TUC Connives With Police to Lower Estimate of Numbers Attending

Brighton was typical of many places. All the coaches for miles around were booked for the March. We got to the Embankment yesterday at about 11.30 a.m. and went on a detour round East London in order to free up space. The march crawled the mile or so along the Embankment at such a slow pace that it led to many people giving up on going to Hyde Park, not least because of the physical strain of walking so slowly for 2 hours.

The TUC March was a demonstration of the anger that people feel as they are called on to make sacrifices so that the bankers and the other ruling class pigs can continue to feed from the swill. That was why hundreds of young kids took to Oxford Street to demonstrate their hatred and anger at fat cat bosses like Philip Green who avoid their taxes whilst bleating about social security scroungers. And the Police, so eager to protect property, do nothing about the real criminals in society whose activities endanger the welfare of all.

It is scum like Green who pays next to no taxes but rely on the protection of the Metropolitan Police, who last year murdered Ian Tomlinson at the G7 Demonstrations despite not even having anything to do with the demonstration, thanks to ‘kettling’, who are the real criminals, not those who occupied Top Shop and the Queen’s grocers Fortnum & Mason.

It’s only a pity they didn’t manager to rampage around the Ritz too. And speaking of breaking the law, the Metropolitan Police is institutionally corrupt and bent, with the latest revelations of its senior brass having been wined and dined by News International to ensure a ‘light touch’ investigation of phone backing, that fingered no one are as corrupt as they come.

Brighton Unemployed Centre distributed 5,000 leaflets attacking the TUC General Council for having no spine. Backroom boy Brendan Barber, whose only job has been with the TUC selling out working class people, sought to turn the rally into a support march for New Labour. The same New Labour Government that began the attacks against the poor and disabled, which increased unemployment and at the same time forced people to take the first low paid job they were offered.

Because of this any radicals were kept firmly off theplatform. Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT (rail union), was kept off the platform, even though the march was his idea in the first place! Barber didn’t want Miliband embarrassed. The TUC’s idea of a campaign is waiting 4 years until there is a general election that Miliband can lose.

That is why those of us who were on the 2003 March Against the War and similar large demonstrations know that the original figures for the number of marchers were an underestimate. I would say between ½ and 1 million were on the demonstration. It is unprecedented for the Metropolitan Police and the organisers of a demonstration to agree on figures. The only occasion this has ever happened was when the Countryside Alliance exaggerated numbers and the Met was happy to agree with them – surprise, surprise! I notice that in today’s news bulletins that the figure has been revised upwards for 400,000 but the report on the BBC site yesterday gave 1 /4 million which the TUC had estimated and with which the Metropolitan Police had agreed.

All in all a good day but it is time to begin the fight back against TUC and Labour Party scabs as well as the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government.

Tony Greenstein