Boots, boots, boots, boots, moving up and down again

Count, count, count, count ... the bullets in the bandolier

Clip: Australian tenor Peter Dawson sings his hit Boots.

I’m not entirely sure how it comes that police always estimate attendees at demos at much lesser a number than demo organisers do, aside, that is, from the fact that estimates usually reflect the parties’ interests in the number being low or high; but the discrepancies can seem illogical to the casual onlooker.

The fact that demo organisers organise the demo does not mean that they necessarily know who turns up or whether people will turn up at all. They have their grass roots, of course, but if I went down to join the throng, I don’t know if I’d tell them. They wouldn’t know me and we might not even be introduced. Demos are not wedding receptions.

Any demo in an urban setting will do what it’s intended to do: attract attention. And onlookers are plentiful, from those who happen to be passing by to those who sit in police control rooms twiddling the knobs of their cameras. So, between 70,000 and half a million people at a given march: what do those look like in real time?

Here’s 75,000 happy chappies at Notre Dame Stadium in Indiana, USA.

Notre Dame is small fry compared to Michigan stadium, which is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Here is a crowd of, what looks like 100,000 Ukrainians.

Notre Dame Stadium holds 100,000. So half a million is five Michigan Stadiums:

You’d have thought that telling 70,000 from half a million was easy, but bakers even get confused over how many eggs are in a dozen.

You could get some AI scanner to analyse footage of the march and then tell you how many marched. I mean, they have face-recognition stuff to ban obstreperous theatregoers (such as at Madison Square Garden (€)), so whatever’s analysing your good side must also be able to count, no?

If that doesn’t work, you could require details. To get a large march authorised, you need to plan a route and get police to agree to it. Like Hyde Park, London, to the American Embassy, London (which used to be 300 metres away in Grosvenor Square, bearing an eagle looking in the wrong direction, and is now in Battersea, making it worth putting your Reeboks on for). That way, the police know where to appoint stewards and mobile operational headquarters and beefburger wagons and can keep everything on the straight and narrow.

Much, much better, of course, would be to get everyone who marches to register, like you need tickets to get into Madison Square Garden. At the Garden, it’s because places are limited; for a march it’d be so’s we knew how many pitched up. The idea behind a demo is that it’s a spontaneous expression of protest born of a groundswell of sentiment, but the spontaneity goes a little lost with all the preparation that’s needed. And the protest part can get heightened or diminished according to how much advance political capital can be squeezed out of the very fact of the protest before it even takes place.

After the march, not much happens and there’s not that much merch. There can be a few headlines if the skinheads infiltrate and start beating people up to raise a bit of profile. Skinheads characteristically wear drainpipe, tie-dyed, blue Levi 501s, Doc Martens and shave their heads, and some may even be found to be carrying a Metropolitan Police badge, if they were but strip searched.

That said, if there are no scuffles, the only thing that anyone’s interested in after the march is how many were there there? And, with that being so central to the very notion of holding a march, you’d have thought that the methods for knowing that would be a bit more sophisticated than they appear to be.

Of course, the organisers could get everyone to register, with e-mail, phone number, date of birth and address. But that would simply be unnecessary administrative red tape. Because, all else being equal, all those details should be available from the face-recognition cameras, anyway.

As for the route, from Hyde Park, through Belgravia and past Buckingham Palace (or thereby), on down over the river to splendid Battersea, with its dogs’ home and Pink Floyd album cover, is around three kilometres, so not quite a marathon. However, it has become a subject of great controversy, since it is feared that the march, if not the entire body of mankind, could slip in a quick diversion up Whitehall and desecrate the Cenotaph, which is bombastically, of not a little dangerously, plonked in the middle of the road there. That’s a diversion of another three kilometres there and three kilometres back again, and nine kilometres is probably a healthy outing, but one wonders why this challenge has been raised, other than that the march is set for Armistice Day. Which is when people resort to peaceful means of protest instead of shooting each other.

Of course, if march organisers wanted to plan insurrection, they might well conceal the true objective of the march. We are but a few days after England’s celebration of the failed Gunpowder Plot ... so, obviously, the suspicion of a six-kilometre diversion on a three-kilometre march is going to be met with blanket denials. Obviously. Don’t want the plan exploded before it ... explodes.

It’s where things explode that people get killed, and are getting killed. I think that that’s something to protest about. This is a protest of one.