It was a good-looking march. Britain's new authoritarians take to the streets.

It was a pretty good-looking march. Lots of forty- and fifty-something middle-class men and women flourishing home made banners with witty slogans. We're not sure how many there were - estimates vary from about 20,000 up to half the population and were accompanied by the now familiar moans about how the media were reporting other news (even god-forbid the timely jumping ship of UKIP MP Douglas Carswell) rather than indulging the marchers vanity - but however many turned out they were an attractive bunch. No punks or masked anarchists just 35 year-old civil servants with their faces painted like the EU flags and well-groomed writers who've dragged their seven and eight year old children along.

These are the new authoritarians, the political children of 2016 - Remainers. Looking at the images from yesterday's march I am struck by both the homogeneity of the crowd - for all the talk of diversity it was a very samey looking gathering. And this was also a gathering of the 'haves' not the 'have nots', Harm de Blij's flatearthers rather than the common folk who are happily tied by love and faith to the place they live.

The common theme of the hand-made banners is that somehow a wrong has been done to these people. And, because of this wrong, we should change the principles of democracy to accommodate what they see as right. It's not enough that we had a referendum. It's not enough that Parliament, in accordance with constitutional principles made up yesterday by some judges, voted to allow the advice of that referendum to be taken by the government it advised. No we must have other votes, referendums and debates - a live second-guessing of a delicate negotiation.

At the end of last year I described 2016 as the Year of the Remainer:

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

What's clear to me about these few thousand remainers - let's call them Remain Ultras - is that they've invented a EU that didn't exist before 23 June 2016. Before then the EU was an unloved institution, almost no-one would dream of painting their face with it's flag without first getting a grant and we only waved that flag because the conditions of that grant required us to do so. Even those people who saw our membership as a good thing would have struggled to muster much enthusiasm for defending the EU itself.

Today all that has changed as our Remain Ultras take to the streets - where they'll be addressed by EU pension-holders like Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. Flags are waved, smiling and healthy faces nod at the sage metaphors from these men - cars driving over cliffs are a favourite. The EU is portrayed as a marvellous sugar daddy of an institution, a bastion of democracy, equality and all sorts of other good stuff (including those grants, of course). Then comes the crunch as one of the speakers, yesterday it was David Lammy MP for Tottenham, mentions the D-word:

We’re living in a dictatorship. In democracies people are always allowed to change their minds. Over the coming months and years we will fight.

Nothing out there suggests that any more than a few people have changed their minds about the vote last June. And some of them have come to like Brexit. What Lammy's words tell us, and they could have come from any of those Remain Ultra leaders, is that we cannot afford to see them as figures of fun. They are genuinely a threat to our ideas of liberty, democracy and the right of the people to have a say. As I wrote in December:

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

We must resist this authoritarian, anti-democracy message. Above all we should not indulge this bunch of extremists just because they dress well, have a decent hair cut and nice kids.

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Marches and rallies are professions of faith not mere political acts

In his novel 'Necromancer', Gordon Dickson explored the differing traits in human personality. The book acts as a prequal to Dickson's best known work, the Dorsai trilogy. One of the traits or types - alongside military, spiritual and scientific - was one based on faith. In 'Soldier, Ask Not' the second in the Dorsai trilogy, Dickson casts this 'trait of faith' in the manner of a sombre, puritan religion and explores ideas of unquestioning loyalty, community and conformity to rules.

But the origins of these 'Friendlies' that Dickson sets out in ' Necromancer' were what he called marching societies a group of cults whose typical modus operandi was to march through the streets chanting slogans. Now while the book paints these marchers as religious in motivation, Dickson is clear that the link is faith - undoubting belief that something is true regardless of criticism, evidence or argument:

“Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me”—his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me—“that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me!”

It's important that, in understanding politics, we appreciate that this faith is as important as the measured, supposedly rational debate that we pretend motivates the politically active. It has, for me at least, been a matter of curiosity why thousands of people who are otherwise pretty normal feel the need to gather in rallies, to stage protests and to march - like Dickson's cults - along the streets waving banners while shouting slogans. When we look back at the Labour leadership campaign, we see the clash of these two approaches to politics - cynical triangulation set against a cult-like certainty of the truth in those chanted slogans. As Nick Cohen argues in this week's Spectator:

Utopias are always banal. Corbyn's Utopia allows his supporters to wallow in the warmth of self-righteousness. They want to end austerity. Stop greed. Bring peace. How they do it is not their concern. Practicalities are dangerous. They take you away from Utopia and back into the messy, Blairite realm of compromises and second-bests.

The problem is (and Cohen - along with many others - misses this) that the Blairite realm has no appeal to the political. It is essentially anti-politics at least in how it deals with the traditional certainties of the left's world view. Those traditional certainties - capitalism exploits workers, socialism is good, businessmen are greedy, Tories are uncaring - are a mantra, exclamations of faith and without them the thing that drives the activist is gone. Without them the left has no purpose and is simply a pale imitation of the cynical, corrupt Tory Party.

If this mantra of socialism, so the left believes, is shouted loudly enough and often enough its message will be heard and the workers' Utopia will come to pass. And, just as in the quote above from 'Soldier, Ask Not', it doesn't matter how often the terrible truth of that Utopia is shown the marchers simply march more and shout louder. The mounds of dead in Soviet Russia and Maoist China make no difference. The warning words in '1984', 'We' and 'Brave new World' don't dent the commitment of the faithful. Riots and bread queues in Caracas merely result in a renewed condemnation of the rich and the greedy.

The rally and the march - things that seem strange and even sinister to most people - serve the same purpose as the Sunday service does to the evangelical. They are shared proclamations of faith, occasions when the believers gather to affirm that belief. These events are as much about this shared experience as they are about changing anything - the 'Save the NHS' march doesn't do anything to achieve that aim but instead brings together the faithful in publicly professing their faith.

Today, with what's called the 'populist' right, we're seeing similar attitudes emerging blinking and unpolished from the right. This isn't really that new - the extreme right has always been a twisted reflection of the far left - except in that there's numbers and momentum. Trump, Le Pen - even Nigel Farage - use that same rhythm of repeated slogans to provide a catechism for the faithful to use. And they use the same targets as the left too - greedy bankers, corrupt politicians, the rich elites and globalisation. There's an appetite for this because the processes of democracy became the realm of marketing rather than debate or discussion. And marketing suits the simple slogans of the faithful far more than the nuanced ideas of the intellectual.

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"Everything is within the state, nothing without the state" - today's marcher motto

Back in the 1980s – that age evoked so charmingly by Ed Miliband recently – the word “alternative” was captured and held prisoner by the forces of the left. To be an ‘alternative’ comedian wasn’t to be funny (although some were this doesn’t include Ben Elton) but to be ‘left-wing’, ‘progressive’ and above all else against “The Tories”.

In the end the alternatives weren’t really alternatives at all – there was much talk of “defending”, “fighting”, “mobilising”, “organising” and, of course, “striking” but little of substance as to the alternative being proffered.

Now, we find the same voices crying out, a coalition of the self-interested and the prejudiced descend onto London disrupting the pleasure of tourists, the weekend of locals and the choices of visitors. To achieve what is unclear except that this is a march for the “alternative”.

 For some, such as the Unions the alternative is for ordinary people to pay more taxes and for government to cripple future generations with debt so their members can continue to consume what the nations earns (and remember, dear reader, that public servants – however valued – are solely consumers, they do not produce wealth or income) regardless of the interests of those who are producing that wealth.

For others – the spoiled children of UK Uncut in the forefront – the aim is to disrupt and annoy, to make a petty point and to adopt again that squadrista role of doing what the government refuses to do (not that they will succeed in this, of course) in “maintaining services”.

Behind all this lurks to prejudice, the hatred of business and enterprise. People clutch at a specious belief in the moral superiority of public service and wallow in ugly envy of others fortune. These people – who somehow believe, like Mussolini, that “everything is within the state, nothing is without the state” – are screaming for the good state, be it motherland, fatherland or the nanny, to care for them, coddle them, provide for their every whim and need. And to take the money for it off those “other” people.

This March for the Alternative is the political equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum.

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More people watch a football match than march on Westminster - says it all really

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Arsenal vs Stoke: 60,048
West Ham vs Stoke: 34,980

So that's a shade below 100,000 people going to a premier league football game in London. So what you ask? Well...

Rather fewer folk (police estimates 20,000-25,000) decided to waste their Saturday by going on a march. Now that’s fine but frankly I don’t see the point – unless you fancy a trip to London with some mates, a brisk walk and some shouting. Followed I assume by a pint or two and earnest discussion about the ways in which the concerns of the marchers can be made to “count” (a popular concept with marchers that means precisely nothing at all).

On this occasion the issue of the day was “climate change” – and specifically stopping “climate chaos”. The organisers – something called the Stop Climate Change Coalition – told the papers that everyone was there:

“We’ve got so many people coming together. We’ve got faith-based groups, anti-poverty campaigners, green groups, students, community groups, women’s groups and unions”

…there you have it. The usual bunch of marchers, self-appointed guardians of the national ethic and assorted loony lefties.

Total waste of time, annoying and pointless. How does walking, shouting and waving banners inform a debate dependent on science, detailed appraisal of policy options and tough choices for political leaders? Not in the slightest.

Next time go watch a football match...

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