Reporting in the news last night.

At first the BBC and Metro reported that ‘hundreds’ of people celebrated Brexit in Parliament Square. On TV the BBC’s Brexit night special featured remain supporters and other worthy (to them) talking heads and showed about 5 seconds of the Square before the under-whelming clock projection on the front wall of No 10 at 11pm, then immediately back to the studio and their panel of pundits. 

The Telegraph live feed was pretty accurate in so far as my experience and others coincided with what their reporting team saw. And now I know that it was Nigel Farage and the Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent in the lock in at the Red Lion pub when my friends and I couldn’t get access. 

This picture taken from above the square shows just how big the crowds were; thousands, not mere hundreds and the BBC and Metro have updated their reports during today. The Manchester Evening News hasn’t, but I suppose they repeated the BBC and didn’t have local knowledge to correct the ‘under estimate’ (lets be charitable).

I can’t yet find out who took this picture and where it was first published (it was shared from one of the friends who stayed on) but I am confident it was taken last night for several reasons. The arrangment ofthe flags, the positioning of the blue poster at the base of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill and the status of the restoration work round the tower of St Margarets Westminster.

Note that the Metro article also speaks of the arrests, 5 in London, one in Glasgow, none in Belfast, none of them for serious disorder. 

The group Traditional Britain has this video on their FB page, taken from the same, or a nearby vantage point as the photograph above. It shows the joy of the crowd as the recording of Big Ben chimed 11o’clock. That may seem a strange time, but it  was the last decree of Brussels, where the time was midnight. 

And finally the left leaning Independent, so far left I don’t know how they are not prone, published this today. 

Parliament Square was a knuckle-dragging carnival of irredeemable stupidity
by Tom Peck Political Sketch Writer

There they were, all gathered in one place. Not quite midnight’s children but 11 o’clock’s toddlers. Here, at the long-awaited end of dry January, was a once-proud nation coming together to wet its little trousers.

…there is also, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, some half-remembered obligation for a writer to have the courage to tell the truth. So it is with a genuine sense of sorrow that I must report that on Friday 31 January, between the hours of 9pm and 11pm, Westminster’s Parliament Square played host to a static, knuckle dragging carnival of the irredeemably stupid. 

, we must go through the motions. Dance the dance. By the time the final countdown came you could scarcely get on to Whitehall. There were thousands there.

Of course, what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants.  We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there.

. . . Ann Widdecombe . . . She’s only 72. Which is young enough, it turns out, to stand on a stage in Parliament Square and ululate away about “the glorious future that awaits us” – the one she has forced on the nation’s young entirely against their wishes.  Not the young people I saw celebrating last night – he noticed a few men using salty language but not the thousands of youngsters. 

These people (you crashing snob!) really do think it’s 1989, or the Arab Spring, that Frisby is their Vaclav Havel. They think the blue touchpaper has been lit, except for the fact that our neighbours are not rising up but glancing up to look upon us with embarrassed pity at our own crushing stupidity.

There is simply no way anyone of good conscience can make peace with being so very clearly on the wrong side of history. 

Come together? Sorry, but no thanks. The long walk back to sanity starts now. Who knows, it might even be a surprisingly short one.

Had a journalist written in such terms about any other group than the English, and he is also ignoring the well represented ethnic minorities in that crowd, he would be sacked, pillioried, hung drawn and quartered, his children or cats sold into slavery and his name a hissing in the dark. A well-loved senior newsreader was forced to resign this week merely for quoting Shakespeare at a black activist. But Brexit happened, despite him and his colleagues.