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Offical Disinformation

Richard Lanchester | 07.07.2005 22:18 | G8 2005

Is anyone gathering instances of officials deliberately lying and mis-information the protesting public? Here are some examples:

I arrived on the overnight "Megabus" convoy of double deck buses from London, carrying people going to both the main protest and the Live8 concert, at 10am on wednesday 6th. Bob Geldorf was there to welcome the bus-convoy, but there was no sign of shuttle buses to Gleneagles that we'd been told to expect in the area near Haymarket Station.

People offered conflicting rumours of where buses might be found, perhaps round the corner near Haymarket, perhaps in the city center on Princes Street. There appeared to be no helpers from dissent organisers to guide us, so we eventually steaggled off towards Princes St, a mile away.

Police officers on the street advised us to try the Edinburgh Bus station (St Andrews Square) where we saw on the electronic destination board list that the Intercity coach scheduled for Stirling listed as "canceled".

Heading back to Princes St I saw some of the crowd of bus convoy travellers joinin in the protest procession moving slowly down the avenue inside a police cordon (I heard later that these were all people denied access to the shuttle bus fleet).

More police officers, met in the street, said they thought there were no buses or trains to Stirling and beyond. But I went down to Waverly Station anyway.

There were a considerable number of railway staff acting as crowd stewards in Hi-Vis jackets, who insisted that there were no trains to Stirling area. I went down to the offical travel Information counter, where two railway staff insisted the Stirling service was cancelled. When I requested information to any other suburban area in that direction. They told me they were under orders to not assist protesters.

By now I had a strong suspicion I was beeing lied to. So I went to the ticket counter, bought a ticket for the "non existent" train to Stirling, went to the platform where railway staff insisted there was no train to Stirling, and a minute later was guided onto the train by helpful local passengers. I then found the train was going further north up to the line as far as Dunblane, a village only 12 miles short of Gleneagles.

After picking up a sandwich, and a pocket of Fairtrade bananas, in the village mini-market. I had a 12 mile hike ahead to Auchterarder and the protest center (I got a lift the last 3 miles).

While on this walk on the dual - carriageway A9, I saw at least 10 intercity coaches with names like Stagecouch in both directions, on various routes.

So much for the offical info that intercity buses had to be cancelled.

Once at the protest, arriving only when the crwod was beginning to drift away to their buses, I did not see a single face from the crowd of the bus travellers I was with the night before. If I assume that half of the 900 plus passenger had planned to go on the march (rather than the Live8 music event) then over 450 people were prevented from attending by this combination of obstructing our shuttle bus movements, and a campaign of offical lies.

Future protests will have an urgent need to have information runners to help everyone keep up to date - especially the new arrivals - so we can all keep a step ahead of the misinformation campaign.

Richard Lanchester