Who's Paying The Bill?

Just wondering who's going to count the numbers attending the Police demonstration today?

As a rule, the Met normally cut about three quarters off the organisers' estimate.

Applying this criteria could mean that if 15,000 actually did turn up, they'd first give an organiser total of 3,750 and then the working Police would argue that only 937 turned out.

During the last demo I attended I overheard three of the Met's finest apologising to drivers stuck in traffic that "a bunch of students are blocking the road again". It was all so quaint and Eighties and especially funny as it was clearly they who were blocking the road with, er, police road blocks.

Ah, demonstrations, what memories: being penned into Oxford Circus for six hours under the Riot Act to prevent 'the possibility' of trouble; charged by mounted police while sat down eating a sandwich in Hyde Park; watching a Holocaust surviver having to clamber over a collapsed cemetery wall to escape a battening; charged by mounted police, from behind, while walking to our coach in Welling; and constantly being funneled individually through Police lines to be filmed and photographed for doing nothing but attending officially recognised protests...

I'm sure it'll be just the same for them today.

And what a pity, as if they're a little short-handed I'm sure there would have been plenty of ex-miners or maybe Toxteth and Brixton residents up for popping down and giving them a hand with the stewarding? It's their taxes that pay their wages after all...

Hmmm?

No?

Suit yourselves...