Not much help, I know....but a lot of people were very p*ssed off at the way things were reported, how it was mismanaged by the powers that be, and with all the media coverage, how it took a phone camera by a bystander to catch the incident. Which is in itself illegal, as two weeks ago it was made an offence to take photographs of the police going about their business.


If you can check out "newswipe" with Charlie Brooker...he raises alot of interesting items with how it was portrayed.


Liberation from a dictatorship

Cheers

Phil H
 

they need there to be violence m8!
gives them the excuse for police in the first place.

on another note what i but on my blog on another aspect i felt there was
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Much as i was delighted by the RBS taking a bashing and lots of more conservative friends saying how they found it a highlight, even for one to say that he watched it three times on different news channels, it all seemed very stage managed to me with the police letting protesters give a symbolic bash at the bank without any attempt to stop them, and their seemed to be more media involved than anarchists!
Coupled with this seeing a previous report on tv of a supposed anarchist leader/mastermind (a anthropologist professor!) being interviewed on tv stating how they we're gonna "turn the lights out in london" etc, it occurred to me then that he may be a MI5 set up, so was it all stage managed? , here is a eyewitness account of said "Bank Bashing"
Andy X

Eddie StClair Says:
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm

I was very close to the incident where the windows of the RBS branch were broken on Wednesday having wandered up Bartholomew Lane to try and see, out of curiosity, how the protest was progressing.

Initially I was able to get up onto the junction with Threadneedle street where the crowd spread back from the Bank of England. I was straight away quite struck by the number of photographers with professional equipment that formed part of the crowd. Things seemed peaceful if a little animated, quite natural for those people who were there to protest.

There was quite soon some action from the police from the back of the crowd towards Bank tube that forced the crowd where I was standing forwards and I ended up stepping away back sideways again down the top of Bartholomew Lane. Things seemed to be calming down when there was the sound of quite loud thumping. A couple of people with hoods and black lower face coverings had started kicking against the door of RBS on the corner. Very soon they had moved down to the windows on Bartholomew Lane and broken one.

It struck me immediately as being almost theatrical in that it would have been much more natural for them to have attacked the Threadneedle Street windows that were largely still sheltered by the main body of the crowd. Their activity on Bartholomew Lane was quite obvious to the line of police at the lower end of the road only a 80 yards or so away with only a relatively thin scattering of the mainly curious like myself in between. I immediately assumed as the vandalism continued that the police would be moving in as there was little to delay them, sure enough within a minute a whole line of police horses had appeared at the bottom of the lane as if on cue.

I decided at this point to take some shelter from the inevitable advance behind some building scaffolding that ran handily down the side of the street, but nothing happened. The intermittent sounds of smashing glass continued for at least a quarter of an hour with little between the incident and the police lines, now reinforced with some riot shield and helmeted foot soldiers, other than the attendant scrum of photographers. The location, away from the main body of the crowd, making it a very convenient photo-op. The press pictures I’ve seen of this activity are quite accurate in that they show very few “demonstrators” there and simply a large scrum of photographers trying to capture the images.

I became quite amused at this point as the whole thing had a definite air of fakeness about it. So much so in fact that I wandered up and took a couple of pictures from behind the media throng myself with my mobile phone, along with some of the other curious bystanders.

Finally after 15 minutes when the RBS assault seemed to run its course, the police started a very slow and deliberate deployment up the 80 or so yards of Bartholomew Lane, no attempt at all to apprehend the perpetrators, just a preparation for further “kettling” in of the crowd. I managed to slip out just before they refused further exit, which as it turns out saved me 3 plus hours of being denied my freedom.

So make of that what you will. Initially I thought the police were displaying a cool headed caution before making their move, but as the minutes ticked away it became obvious they had no intention of making what would have been a fairly straightforward advance in an orderly fashion up the street to at least end the incident, if not actually send in some officers more aggressively to catch the perpetrators. As mentioned, there was little but a scrum of photo-journalists to stop them.

So I was interested to come across this article. From the point of view of an eyewitness this thesis would explain a number of rather incongruent things about the incident, which received a disproportionately large amount of media coverage including the front page of the BBC website. A very misleading impression being sent out not only of the demonstration as a whole but the actual rather pantomime nature of the incident itself.