At Westminster’s Central Hall – the storied political venue that has seen everything from suffragette meetings and the Bloody Sunday inquiry to the first public performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – a middle-aged man in a tight, greige suit is whipping up the crowd. “Are we gonna be free?” he beseeches. “We’re gonna be free to disagree!” they chant back, in some bizarre panto approximation of Primal Scream’s “Loaded”.
This is the third anniversary bash of Together, a raggedy, but strongly supported, “pro-freedom” pressure group, formed in the wake of the anti-lockdown protests, and chugging along ever since. Although the Covid debate has retreated into the back pages, its fervour flattened by the dead bureaucracy of the ongoing public inquiry, Together has found new furrows of discontent to plough: particularly the grumblings around the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), “15-minute cities”, and what they regard as mainstream media censorship. Together presents itself as a proletarian, open-minded refuge for the politically homeless – a place for black-cab drivers, pub landlords, small-business owners and concerned grandparents. But a little cross-referencing by the investigative journalists at DeSmog does reveal some interesting bedfellows, with one Together “cabinet member” having co-founded the anti-net zero “No Farmers, No Food”, and group affiliations with the vaccine-sceptic Hart foundation and Action Against Ulez Expansion.
The compère for the evening is the driving force of Together, Alan Miller, once a major figure in east London’s nightlife scene, now something of a Facebook Robespierre. Miller is somebody I have crossed paths with before, while making a documentary that touched upon the mass closure of nightclubs in the UK. Back then, he was the chairman of the Night Time Industries Association, a role which drew upon his experiences running the well-known Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, and the nearby Truman Brewery space. In fact, Miller isn’t the only old raver involved with Together, with legendary UK garage DJ, Norris “Da Boss” Windross, listed among the other founders.
While always a talkative, “legend in his own lunchtime” kind of figure, I never could have imagined Miller’s new incarnation – a kind of fire-stoking Wat Tyler for the “free-speech movement”. Dressing more and more like Jordan Peterson every day – with his sober-but-natty suit, salmon pink tie and shiny brogues – he is chairing an event that features an eclectic group of speakers. The guest list included: the journalist Dan Wootton; the tin-foil trequartista Matt Le Tissier; the peer Claire Fox; “Britain’s strictest headteacher”, Katharine Birbalsingh; and the academic Frank Furedi.
As the crowd waits for the billed acts to appear, enormous screens play a roughly cut montage of the speakers, juxtaposed with sworn Together nemeses. So: cheers for heroes (the columnist Allison Pearson) and boos for villains (Keir Starmer). It all reminds me of a wet-weather activity at a Benidorm resort, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the crowd broke out into a mass rendition of “Agadoo”. Onstage, Miller talks of authoritarians and “weak technocrats”. He invokes the spirit of Voltaire and William Tyndale, and tells us that Le Tissier (who originally pulled out, due to his ambassadorial duties at Southampton Football Club) is attempting to join us on a video call from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (“he’s through passport control now”). Miller refers to Starmer’s punishment of the rioters as “madness on steroids”, before introducing a low-resolution video message from Bernadette Spofforth, a “free-speech activist” who was arrested for tweeting an incorrect name of the Southport attacker (the charges were later dropped).
I spend some time sizing up the people around me, trying to work out who would sacrifice their Friday evening for such an event. There is a long queue at the bar, and a man in a T-shirt reading “a pub is for life not just for Christmas” nearly spills his four plastic pints all over me. I spot another guy in a shirt that reads simply “Anglo Saxon”. It’s an oddly stifling September evening, and the rafters are three-quarters-full of lightly glazed geezers and their freshly blow-dried wives, many of whom are exasperatedly fanning themselves with various unofficial pamphlets handed out outside. For freedom fighters, they all look remarkably benign: the demographic of a Sunday carvery at a country pub, or a TUI cruise ship.
There are plenty of speakers to get through, and one by one they make their way on stage. After an emotive introduction from GB News’s Beverley Turner, the first proper address of the night goes to Neil Oliver, the BBC geographer turned rabble-rouser extraordinaire. Oliver hams his way through a rather dated diatribe about how good it is to have everyone back in person again (as if lockdown didn’t end three years ago). He speaks of his “physiological response to togetherness” and “inversions of the natural order”. He tells us that “a flame matters most when it’s struck in the darkness”. With his flowing locks, whistling “W” sounds and nods to Celtic mysticism, Oliver often recalls William Wallace – had he set up an alternative medicine clinic in Hastings.
Next up is a panel talk chaired by Miller, featuring Wootton, critical race theory critic Ada Akpala and ex-Mumford and Sons banjoist Winston Marshall. They are joined, on video call, by the “rapper and podcaster” Zuby (who is mostly just an obsessive X-poster) and Le Tissier – now out of airport purgatory. The conversation revolves around tackling the “mainstream media”, and it goes pretty much how you’d imagine. Le Tissier offers up some guff about “people who no longer trust what Sly News [sic] are saying”; Zuby claims that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a “one of the most important things he’s done for humanity”; and Wootton – now shunned by even GB News – gleefully suggests that the “mainstream media is on its deathbed”.
But the panellist I can’t take my eyes off is Marshall. Dressed like a British actor on a press junket, he exudes a jaded pop-star indolence, rocking back and forth on his chair, laughing at his own jokes and throwing out bits of Silicon Valley jargon among his non-answers. “I ten-timesed my numbers since going independent,” he boasts, which is an odd thing to say for a man who’s gone from headlining Glastonbury to this. Perhaps the only scene of real conflict arises when Wootton digs at his former employers GB News (owned by Winston’s father, Sir Paul) and the crowd erupts into applause.
Winston spares us a performance of “Little Lion Man”, but music does arrive in the shape of Dominic Frisby – a finance journalist turned “comedy songwriter” who specialises in chap-hop style ditties like “Gammon and Proud”. Imagine Bill Bailey, had he been fed purely on a diet of Truth Social livestreams for three years. And watching Frisby jaunt through his excruciating music-hall numbers, it occurs to me that we all have the personnel to create an entire alternative media landscape. Frisby is Mr Light Entertainment – your Bradley Walsh, or Michael McIntyre – while Furedi and Birbalsingh are your Radio 4 intellectuals. Wootton is the showbiz correspondent, and Le Tissier the poundshop Lineker. It’s a model that Fox News has had success with but, in the hands of this mob, it all feels too petty, too small-time to really succeed. However mainstream the message might get – and some of what these guys say would find a fair echo nationwide – the carnival medium will always keep this specific grouping in the margins.
Later the same evening I meet some civilian friends nearby – the kind of people who only really know this world at a glance. They ask where I’ve been, and I say: “Well it was this anti-lockdown, anti-vax, pro-free speech kind of seminar. Matt Le Tissier… Dan Wootton… Neil Oliver… you know, that kind of crowd.” “Isn’t that all a bit old hat now?” one of the party asks. Embarrassingly, this hadn’t quite hit me until now. Because I am perversely “tuned into” this world, I tend to notice the campaigns, the characters, the paranoias it throws up. But really, we live in a very fast time, and 2020 – the year zero for many of tonight’s attendees – now seems like a generation ago. Which means that someone like Neil Oliver is about as relevant in 2024 as Neil Hamilton.
Covid, which provided the organising impetus behind this supergroup, is gone. In what other context could you have brought together such a bizarre mixture of broadsheet columnists and pop-cultural footnotes, tabloid hacks and minor politicians? It must be said, however, that the Establishment keeps giving them reasons to reunite. Because while the government may not be the cartoon villain Together think it is, there are opaque organisations trying to change the world we live in, the cars we drive, and how we run our businesses. And Britain has taken on a more joyless, authoritarian, law ’n’ order streak since Starmer’s election, with heavy sentences dished out to rioters, and all sorts of rumours about smokeless pub gardens, increases in alcohol duty, and other classic nanny-state scare stories floating in the ether.
The sheer size of Labour’s majority could easily breed a legislative overconfidence, and such disciplinarian policies do need a political challenge. You won’t find it at Together, which is no symposium of daring ideas or unspeakable statements, just a slightly tragic blend of malcontent grumbling and obsequious backslapping. Indeed, when the floor is finally opened up to questions, the only people who get to speak are the like-minded (including Adam “EssexPR” Brooks and a few other pressure group leaders), which all feels a little ironic for an organisation so maniacally obsessed with free speech. But there’s much that’s contradictory here: an angry, open-armed coalition of conspiracists, celebrities, think-tank mafiosi and freemen of a land where people have the right to disagree yet mostly read from the script.
Perhaps it’s just the latest vessel for a long-standing, mostly latent, streak of English libertarianism (with Neil Oliver as the lonely Scot) – your standard LBC or Mumsnet discourse, given new organisational force by lockdown, green initiatives and the culture war. But Together is also stranger and murkier than that. The chatter here is far more zealotic, much further “down the line” than anything you’d hear at the Reform conference (which took place on the same day). And while it’s easy to laugh at Le Tissier droning on about “totalitarianism” on Facetime, you have to wonder who the people who don’t speak are: the young, Oxford-shirted pseudo-Spads at the back of the room, slyly typing up notes for god knows who. Lockdown may be over, but the fuse that it lit still burns.
[See also: Did the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers deserve their sentence?]
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