A GAGGLE of far-right transphobes descended upon my town in south-east London a couple of weeks ago to protest against Magical Storytelling, a drag queen storytelling event for kids at the Honor Oak pub.

The protest was organised by the uber-conservative, so-called “student movement” Turning Point UK (TPUK) — though few, if any, of their mob that I saw resemble the fresh-faced youngsters used in the organisation’s online paraphernalia.

And the same morons are planning another ruckus for this Friday morning (March 10) at 11am at The Great Exhibition pub in East Dulwich, south London. Strangely, though, the pub says there isn’t and never has been a drag queen storytelling event scheduled to take place at the pub on that date. Still, the locals and London-based anti-racists are planning to oppose them.

TPUK is the British franchise of Turning Point USA and is apparently backed by Tory backbench MP Marco Longhi. It claims to be the largest conservative activist movement in this country. Well, I hope it is, because it only managed to muster up about 30 people for this crusade against drag queens reading books to children. 

“It’s wigs and make-up, what’re you so afraid of?” I chanted with the roughly 300 anti-fascist counter-protesters who blocked the far-right goons from getting anywhere near my local.

TPUK’s raison d'être, it seems, is to provide fuel for the culture war and to make sure that the piss of GB News viewers and The S*n readers never stops boiling.

Its latest tactic is to drum up fear of the far-right folk devil du jour: trans, non-binary and genderfluid people. 

In the run-up to the protest, and most days since, TPUK has shared racy images of drag queens performing at totally different and unconnected events, and claimed that this is what is happening at pubs, nurseries and schools everywhere. 

All it takes is a little googling of Magical Storytelling or Drag Time Story Hour to see that TPUK is spreading misinformation. These events are clearly not strip shows nor whatever nonsense TPUK says they are. They are about helping kids learn about diversity and inclusivity, and that being different is no bad thing. 

TPUK hates being referred to as the far-right. It claims that because it has prominent black and Asian members, it can’t possibly be on the far right. Yet it does what all far-right organisations do: sow hatred, scapegoat minorities, spew conspiracy theories and divert attention away from the real causes of oppression in order to advance its own group’s power.

It is obsessed with the idea that Britain, or the West in general, is under threat from an amorphous enemy, “the woke,” which is basically anyone or anything to the left of Nigel Farage.

Why am I even writing about TPUK? They are, after all, a pathetically small, though well-funded, far-right fringe group. And reading about themselves in a left-wing publication will likely get them all damp in their underpants. They may even see the publication of this story as some kind of victory.

Well, back at the counter-protest I was shocked to find that I recognised the face of one of TPUK’s speakers. Fortunately, I couldn’t hear what he or any of the others had to say over the anti-fascists’ chants of “are you not embarrassed?”