At the pots and pans protest at our government’s complicity in the attempted starvation of 2 million Gaza Palestinians in Whitehall this evening, I was attempting to beat out the rhythm of the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Rheingold – old moles hammering away in their mines – with a saucepan and wooden spoon. This was an effort to create an air of collective subteranean proletarian menace. Needless to say, loud though it was, it did not catch on.

The cacophony of thousands beating pans with spoons nevertheless settled into a series of steady rhythms, sometimes echoing chants, sometimes settling into that most basic one, two, one two that is like marching feet and a heartbeat at the same time.

A kippah and a Keffiyah side by side against genocide.

The power of the percussion made me think of the scene in the Tin Drum in which Oscar subverts a Nazi Rally by beating a different rhythm under the grandstand, throwing the Nazi band off its stroke so its loses its bombastic march and only recovers by finding a waltz rhythm, leading the rally to dissolve as the rigid ranks melt into whirling dancers. A scene that shows the potential of people and nations to shift, affirm hope and life and fluidity over rigidity, conformity and racist militarism; and affirming that though Germany produced Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich, it also produced Beethoven and Schiller and Schubert.

In a way, when the Left is campaigning properly, it is attempting to do what Oscar does in this scene.

On the train on the way home there was that announcement; “if you see anything that doesn’t look right”…I see an awful lot of things, on the News mostly, but reporting them to the British Transport Police wouldn’t do a lot of good, sadly.

I don’t think they had many takers.