One of the best things about being a correspondent based in Britain is the glamour. I was musing on this point somewhat facetiously as I scoffed lunch – a little box of fried chicken and chips – while walking down a ramp towards an exit gate at the Labour Party’s annual conference at the ACC arena in Liverpool on Sunday.
I had only recently disembarked a train from London that was three carriages shorter than it was meant to be. This meant that all the seat reservations had to be cancelled and the journey was essentially a free-for-all – there were people sitting on the floors, in between carriages, and even in the toilets.
After three hours of that delight, I made it to the conference. I met some people hurriedly and then had to find somewhere to sit down to work. Deadlines loomed. My nutritional choices boiled down to either ingesting this dried-up chicken while marching across the venue, or going hungry until late that evening.
The glamour was almost too much to bear. But it was also half the fun, an integral part of having the privilege of a ringside seat at Britain’s political circus, the craziest show in town. It was also the best dried-up chicken I had tasted in quite a few weeks.
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Near the gate I ran the gauntlet of a posse of hard-right protesters, an angry sea of people waving Union Jacks. I became aware that somebody was shouting towards me from the far side of a security barrier. He was with a second man and they weren’t saying hello.
“What’s that you’ve got there? Is that some vegan sh*te you’re eating,” shouted the young man from the barrier. I was sure I heard the second man call me a “w**ker.”
Instantly I recognised the first man, and quickly realised that, in all likelihood, he hadn’t recognised me.
I first met him in early August at a hard right anti-migrant protest outside an asylum hotel in Didsbury, just south of Manchester. He was a YouTuber, a hard-right influencer and content creator who goes by the name of the Ginger Patriot. He is in his early 20s.
I had interviewed him at the Didsbury protest and he couldn’t have been more polite. Now, here he was snarling at me across a security barrier in Liverpool about my gastronomic choices.
Both men were filming with mobiles phones held in professional grips to keep them steady. The Ginger Patriot had a microphone on his jacket. I guessed they were probably live streaming.
Clearly their plan was to provoke angry reactions from people they abused at the Labour conference, which they could upload as content for their followers. It is a common tactic among the battalions of hard-right influencers who document their side’s protests. Some of them make thousands of pounds a week from ads.
“I know you,” I said to the Ginger Patriot, as I approached the barrier.
“Oh yeah?” he said, his face contorted in rage. “How the f**k do you know me?”
“I’m with The Irish Times. I interviewed you in Didsbury.”
“Well what the f**k are you doing in there?” he replied, perhaps assuming I was a left-wing Labour supporter – that would be so typical of the Lamestream Media.
“I’m a journalist. I’m covering the conference for my newspaper. You were a lot nicer to me the last time we met. Do you not remember?”
He didn’t say another word to me. But it was obvious that, now, he was starting to remember. He looked embarrassed. Soon his face was redder than his hair.
In Didsbury back in August, he had told me he originally started going to anti-migrant demonstrations as an ordinary non-filming protester “on the English side”, which would normally be met by left-wing counter protesters.
He complained that, afterwards, he would read misleading newspaper reports about “far-right fascists” causing trouble.
“I’d be there. It was nothing but peaceful. It was the other side that were doing the violence and the intimidation. People need to see the real side of these protests and that was what made me want to start documenting them,” he said.
“When I’m recording, I want to get both sides of the story.”
He complained back in August that left-wingers had left abusive messages about his parents in the comments section beneath his videos online. This was unfair, he said. He also insisted that he didn’t blame asylum seekers for coming to Britain.
“If you came from a poor Third World country, you’d be stupid not to take the opportunity.”
At the Labour conference on Sunday, he walked away from our interaction at the security barrier. I exited through the gate and saw him again outside, but he didn’t want to talk to me again. The Ginger Patriot brushed past me looking mortified.
The protest began to move off. I heard one of them suggest they should go to the pub. The army of hard-right live-streamers and influencers began packing up their media kit, their work done for the day.
I got back to the glamour.
