Where really driving some of them?

I was reading the comments on an article by George Monbiot on the G20 protests recently. Being a Guardian piece, most of the comments are predictably naïve, though if you cut through that to some of the legitimate points they can be quite interesting. Most comments are very one sided and basically anti police as you might expect.

One of the commentators makes the assertion that the Police exist to protect the interests of the wealthy (*1).The patent dumbness of this assertion makes me wonder sometimes how people can blinker themselves to reality in the pursuit of attempting to support their prejudices.

So do the Police exist to protect the interests of the wealthy alone? Since when have the police had a general policy of failing to respond to an incident due to the socioeconomic circumstances of the victim? A policeman said to me once that most the victims of, and perpetrators of crime are usually the lowest rung on society. Therefore taking that observation as accurate a great deal police time is taken up dealing with the less well off not only as offenders but also as victims.

Its not too hard to find where some people draw their inspiration. Elsewhere in the comments for the Monbiot piece you can see references made to Friedrich Engel’s writings about the capitalist state and how it is maintained by bodies of armed men - (unlike totalitarian states obviously).

Ah, so now we’re getting down to the real motivation of some of these people – their communist or neo communist beliefs.

I read through the comments on this article to try and get a better understanding of the political viewpoints of those who see things differently to me. And what I have seen is that a fundamental driver for some at least is not simply a desire to ‘make things better’ as we all do but simply coming at it from a different perspective, but an altogether more suspicious and dodgy mindset.

This is all useful knowledge of course, because once you realise where people are really coming from then it is clear that it is even more important to resist them than you first thought!


P.S. Who are these ‘working class’ any way? The last time I looked many people in the trades (plumbers, electricians, builders) were on more money than a lot of white collar professionals, especially junior ones. This talk of class and such is mostly completely out of date. Naturally organs such as the BBC routinely use terms such as ‘the Workers’ belying their own left of centre orientation which is common knowledge of course.

*1 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/police-g20-protests?commentpage=3 (see comment by Seenitalready)