Friday 10 December 2010

Protest narrative

The papers this morning are full of screaming headlines about student mobs and rioting and - of course - numerous pictures of students committing outrage after outrage against National Treasures (tm) like Charles & Camilla, the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square etc. I would have some sympathy for their point were it not so cynically put together.

Anyone who has been to a protest in the last few years can't have failed to notice that "kettling" is a bit controversial. Certainly anyone who's faced a line of bobbies who won't let people leave the protest zone, provide any kind of facilities or in fact do anything to defuse rising tension until it breaks out into violence will know what I mean.

You try not to be too conspiracy-theorist about this kind of thing, for fear of being put with the rent-a-mob anarchists who *always* turn up to protests with their faces covered like they're some freedom fighting heroes instead of middle-class kids with a GCSE-level understanding of politics. Nonetheless, this morning when I look at the pictures doing the rounds in the papers I have to wonder - why aren't any of them mentioning the fact that students were kettled in Parliament Square most of the night without toilet facilities when they bring up the urinating on statues thing? What do you expect them to do, piss themselves? Come to that, why did the police abandon a van in the middle of the kettled area in the first protest? Why, when every wannabe political reporter - regardless of whether they were there or not - gets to have their say in an editorial, are there no stories discussing the twitter postings from people actually in the protests, many of which allege police brutality? Why is the discussion all about students pulling a mounted riot police officer off his horse rather than the appropriateness of charging students and schoolchildren with horses in the first place? The Mail has even whipped itself into a frenzy about it, asking rhetorically "what kind of sick mind would do this to a horse?" I think when you're being charged by a police horse, all bets are off frankly.

Most terrifyingly of all, we're being told with deadpan seriousness all over the news that the students were jolly lucky not to have been shot while they were mobbing Charles and Camilla's car. Personally I find it far more worrying that we're supposed to be grateful that these taxpayer-funded security guards didn't fire wildly into a crowd of teenagers or that, in fact, they showed commendable restraint. "If they were throwing petrol bombs, we could have had a serious tragedy here" one talking head sagely threw in on the lunchtime news. Yes, probably, but they were throwing paint. Paint. Dial it down a bit, mate.

Whether or not the violence was justified, or at least understandable, is another issue and not something I want to write about until the dust is settled a bit. I think it's worth asking some questions about coverage while the iron is hot though, because as time goes by the specifics will fade and be replaced with the standard narrative for all of these protests: "student violence".

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