interested in how anti-vaxx groups intersect with the far-right, so we’ve been checking out their social media pages. They have an active presence on Telegram, a messaging app, and Zello, a walkie-talkie app. And sure enough, they are awash with claims about Jews controlling finance, the media and the international response to the pandemic.
In the last few days, however, the conspiracy theories have taken a backseat to the more real-world problems of how to get protesters to spend the night on the pavement when it’s 3C outside and pissing it down. Organisers are trying hard to maintain the demonstration amid waning interest, pleading for more people to show up.
As their hopes of capturing the momentum that has sustained the Canadian protests fade, activists have been reduced to tears for failing to turn London into the new Ottawa. They are now firing off angry voice notes, accusing each other of being police infiltrators and establishment stooges.
The protest has been partly organised on a Telegram group called Direct Action UK Convoy 2022. It has 4,600 members online but only a fraction of them have mobilised, leading to bitter accusations of apathy and incompetence.
Keith Whitty, a demonstrator who says he has been at the protest “most days”, has reproached his fellow activists for failing to turn up. “I’m trying to talk the truth and you can’t handle the truth,” he wrote in the group. “Everyone is divided and lazy because there are two cars and 20 people at a 1-week protest…Fuck off with, ‘there are people on the ground’. There are 0.000000000000000000001% of Londoners there.”
Others have accused Direct Action members of “hiding behind their keyboards then tapping themselves on the back as a warrior for sharing a post”. Brad Allsopp, a demonstrator from Sittingbourne in Kent, drove 50 miles to Westminster only to find a poor turnout.
He has been imploring more people to show up:
“All I am hearing is ‘next time’. We have no time. We need support now. I wish I could be at home warm wrapped up but this is bigger than that. I am trying my very best to stay calm. Get out from behind your keyboard and join us now.”
Another demonstrator posting under the name J Lou Lou said the sight of the Westminster rally and its lacklustre attendance made her cry. “There should be hundreds of people at New Scotland Yard, not a handful,” she wrote. “Way, way more people need to be attending. The handful of guys sleeping over there have been doing this for a week now. Where is everyone 😪”
After the group’s online fundraiser — which was meant to secure money for supplies — was taken offline, there have been accusations that event organisers misappropriated funds. They deny any wrongdoing. “I would never do anything dodgy with the funds,” said an organiser. “They are going straight to the front line.”
Ann Brown, an activist who raised questions about how donations would be spent, has also been sending voice notes accusing her peers of factionalism:
“I’m just absolutely miffed at this channel. Everybody’s arguing with each other and ripping each other down. You’ve got Canada, America, Australia, sorted. In the UK, we’re arguing and bickering over the phones while a handful in London are screaming for more people to hold the line. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.”
The person who is the most active on the front line, such as it is, goes by the handle Freedom Fab. For a week, he has been begging for people to join him, saying he ditched his own plans to spend half-term with his son to protest in Westminster.
“Where is the UK convoy that we have been screaming about?” he said on Zello. “We are looking embarrassing right now.”
He has had to shut down two Zello channels used to coordinate the protest — other activists said they had been infiltrated by police informants, but Freedom Fab had also been complaining about “chit chat” from members spamming the group. They had been flooding the group with unrelated conspiracy theories that HIV was being put into genetically modified food and claims that the Queen had died of Covid.
Freedom Fab, who walks around clad in a Canadian flag, has been shouting through a megaphone at commuters to take off their masks. He doesn’t always get the response he hopes for. On a livestream posted on Valentine’s Day, he spotted a father waiting with his kids for a boat at Westminster Pier, and shouted at him to remove his face covering. The father, cupping his hands to his face, responded: “You’re an arsehole.”
A refrain in the Telegram channel is that nobody from other activist groups has supported this rally. Convoy planners have complained that the leaders of regional and national anti-vaxx organisations — some of which have tens of thousands of members — have refused to share flyers for their protest. Organisers had counted on outside support, so when the crowd failed to materialise, they accused the other anti-vaxx groups of being “controlled” by the government because they didn’t want to promote a “genuine cause for change”.
A prominent member of the Direct Action channel named Neo, who said he had also become emotional at seeing the size of the protest, wrote:
“Unfortunately we aren’t receiving shoutouts from other big groups that could pull in crowds of thousands. Where are all the Facebook truther ‘celebrities’ now? Because this is real and it won’t make you famous, they aren’t interested. They don’t want to sit in the cold and stand guard for freedom. It’s heartbreaking, and infuriating. I pray God intervenes, because we’re going to need divine intervention.”
Other organisers are rejecting any negative assessment of the convoy, accusing critics of being government saboteurs and demanding their removal from the group. One activist called Dark Lord Alexander Anthon Sangmoore, who blogs for a conspiracist YouTube channel, sent an angry voice note that said: “All of the delegitimisation and demoralisation operatives — fucking boot them, don’t hesitate. Do not concern yourself with these demoralisation fuckfaces.”
The reason for the London protest was never as clear as the Canadian one. In Canada, you have to show a vaccine passport to get inside gyms, bars, and restaurants, while jabs are required for healthcare staff and public servants. Their protest is ostensibly focused on a vaccine mandate for truckers whose jobs take them across the border into the US. By contrast, our Covid restrictions have been lifted, and the NHS has reversed a vaccine mandate for its staff.
Social scientists say that if protest movements want to inspire their followers to take action, they need to convey that there is a severe problem that urgently needs addressing. They also have to convince them that participating will have an impact, and that this is a just and worthy cause. The UK Freedom Convoy asked a lot of its followers — leave your homes, drive to London, and camp in the cold indefinitely to demonstrate against an issue we don’t really have. More waves of this protest have been planned, but don’t hold your breath.