Sadly but predictably, media coverage of Saturday's demonstrations in London against the government's fiscal plans has focused on the mayhem and vandalism of a few hundred thugs in Trafalgar Square, rather than the peaceful march staged by as many as 500,000 protesters earlier in the day. Not, of course, that most of the press was ever going to give the Trades Union Congress and its supporters much of a hearing. For the most part, the media's mantra is that opponents of the spending cuts offer no alternative, or at least, not a palatable one. Here, in typically colourful style, is London Mayor Boris Johnson, writing in the Daily Telegraph:
So that's the alternative, eh! I was starting to wonder. After all those strategy reviews, all those blank bits of paper, we have finally heard Labour's response to the fiscal crisis bequeathed to the nation by Gordon Brown. The plan is to get a load of aggressive crusties and Lefties to attack the Ritz hotel, to storm Fortnum's, and to cause so much argy-bargy that 4,500 police officers are obliged to waste their time (and our money) in putting out the bonfires and controlling events as peacefully as they can.
At least that's entertaining, though non-UK readers may need a translation. Over at the Spectator, Alex Massie offers a more succinct verdict on the leader of the Labour Party, who addressed Saturday's rally:
I don't think there's any point in pretending that Ed Miliband is not an idiot.
Equally, one might think, there's no point in the media pretending that those opposed to the government's present course have no alternative to offer. Take Ed Miliband's party, for instance. Before last year's election, Labour said it would attempt to cut the budget deficit in half over a four-year period, and even announced the first stage of such a programme in a budget that was stillborn when the election was called. It may be that new Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is not entirely on board with that, but it remains the party's official policy. Arguably, in fact, Labour has been more consistent in its approach to the deficit than the two coalition parties: you'd struggle to find anything in the Tory election manifesto, and still less in that of the LibDems, that would have warned you of exactly what they would do once in office. It's too soon to tell whether the coalition is cutting too sharply, as Labour is suggesting, but it's certainly a defensible argument.
Of course, many of Saturday's protesters might favour a different approach. For example, Bob Crow, the rail union leader, thinks the alternative to spending cuts is a tax on e-mails, which according to one estimate would raise only £12 million a year, and might be the easiest-to-avoid tax ever devised. (Memo to Bob Crow: maybe a tax on text messages would be a better idea, though you'd risk bankrupting every family in the country with teenage children).
More practically, the TUC leader Brendan Barber thinks the solution is a "Robin Hood tax" on the banks. This certainly hits the populist buttons right now, and it seems to be part of the Labour Party's thinking as well. Given the scale of the fiscal mess, it's hard to see such a tax making a huge dent in the deficit, and with the momentum for financial reform around the globe seemingly fading, there would be a risk of banks leaving London for less hostile climes. Still, it's an alternative approach, or at least part of one, as Messrs Johnson and Massie should acknowledge.
The government has stated that Saturday's events will not deflect it from its chosen fiscal course. It may well get away with that for the time being, as long as legitimate protests get pushed off the front pages by scenes of violence, and as long as the media keeps parroting the old Thatcherite line that "there is no alternative". Whether it's going to work is a different question altogether, and one that may not even be fully answered by the time the next election rolls around in 2014.
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