When did you first attend the SODEM protest outside Parliament and why did you come? come? 

I went with Liverpool for Europe, intending to go to the debate on whether there should be another vote on EU membership once we knew what the deal was. That was cancelled in order to debate the Windrush scandal, which we were very keen to attend anyway. We were all keen to support SODEM  and decided we’d like to attend a debate, so we resolved to go at the same time as when there was a debate that we were particularly interested in.

Roughly how old are you?

70

How frequently did you come and when was the last time you attended?

Attended 7 times between May 2018 and our last visit November 2019.

How far from Westminster do you live and what was your travelling time?

222 miles and about 3 and-a-half hours journey-time.

What’s your favourite memory?

Musical Monday with Yorkshire and Cornwall for Europe and Alastair Campbell playing Ode to Joy on the bagpipes.

Some of us from Liverpool for Europe were in a restaurant at Euston, waiting for the train back. We were all in our EU regalia. A customer sent over a bottle of wine to thank us for our efforts. Having received abuse from Brexiters and being asked immediately after getting of the train “Who’s paying you to do this?” it was so up lifting. We had a good conversation with him, his wife was an EU national. It was a real boost to our morale and a perfect end to the day.

Tell me your story

I’ve always been politically aware, but not very active. I joined the Labour party in the 80s to out vote militant in Liverpool and was very active, knocking on doors and leafleting. I find meetings very tedious and after a few years stopped being active.

Pre-referendum I looked at the people advocating Leave:- Farage, Gove, Johnson and Trump and didn’t need to know anything else to be convinced that remaining was the only choice. Out of curiosity I looked at the list of people/ organisations backing Remain and saw that it was basically the rest of the world and his wife. I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell of us voting to Leave. I didn’t engage at all in the campaign. I recall seeing the [Brexit red] bus and raising my eyes to the heavens, and thinking that no one would possibly believe that.

I was totally in shock the next day when I saw the results and when I saw people laughing and cheering, I just thought, “What on earth have you done?” 😱🤦‍♀️ I determined straight away that I’d have to do everything in my power to try and stop us leaving. I didn’t know much and recall saying to my Brexit-voting brother-in-law that it wasn’t a big enough majority for such a massive change and that we didn’t know enough about it to make an informed decision.

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