We didn't write very much about the police violence against the G20 protesters because other people were doing it for us, all over the media. By the same token, we don't see the need to get deeply involved with the MPs expenses scandal. Everyone knows all about it, it's been exhaustively reported by the press, by and large everyone is agreed about it.
We all know the bastards have been snouting in the trough for years, we all know they make themselves rich and comfortable for life at our expense, and we all know that whatever the public thinks and the papers say, they'll kick and scratch and fight at every step to cling on to what they've got, because that's why they entered politics in the first place. It's not a popular view, we know, but in our opinion the problem is that politics has become a career. Young men and women embark on it quite deliberately, getting themselves elected as local councillors, then as county councillors, often both at once and not necessarily in the area where they actually live (not a lot of people know that). Then they begin the search for a gullible selection committee in a parliamentary constituency.
Once upon a time, politics was something you did in addition to a proper job. You might be a rich landowner with estates to run, gifted by the local gentry with a safe seat in the Tory shires, or you might be a trades union official sponsored by your colleagues and union members to represent a grimy inner-city slum. You might even be a middle-class liberal, a doctor or a teacher perhaps, steeped in moral belief about suffrage and education for all, but either way you were first and foremost a member of your own social milieu, rooted in a place and a social caste, and you would feel obliged to represent the views and needs of that place and those people. Modern politicians are shiftless, faceless, baseless beings whose sole purpose is to tell the rest of us what to do, and who represent nobody but themselves. They have no belief except in doing whatever they can get away with: their heads are ruled by a lust for power, and their hearts by the lust for money. Our money, that is.
ANYWAY ... before getting sidetracked, we started out explaining why we haven't said much about the G20 not-a-riot-at-all, officer. But there was another protest, and another case of police violence, that was never reported in such detail - in fact we're ashamed to say that we hardly knew anything about it at the time.
In 2004 the Countryside Alliance organised a London demonstration against the hunting ban. Being sensible country people with proper jobs and traditional education, they organised it rather well. They expected 15,000 people and told the police so. The police didn't believe them, so were very surprised when 15,000 people actually showed up.
The police, motivated both by panic at the numbers, and by the desire to give some toffs a good kicking, waded in with a will. They inflicted dozens of what the Independent Police Complaints Commission described as "serious head injuries", and stories of unjustified brutality were commonplace: in one of the few that ever did get reported, a 37-year-old mother-of-two who had been pushed forward from the crowd by sheer pressure of bodies, was following a police order to 'get back' when an officer came up behind her and pushed her to the ground. Bleeding from a head wound and bruised all over, she was being comforted by a female friend when another police officer came along, sat on the friend and forced her arms behind her head.
The press were strangely silent (the Guardian described the demonstration as 'an attack on the liberty of the British people' and 'a series of assaults on police protecting Parliament'), the BBC reticent, and the civil liberties organisations sat on their hands and hummed quietly. After all, these weren't real people who had been attacked and hurt, these were just a load of toffs with horses and Range Rovers who got their jollies torturing little foxy-woxies, so basically they deserved all they'd got.
Nevertheless, two years later there was an official inquiry and 17 police officers were scheduled to be charged. In the event, only three were charged and all walked free. The inquiry established that officers had deliberately concealed their badges and identities but did nothing about it. Its chief conclusion was to suggest that, after future punch-ups, police batons should be retained for forensic analysis. And that was that. End of story.
So if you were one of the left-wing protesters at the G20 in April, you might like to think about this.
If five years ago you had been a little more concerned about the right to peaceful protest instead of sniggering at all the vets, pig farmers and yokels getting a pasting, maybe you wouldn't have got your own heads bashed in quite so badly last month?
Here's a link to an article giving more details, and here are some pictures of the thugs who deserved all they got. Don't forget, if you do nothing wrong, you can have nothing to fear ...
See what we mean? Obviously a bunch of violent, trouble-making hippies. Spot 'em a mile off!
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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