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When is half a million not half a million? The answer is when it comes to counting the numbers of people at a ‘peace protest’.
The Stop The War coalition claimed 500,000 people turned up for today’s protest in London (they later lowered their claims to 200,000) … yet the Metropolitan Police were quoted on SkyNews tonight as have said “less that 100,000 attended”.
Of course membership of the Stop The War coalition has considerable cross over with CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), a well known glove puppet of the old Soviet regime. During the Cold War, CND also used to vastly inflate the claimed attendance at its rallies, aided and abetted by the left wing BBC who would just report these claims as though they were incontrovertible. The fact CND & the BBC consistently inflated these numbers was exposed by Dr. Julian Lewis MP by using aerial photographs of CND protests.
The world may have moved on but the old Marxist left have not changed one iota.
Fortunately it is now it is easier than ever to ‘fact check their ass’.
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They should use the same service that the Chronicle in San Francisco used; it’s a company that specializes in aerial topographical survey work. Their far more accurate count of the SF demonstrations was most revealing!
I briefly took note of a headline the other day about “protests” in San Francisco where the protesters took up vomiting in the street to demonstration their *feelings* about our taking action in Iraq. That’s clean and non-violent. Lovely aroma filling the bay air.
Enjoy San Francisco.
I will go out on a limb and venture to guess that many of those attending in San Fran – were actually protesting President Bush and other such items on their agenda.
I think at this point everyone who’s not completely divorced from reality has recognized that protesting accomplishes nothing whatsoever.
The bus I take to and from work goes by the main protest site in Los Angeles, so I get to see protestors up close every day. Funny how the current crop of protestors were completely absent in 1999 when Clinton was conducting his similarly unprovoked war against Serbia…
I’m the only pro-war blogger who seems to be linked to the Stop the War coalition after they linked to the blog. It’s quite strange because I imagine anti-war readers find a rabid Eurosceptic and leave puzzled?
Hold on, are you saying that even if I belong to five of the organizations in the Coalition I should still count as only one marcher? What would be the point of belonging to five then?
If I join ten organizations I can have ten times the impact!
What I find galling is the way it is now received wisdom that the big march last month attracted over a million people when the police’s estimate was 750,000.
Worse still, the Police’s estimate is probably more accurate than ever before because at their march a few months ago the Countryside Alliance went to the trouble of physically counting the marchers.
Shouldn’t that be ‘fact check their arse’?