As tragic as the death of Ian Tomlinson is I’m concerned that the media spotlight is being diverted away from the other events at G20 such as the violent closing down of the Climate Camp
Of course this has been criticised in the “progresssive” media such as the Grauniad – but its well known that they encourage the young middle class year 12/13 students (think I got it right this time :laugh_at:) and university students to attend these protests “just like their parents did back in the day”
but elsewhere I’ve rightly seen condemnation of the Police actions against the late Mr Tomlinson; but many of the mainstream the media and worse, many of the citizen commentators all seem to think that it whilst it was wrong for the Met to beat up a newspaper vendor doing his job (ironically, selling papers known for their Conservative-leaning views!) – there has been far less condemnation of violent action against “real” protestors…
Today in the East Midlands, the cops have arrested 80-100 people in a place called Sneinton who were allegedly going on a protest to shut down a power station.
These arrests happened in a residential area; I am not aware of any such area in the country easily able to house 80-100 protestors at short notice unless they hired a community centre or similar – the cops are refusing to give out any details but either they have arrested 100 mostly “normal” local people just as a warning ; or worse a mixed contingent of protestors from outside and locals was dobbed in by a (minority!) of locals due to disagreement over whether the protestors should have been sheltered in this area.
That said whilst I agree with genuine peaceful protest outside power stations, I don’t agree with untrained protestors activating emergency shutdown procedures – as to get a power station back on line and re-synced with the Grid after doing this uses more energy, and as much as everyone wants to be eco-friendly we all depend on electric particularly if we are into dance music as well..
