Unless you’ve had your head buried under a pillow and not watched any TV nor read any newspapers, then you should have been aware that Saturday was the day that Britain saw the biggest protest march since the march about the War in Iraq 8 years ago, and the biggest ever for the cause the march was representing. The cause being the population’s deep worries and dissatisfaction with the current government’s plans for the unfair and the unnecessary cuts to public services, which really should be avoided if the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 onwards (the bankers and financial speculators) were made to pay for their mistakes. Instead it falls on the poor and the middle classes to pay for the rich classes’ mistakes. I won’t go further into pros and cons of the argument as I have covered that in some of my previous blog posts.
My point today is that the media coverage, both simultaneous to the protest and in the newspapers after the event, have been biased and rather unhelpful in concentrating disproportionately on the tiny disruptive element that caused some damage in Oxford Street and Piccadilly (eg the Ritz). Those 200 people were not part of the 250000+ (some estimates are 400000+) peaceful and rightful protest marchers.
One very significant bias (or misjudgement at best) was when both Sky News and the BBC live coverage of Ed Miliband’s (leader of Labour Party) speech, which was excellent by the way, to the massive gathering in Hyde Park. When Ed was speaking, both news feeds juxtaposed the video images of the Oxford street rioters onto The live video of The speech. This immediately created an impression, perhaps iconography, that Ed was both responsible and inciting those riots. This is pure sensationalism, and in the case of the right wing media a gift for undermining the will of the masses and the goodwill of the leader of the Labour party in supporting the cause of discontent of the massive majority of the protesters. Intelligent people know that the two images are not cause and effect. The anarchist rioters are always there whenever there is a big cause to voice by the masses, and they don’t care what damage they do to the massive peaceful majority and the people they represent. The anarchist’s cause is by definition to make disruption whenever the opportunity arises.
I do hope that vast majority of voters understand the cause and understand that Ed Miliband was not supporting the rioters. The same voters have the opportunity to oust the cuts-supporting (or abstaining) Liberal Democrats and Tory councillors in May 5th local elections and show how unhappy they are with the unfair majority of the public service cuts.
There is nothing wrong with necessary savings from time to time, in the normal course of local authority and public services’ budget reviews. But the speed and depth of cuts is unfair and most of it unnecessary, especially if the unpaid taxes of the rich were enforced and collected by the government, and penalties and additional taxes imposed onto those people and sectors that caused the financial crisis in the first place.
