Wednesday 27 June 2018

Demonstrations and statistics

Estimates of numbers of demonstrators in London are notoriously difficult to validate. However, the BBC estimates that last Saturday's March for a People's Vote attracted around 100,000 marchers. That must be a conservative estimate, seeing that an enterprising 48%-er used an app named crowdsize on (presumably) the helicopter images of the demo and produced a figure of over 200,000.

 I used an app called crowdsize to estimate how many people there were. Clicking an area from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, with a high density of people, it gave me a figure of 239, 000 (I’ve rounded it). As the back of the crowd probably thinned out, I would say for sure 200,000. Awesome!

We do not have an official Metropolitan Police estimate yet, but a source close to the Met. has given the organisers a figure of 500,000. Given that the police some time ago gave up unthinking support for a Conservative establishment, one should treat this information with caution. However, it is clear that the big 1990 demonstration against the poll tax, which was a major factor in Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine reversing policy on local government finance, was somewhat smaller than the People's March.

The record is still held by 2003's Stop The War:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/28/demonstrations-protests-uk-list
That article is from 2011, but between then and now there had clearly been no demo on the same scale.

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