The battle for Brexit has taken to the waves again as a flotilla of fishing boats sailed up the Tyne in Newcastle to demand a no-deal departure from the EU.
The demonstration came the day before Nigel Farage was due to launch a 280-mile “Leave Means Leave” march from Sunderland to Westminster.
The former Ukip leader was expected to appear at the protest on the river but had not surfaced by early afternoon, instead appearing on the US television network Fox News.
Braving choppy waters, 12 trawlers made their way up the Tyne while a battered boat was driven on the back of a lorry by road, before they met at Newcastle’s Quayside.
At one point, the anti-EU fishing boats sailed beneath the Millennium Bridge, where a small group of counter-protesters waved EU flags.
The demonstration was run by the anti-EU group Fishing for Leave, which also organised the confrontation on the Thames between Farage and Bob Geldof the week before the EU referendum in June 2016.
The latest protest was a more low-key affair. The only fireworks came when one trawler let off a two-minute volley of pyrotechnics from the Quayside before heading back down the river.
Catherine Blaiklock, the leader of the newly formed Brexit party and a close ally of Farage, was on one of the trawlers.
She said the protest was about “trust, democracy, respecting people’s vote”, adding: “This is a fragile flower and if you mess it around you can have unpleasant results. You just can’t ignore 17 million people, and that’s what is happening.”
A spokesman for Fishing for Leave said Theresa May’s Brexit deal presented an “existential threat to fishing and a total betrayal of Brexit and Britain” and placed a “constitutional bomb under democracy”.
Farage will launch a 14-day march from Sunderland to the Houses of Parliament organised by Leave Means Leave, the campaign group founded by the millionaire property tycoon Richard Tice and John Longworth, the former head of the British Chambers of Commerce.
Protesters were charged £50 to be a “core marcher” on the route, where they will be provided with branded merchandise including a wristband, woolly hat and hi-vis jacket.
While the exact route of the march has been a closely guarded secret, the rally is expected to target the constituencies of MPs whom organisers accuse of trying to thwart Brexit, including the Conservative Dominic Grieve and the former Tory Anna Soubry.
