[Notes from this meeting can be found here]
Tuesday 26 July, 7pm
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square
Some sections of the media have a long history of demonising protesters and strikers. This week the Daily Express condemned the peaceful occupation of Fortnum & Mason as “yobs” in a “riot” even as new evidence has come to light showing they were arrested under false pretences. The Daily Mail has recently had to apologise for harrassment after hounding the family of arrested student Bryan Simpson.
Among of the worst offenders have been the papers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Now their links to Britain’s most senior politicians and police officials are being exposed. According to disgraced former Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the Met was “too busy fighting terrorism to tackle hacking” - yet it wasn’t too busy to assign up to 200 officers to arresting several hundred students for their involvement in anti-fees protests.
This collusion goes back a long way. 25 years ago, when Rupert Murdoch moved to wipe out trade unions in the Wapping dispute, he could count on the Metropolitan police as a private, strikebreaking army. This contributed, perhaps more than any other single event, to the squeezing out of independent voices in the Murdoch press.
Now that the powerful executives and senior police officials are being exposed, it raises the question of how we fight for justice. How do we keep up the pressure on the Met - especially now it has appointed Cressida Dick, the commander of the operation that killed Jean-Charles de Menezes, to replace Yates?
How do we get the charges against protesters dropped, and an independent inquiry into their arrests and the problem of police violence on demonstrations? How do we get a media that defends the right to protest, and work with journalist to ensure our voice is not drowned out by media moguls like Murdoch?
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