As people start to get their stuff together to go on March for the Alternative this morning, I thought I'd throw in a quick thought about the hounding of those people who ocassionally break things or get into fights with the cops - and a quick competition!
Much as the TUC would like us to believe otherwise, a media frenzy over a few broken windows and a bit of a ruckus, if it happens, will not make the slightest odds to the message being pumped out by its publicity machine and that of the rest of the cobweb left.
Tory MPs are not stupid sheep to be panicked or genuinely outraged by ITN throwing a "breaking news" strapline on the TV screen, they'll take note of the size of the march, its overall level of militancy and what it has to say (which is apparently "oh pwease don't be nasty, pweeeease" even though this approach manifestly didn't work in 2003 using three times the number of people against a supposedly more liberal Labour government which wasn't being directly pressured by the markets).
In reality, if this is just a nice, pleasant walkaround, said MPs will almost certainly heave a huge sigh of relief and put those notes in the bin. Because they aren't thinking about right and wrong, they simply want to take things away from us so their lot can have more. Us whinging about that doesn't make any sense given this context - if someone walked into your house and started taking your stuff would you expect them to stop simply because you asked nicely? They've cleared that moral hurdle by starting the cuts in the first place.
So what the march won't do is change Tory minds. What it is potentially good for is getting across a more useful message than "if we whinge loudly enough they will listen," which doesn't even make sense on the TUC's own terms, given how often they and Labour keep stressing that these are ideological cuts.
This is a chance to grab people and point out that waiting for an election where the only other game in town is neoliberal, or hoping that you can make someone act decently simply by asking often enough can never be enough. That direct action which pits our economic might as a mass against that of our ruling class is the only language this government will ever understand.
So, on this note, on to the competition!
I'm looking for keywords which pick out people who have actually taken the narrative of the TUC and media seriously.
The kind of blockheads who think that property damage is the same thing as violence and that if you end up fighting cops its a) probably your fault or b) somehow distracting from the message of the day
The sort of thing I'm thinking about is substituting "anarchists" for "angry people," talking about "extremists," "hijacking the protests," and how it's somehow "anti-democratic" to take direct action against a government which has gone far beyond the 25% vote it was provided a year ago in an election which locks them in a dictatorial position for five years regardless of circumstance or revisions of public opinion. If people hear these from random people, count em - I have five already - and if you hear any other particularly good ones from the day post em below.
Comments
I thought this was worth a
I thought this was worth a bump, as all its predictions have been proved correct!
Well done Rob.
(One very minor point is that Labour's official line is that these are not ideological cuts, although most of the Labour rank and file say that they are)