I am deeply concerned about pre-emptive policing,  or arresting people who might be going to do something wrong.  I frankly don’t believe the BBC’s claim that intelligence indicated that anti-G8 protestors in Soho had weapons, or at any rate I do not believe it was honest intelligence.  I note there are no reports of these weapons actually having been discovered.

The rounding up, arresting and beating of groups of protestors before they had even begun to protest is so taken for granted in London now that I can find no reflection in the media of the outrage I feel.  If an old duffer like me feels completely alienated from the authoritarian state in which I find I now live, how do younger, more radical people feel?  There seems a terrible divide between the corporate-political elite surrounded by their massive Praetorian guard at Bilderberg, and everybody else.  Society is not stable.

The BBC has lost all sense of self-knowledge.  Yesterday it displayed scenes of police beating protestors for no apparent reason on the streets of London, which was presented as protecting innocent shoppers on Oxford Street.  This immediately followed very similar scenes of police beating protestors on the streets of Istanbul, which was portrayed as a terrible act of anti-Western suppression.  Irony is dead.