Discredited, on Dubious Grounds

Yesterday I blogged about the #march26 demonstration. In this world, things move quickly. 24 hours on, I feel a follow-up is necessary.

Front Pages

Sunday’s front pages were not all entirely about the demonstration – something you may find shocking until you realise the Z-list celebrity-obsessed Daily Star Sunday and News Of The World were writing about Jordan and her cohort. From the front pages, the narrative being pushed indicates the march is being discredited, overshadowed by the violence. Photographs of riot cops in full gear surrounded by an air full of flare smoke sells. It looks like hell. Today’s front pages show (aside from the Evening Standard scaremongering over the Royal Wedding) the issue was not salient. It’s old news.

The press doesn’t have much time to get their opinions out there. They are competing to get articles written which fit their pre-chosen narratives, squeezed through the editing process and out onto the printing presses in time for the morning rush hour. They don’t have the time for detailed analysis – if the issue is dropped by them, it will die quickly. Of course, this is why I like the blogging and tweeting platforms – the discussion can continue.

Boris Alert!

Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph (istyosty link) that:

"The sad thing is that in spite of their crocodile tears, Balls and Miliband will feel quietly satisfied by the disorder – a token, they will tell themselves, of the public feeling that is out there to exploit.”

This is nothing but flamebaiting party politics, the “us and them” logic that so often plagues discourse in the media. His views are warped. The event the Leader of the Opposition attended, like 99.996% of the 500,000 protestors, was entirely peaceful. It was a family event. Boris's comments are part of the discredit narrative – and they didn’t go down too well.

On the actual day of protests, when he didn’t have a Torygraph column to fill, this is all he had to say:

This is the same Boris, of course, who Political Scrapbook asserts is prone to violence himself. The well-publicised antics of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive club of which Boris, Cameron and Osborne were members of, comes to mind.

In an urgent question session, the Home Secretary Theresa May refused three times to comment on Boris’s article, whilst blaming Yvette Cooper (whom raised the question) for her partisan questioning. Of course, more party politics. She also praised the demonstrations of the Countryside Alliance back in 2004. Of course, those didn’t involve a House of Commons invasion, or riot cops attacking protestors. I’ll come back to this question session in a moment. We need a bit of context first.

UK Uncut

The simultaneous protests caused the media a bit of a headache – trying to establish an accurate version of events in real-time is extremely difficult. Whether deliberately or accidentally, the portrayal of the violence with the peaceful occupation of UK Uncut has gifted them with negative attention from both sides. They are also (incorrectly) being attributed as the violent ones. Anthony Painter on Labour List had the following to say:

“How dare they unilaterally decide to conduct their own protest and divert attention from the main event.”

This view, whilst acknowledging UK Uncut were not responsible for the violence, questions why everybody shouldn’t just shuffle around in a queue. People have a right to protest, and this can be expressed in many ways. UK Uncut’s action was targeted not as a diversionary headline-grabber, but as part of a wider-scale response to the government’s claim that there is no alternative to their ideological cuts.

Likewise, Charlie Beckett condemns the timing of UK Uncut’s actions, which may be valid, although the BBC did possess leaflets regarding the situation hours before it happened. They had a chance to get their story straight. Joe Cox argues that UK Uncut partake in frequent occupations – to cherry-pick a particular event without the context of the others is misleading.

The police announced that 201 arrests were made. 145 of these arrests were on non-violent UK Uncut occupiers – 138 of which were charged with aggravated trespass. Shocking footage released by the Guardian shows that UK Uncut’s claim that occupiers were tricked into leaving with promises of not being arrested stand up to what happened in reality. The police have some serious questions to answer.

Eyewitness Reports

Eyewitness reports have been pouring in since the demonstration began. Laurie Penny’s New Statesman post was one of the more popular ones, however has been the source of both valid and unnecessary criticism (check out the comments on her article). Adam Ramsay described his arrest, and Dominic Campbell’s account goes into detail about the events at Trafalgar Square, where Black Bloc protestors became intermingled with other ongoing protests; mentioning the disproportionate police behaviour.

Eyewitness accounts, and I don’t mean to discredit them here, can be subject to hyperbole. They can even claim to see things that didn’t happen, or not see things that did. However, they are useful to get an on-the-ground view of things, and provide some more context for what I want to actually talk about.

More Powers

In the urgent question session, Theresa May said that she is prepared to look at granting more powers to the police. These powers seem to indicate the pre-emptive banning of people from protests, and the power to remove face masks. It will be interesting to see what Fitwatch makes of these powers. It will be additionally interesting to see how these powers stand up to the presumption of innocence and the right to protest. Comparing these powers to laws regarding football hooligans is like comparing apples to oranges: there’s a difference between banning people from football matches and removing their right to protest. In my mind this is reminiscent of sweeping legislation introduced by the Blair Government, such as the Serious And Organised Crime And Police Act 2005, which helped further erode our civil liberties and restricted the conditions upon which we exercise our right to protest. This coming from a Tory-led government who campaigned against Labour’s legacy of civil liberty abuse, and who have already taken positive steps into removing controversial databases (the ID card database). This is an intriguing test for the government.

Conclusion

It’s been a difficult three days to try and consume and analyse the amount of information that’s been streaming onto the internet, in a very fast moving story. I am hoping that a full debate is heard within the House of Commons with a full, independent report relating to the police tactics being on the table. The Met have questions to answer, which, when combined with their seemingly-dubious involvement News of the World phone hacking scandal, brings their credibility into question.

Whilst the violence on the day has been largely condemned and in the short term may allow the Tories breathing space to go on the offensive again, I believe that the anti-cuts message will percolate through once the cuts start to really kick in. Only time will tell – it’s just a shame we have a government willing to gamble with the lives of millions to find out whether they have the right medicine.