Messages from March’s March

‘Tis the morning after the night before and the meejuh are busy picking over the chicken carcass and feeding us all the wrong bits.

Inevitably, because they feel that they have constantly to produce “sensational news”, our horribly dumbed down media are tending to concentrate on the fact that a few hundred protestors went a bit too far – albeit nothing on the scale of the Great Poll Tax Riot. (Two hundred-odd arrests on a day when two hundred thousand-plus had gathered is damned good going on anyone’s analysis!)

There are several points to arise out of the media coverage. Firstly, it serves to obscure a proper view of the feelings being expressed. The overwhelming majority of yesterday’s protestors were peaceful, law-abiding people who wanted to make the, very valid, point that they object to what HMG are up to. There IS an alternative to the Tory scorched earth policy and they were saying so loud and clear. If we hadn’t been in our current state of penury we’d have been there to say it as well.

Sadly, the (limited) violence lets the government shibboleth-robots off the hook. Secretly, they hope and pray that things will turn nasty. It allows them to go into orgasmic paroxysms of pompous condemnation and mock outrage, coupled with a huge dollop of humbug about understanding people’s concern. The Wretched Margaret, the sanctimonious Jeffrey Archer and, latterly, the idiot Boris have all been exponents of this art form, but none of them ever had the acting skills to carry it off.

Having established that the only real beneficiaries of the demo turning nasty are its targets, one must start asking who was really behind it. There have been stories in recent months/years of scarily well-trained and disciplined groups of men dressed in black arriving on a demo solely to kick things off. I can prove nothing and will just leave that thought with you.

We’re all in this together, they say. Some of us are in it up to our necks and we don’t bloody like it.

Finally, we must look at the government response to yesterday’s march. It was at best inadequate, at worst insulting. At the height of the march all they could put up for interview with the BBC was a junior Treasury minister, Justine Greening, who, on her performance, ought not to be running a Bureau de Change at Stansted, let alone have a hand in the taxpayer’s pocket. She had quite obviously been primed by whatever passes for Malcolm Tucker these days, wound up to a fever pitch of indifference and let loose with her bromides. Where were the big guns? Where were Cameron, Clegg and Osbourne? They just weren’t there because they just don’t care.

The REAL message from yesterday is clear and, for the last thirty years, it has been a fact of political life. Tory government brings people out on the streets, but not in the way they would like. It’s what happens when you hand power to people who don’t understand what it’s like to live on an “average” salary; people who have never had to make the decision between fuel or food; people who would make Marie Antoinette blush with embarrassment.

We’re all in this together, they say. Some of us are in it up to our necks and we don’t bloody like it.