The central objective of the campaign was to get the invitation to Trump rescinded. As part of that, we formulated a statement for people to endorse and launched a petition towards that end.
the petition that was languishing for a long time suddenly took off about 2 weeks before his visit and got an impressive 85,000 signatures: far more than we were anticipating.
I think it's worth briefly looking at how we campaigned and what we did and didn't do in terms of the campaign.
At no point were we ever critical of the event itself it was the inappropriateness of Trump being there that was central to our campaign.
As soon as Trump was invited it changed the nature of the event from being an open event to being a rather exclusive event for Statesmen and women, Veterans and invited dignitaries.
Nobody was consulted by the government when they wrested control over all aspects of the event and fundamentally changed its direction.
From the outset, we adopted the slogan "Love Americans! Hate Trump!" to make it clear that our issue was with Trump and we were not engaging in any mean-spirited Anti-Americanism.
We also made it clear we would most likely be doing something around Guildhall Square and nowhere near the official event.
We never called for either a picket or a boycott of the event.
We never at any time approached any of the invited guests, be they Veterans, Councillors, or MPs to ask them to boycott the event. We understood why it was important for them to attend the event. Our objective was for the event to proceed without Trump, we fully supported the event itself.
We made it clear to the media that we thought it inappropriate to attempt to drag the Veterans into the argument since they had no say in the matter. clearly, they wanted to attend their special day to give respect to their fallen comrades, and if any of them did feel uncomfortable about Trump's presence we imagine they wanted to keep their own counsel.
It became obvious that there were clearly some who were putting a great deal of effort into promoting the idea on social media that we were planning to do something barbarous immediately outside the event.
We feel it was primarily these rather alarmist posts that were distressing people more than anything we had planned.
We were made aware pretty early on that the objective in the Trump camp was to dismiss the protests in London as merely the liberal elite on the march and that Portsmouth represented much more "his people", patriotic, right-wing, traditional blue collar etc. There were various pronouncements from Nigel Farage and his ilk about how outrageous it would be for any protests to take place.
There was also the argument that due to the official event being about our battle for freedom out of respect any form of protest would be improper. Many felt that this was taking cognitive dissonance to a new level.
The nature of our event was to maintain our respect for the veterans and the fallen, but also it was about the meaning of D-Day. the fight for freedom and against fascism.
We made it clear in two statements that our objection was primarily about his cosy relationship with alt-right and white nationalist groups which we made clear here.
Also, it was about his frankly appalling attitude to his own military which we articulated in this post.
We felt that it was important to have some sort of event even if it was tiny, and amounted to a couple of dozen. In fact, well over 300 attended. When factors in the staff from the University and the Council staff and others probably around 500 participated in the event.
There will be a full report elsewhere on this blog.
We had an event that attempted to marry disparate strands and I think we succeeded pretty well.
We had a wreath laying and some speeches at the War Memorial, to respect those who had sacrificed their lives in the struggle against fascism.
Also in the Square, we had more traditional reactions to Trump, with speeches on the threat he poses to our environment and to our way of life.
From the comments I have had from people I get the impression that people found the event a moving and impressive occasion.
It became clear that the event in portsmouth was going to be the most difficult of all the protests that took place and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who contributed to it.
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