It's here! - the day we march against the chaos that is Brexit.

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

A thread for those of us on the march today :)

Weather still looking good, (perhaps, possibly, even some sunshine?) temps around 12-14, a little gusty at times, cooling off in the evening, so bring an extra jumper if you haven't set off.

Travel safely and see you at the march!

Fawful you could simply ask them whether they stand by their estimate of last October’s march being around 450,000 and acknowledging “it’s plausible that more joined further along the route” and that their method doesn’t work well for non-static crowds. And then ask them whether, as they doubtless also stand by their assessment of last week’s march, that they are genuinely saying they estimate fewer people last week than in October; and how come they’ve suddenly forgotten to mention their methodological limitations for non-static crowds.

fullfact.org/news/did-670000-march-peoples-vote-brexit/

fullfact.org/europe/peoples-vote-march-count/

onalongsabbatical I feel exactly the same way as you!

And I'll send you a large squishy custard pie for when the doorbell rings ... .

To be honest, I don't care what fullfact.org are saying. The fact that Donald Tusk referred to 'one million' is more important. The EU has taken note of the significance of the march, which is surely one of its key objectives, rather than a rather academic (pretty pointless) point-scoring about how small the crowd was!

I did that too @TheElementsSong
They just said 'it's not a perfect science' , and that the October march might have been 250,000 people. 'Next time' it should be a rally, then. Very annoying to try to stand up and be counted, and then not be counted!

The quickest way to work out the numbers at the march is to ask Google and Apple - I'd guess 80% of marchers had phones.

Failing that, if you could interrupt Vodafone, EE, Three and O2 from counting their money, they could tell you how many unique connections they made over the course of the march in the area.

I didn’t use my phone, signal was either blocked or it wouldn’t work for some other reason.

Most people weren't using phones where I was. No data service anyway. And a lot of the people around where we were at 2pm (in Parliament square) were either very young or very old and probably not heavy phone users. I only got my phone out towards the end of the rally to take some pics.

Disclaimer for the next paragraph: I am a professional researcher whose job is estimating hard-to-estimate stuff.

If I was going to put a figure on this I'd want several different quantitative and qualitative estimation methods, and an algorithm to account for flow of people on and out of the march. I'd look at things like photos, TfL data, estimates from March organisers and police if available, and I'd try to reconcile them using a model that could test hypothèses about the differences between estimates, by accounting for different crowd densities, flow of people in and out, etc. I'd also look at photos of a "regular Saturday" to help establish how many people were tourists vs marchers.

If someone asked me to do that I'd be asking for a substantial sum of money and quite a lot of time

Just count from aerial footage!!
I was there , didn't start right at the beginning but joined near the start.
Couldn't get to Parliament Square due to numbers
Had great difficulty leaving due to numbers Easily a million in my opinion

Most people would have had their phones at least on though. I love that Tusk gave us a shout out!

Most people weren't using phones where I was

If it was switched on then at some point a tower will have picked it up and logged it.

Obviously the poor service itself points to a certain size of crowd ...

You can't just count from aerial footage. The result will depend on what area you consider "the march" to cover and the average density you assume. I can guarantee you that the result will vary by a factor of at least 100% depending on your assumptions.

Most people weren't using phones where I was

What I meant was that most people where I was standing never held a phone in their hand for the entire two hours of the rally. They might not have had one at all. One woman asked me to take a photo using her (cheap) camera. I'd take that to mean she probably didn't have a phone. Lots of very young kids where I was too - none of whom will have had phones. If you could get mobile phone data it might be helpful but it would be very incomplete.

Basically the organisers' estimate probably contains some bias but there is no reason to think it's fundamentally worse than the other figures being chucked around. At least they were there.

I suspect that Grease-Smug doesn't knock on doors, he probably gets his nanny to do it for him.

I tried to use my phone but it kept saying no service so I assumed everyone else was doing likewise and the network became overloaded, but hey I'm sick of the dispute about numbers from those who weren't there and a weird formula for working out how to count a million
Also thoroughly disgusted with my MP who last night voted for no deal, this makes me very very angry, this is Cornwall we stand to lose the most you twat E-mailed him but so far no reply!
I feel like I'm invisible and not sure what to do next

If the vote is run with proper controls and genuine "Leave to..." rather than just "Leave" and still confirms Leave I will still think it's the wrong decision and be sad but I will also accept it's what an informed majority want.

I don't accept the previous Leave vote was valid because:

The version of "Leave" we are talking about now is far from the possibilities suggested in the ref campaign but there has never been a chance to reconfirm it. It's a bait and switch.

Regardless of the gvt leaflet saying the result would be implemented, legally the 2016 Ref was defined as advisory and that meant it was not subject to the controls a binding ref would have. If it had been subject to those controls the Leave campaign would have breached them, invalidating the result. So another bait and switch. I am aghast that we are rewarding these liars and cheats by letting them keep their win without a fair rerun.

Since 2016 we have learned a lot about the weaponisation of social media, not least because of the manipulations in our ref and the 2016 US elections. If the ref happened today there would be a lot more scrutiny of where provocative content originates.

But fundamentally we need a ref (or election) where Leave has a specific destination, not just an action. The 2016 Leave campaign deliberately didn't do that because they knew proposing one definition would lose as many votes as it gained. Hence cakeism and unicorns. This time they would need to come to the table with a single costed proposal that can be judged. (Alternatively, May could have said "right, next step is a cross party working group to define the options, then we have a (ref/general election) to confirm the direction, then we trigger Article 50". But we didn't, so we went from "hey wouldn't it be cool if people could fly" to jumping off a cliff without going through a process of "can people fly? If no, what do we need to do to make it happen?" and then inventing airplanes or squirrel suits or zepplins or even just a parachute before jumping.)

I really hope Grease-Smug comes knocking at my door.

Ha!

Grease -smug. His real name is such a great name to play around with. Love the idea of childhood nanny knocking on the doors for him ' just asking for a friend' ? Will you vote for him? His in a safe seat so I guess they will.
Will he vote for the deal (mark 3 ) tomorrow?