First of all, thank you to throughymy4eyes for alerting me to this. I stay off social media for a few hours and I miss all of this, typical! And you would have to be on social media to see this, seeing as a media blackout appears to be censoring coverage of the protests. #ToriesOutNow is the number 1 trend in the UK but has been removed at least twice from trending pages by Twitter. There are few news articles being published and so the following information has been difficult to get completely right because of lack of sources, other than people’s tweets.
I’d like to request that you reblog to signal boost. The media is deliberately censoring this protest, let’s spread the word ourselves in retaliation.
As far as I can tell, protests in London began around 6pm/7pm and have grown since then. Large crowds gathered outside the Tory HQ in Westminster with signs reading “Get The Tories Out!” and “Austerity Kills”, chanting “Tory scum” and “no more fucking Tory cuts”.
The protests are aimed at two things in particular (main reasons as I can tell):
The fact that 63% of us voted against the Tories, yet they still formed a majority goverment through our voting system
Austerity, and the prospect of 5 more years of cuts to public services.
People are angry. And rightly so. I’m angry. I know all of you are angry. Our voting system really outdid itself this time, proving that our democracy is not quite as democratic as we once thought.
63% of us said we didn’t want a Tory goverment, so why do we have one? Proportional Representation is a tricky one for me I’ll admit. For I believe that we should have equal representation for who we all choose to vote for, rather than being handed a Tory government when 63% said no to one. I’m conflicted merely because had we had Proportional Representation in this election, UKIP would have had many more seats than it got. But that’s just me.
At least 5 police officers have been injured. Apparently they have had bottles, a bike, smoke bombs thrown at them. I saw one person report tear gas but I can’t be sure that is true at all. Sounds like the start of a small riot to me, yet where is the media coverage? No coverage from Murdoch papers so far, surprise, surprise! What little coverage there has been has been biased.
Our country cannot take five more years of austerity. We cannot take privatisation of our health service. We cannot take benefit cuts. We cannot take our services being squeezed for their last spare penny. End the cuts. End the Tories. End the misery. End the deaths, the suicides and the starvation they are inflicting upon the most vulnerable!
I don’t know if the protests will continue. I don’t know if they will change anything. Best case scenario is they get bigger, spread to the rest of the country and we fight for a re-election. Pie in the sky, perhaps. But we can try!
Stay classy, but fight for your right to democracy and fight for your right to a fair government. Your vote is not your voice, just because they won doesn’t mean we have to sit down and shut up.
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