Illuminating article from tody's Guardian contrasting media coverage of the CA march and Saturdays anti-war march.

say's it all really

Hypocrisy is on the march

Protesters in tweeds get an easy ride, unlike those opposed to war

Zoe Williams
Tuesday September 24, 2002
The Guardian

When it comes to public protest, there are some irritating double-standards in this country, of which the most immediately irritating is this: on Sunday, the police estimated 300,000 at the Countryside Alliance march, where the organisers counted 400,000. Fair enough. There is always a counting discrepancy between the police and the marchers, though on leftwing protests it is usually rather larger (the police used to put CND marches at 30,000, roughly the size of a football crowd, which made their ability to fill Hyde Park and beyond nothing short of miraculous). Yesterday morning, however, newspapers were quoting as fact the final figure of 407,791; the Metropolitan police had brought their estimate up to 400,000, presumably because these are people in tweeds and therefore cannot be lying. This may, as so many point out, be the largest peaceful protest in British history, but it's also the first British protest in history where everyone agreed how large it was.
Of course, part of the success of the countryside march was down to its advance publicity. This time last week (indeed, yawning back into the week before) details of the protest were appearing prominently in all news sources. This Saturday, there will be an anti-war protest, with exactly the same grand ambitions (it hopes to be the largest peace demonstration ever) and an equivalently unique selling point (a massive Muslim contingent is expected), and yet it has had almost no coverage. Presumably, this will remain the case until the police find some crackpot website threatening to give the Churchill statue another grass mohican, at which point the capital will suddenly anticipate anarchy.

And let's look at violence for a second: the countryside march was unanimously hailed as "peaceful", and yet I wonder how much of this peace can be attributed to the relatively tiny police presence. I wonder what would have happened if the police had tried to pen 5,000 protesters into Oxford Circus, as they did on May Day 2001. There were scant police on Sunday because the organisers had publicly pledged order; yet the movement has its fair share of loonies, including one who threatened to "target Cherie Blair" (whatever that means) and one who vowed to "use a bomb to safeguard a way of life".

For a May Day march, the intentions of the militants inform the treatment of the entire gathering; for a countryside march, nobody's going to listen to a few troublemakers and let them ruin it for everybody. The picture on the front of the Times yesterday shows a number of small fires on the demo, or perhaps flares; but fire isn't dangerous in the hands of rural folk, it only represents anarchy in the hands of anarchists.

The anti-globalisation movement is constantly lambasted for its inchoate and impractically diverse demands, whereas the sheer variety of country causes was seen as part of the protest's strength - because, of course, liberty and livelihood are solid concepts we can all understand, whereas third world debt is way too complicated. Carry a banner comparing capitalism to Hitler, and all you do is prove how impossible you are to deal with; carry a banner comparing Blair to Hitler (because, like, Blair ruins people's fun, and so did Hitler), and it's a measure of your anger and sorrow.

When an identifiable aristo is spotted on a leftwing march - like public schoolboy Nicholas Keeble, who was hit on the head by police at a demo in 1999, or Zac Goldsmith, who crops up everywhere - it is used as a way to discredit the event. These aren't even the genuine oppressed, the theory runs, they're rich kids with too much time on their hands. But someone with a shooting stick and five generations of entrenched privilege behind him is allowed to remonstrate about the failures of rural public transport, when he wouldn't recognise a bus if it joined him on a hunt.

I always thought conservative opinion was taken more seriously because it didn't make trouble - but even when it does make trouble, it is treated with respect.

Next year, when the government plans to ban apple bobbing and go to war against Saudi Arabia, the peace march should join the countryside march. We can promise to adhere to their basic demands and just add some more of our own (I'm happy to carry a banner saying "More Local Schools; Fewer Bomb-Related Deaths in the Middle East"). We can benefit from their benign policing, generous turnout estimates, positive press coverage and the fact that Starbucks stays open. They can learn our many marching songs (they've probably not even heard of We Shall Overcome). We can have a game of mass British Bulldog at the end. Everything will be so much fairer.

·  zoe.williams2@ntlworld.com