1. Extracts from an article about the Occupy LSX protests that appeared in The Daily Telegraph, admitting bankers are "greedy, stupid and wicked"

"We don’t trust our political leaders, after the expenses scandal. We don’t trust every part of the NHS; specifically, we worry for our prospects if ever admitted in our old age to a general medical ward... We especially don’t trust the banks... View the demonstrations seeking to Occupy the London Stock Exchange through this prism and they start to make sense, no matter how little I agree with the politics of those causing the nuisance. Most of us are angry with the banks, which doesn’t mean we’ve turned into members of a demented Marxist sect. To be furious with the banks and their post-crash behaviour is not to turn one’s back on capitalism... Too many banks were greedy, stupid and wicked – yes, wicked, when we look at the impact of their strategies on our pension plans, on the ability of families to get mortgages, on the capacity of small businesses to grow – and yet, intolerably, nothing of consequence has happened to the industry’s leadership... If bankers don’t pay a price for their folly, why should the poor?"

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8841376/It-doesnt-take-a-Marxist-to-see-that-the-St-Pauls-protesters-have-a-point.html

2. Tory MP admits capitalism is "skewed against us"

Conservative MP Mark Field expressed sympathy with the OccupyLSX protests on the BBC Radio 4 "World This Weekend" programme, saying "I do appreciate there is an increasingly strong sense of injustice, and its not just the usual suspects on the left of politics, but increasingly a lot of middle class, even Tory voting people, who feel that capitalism is a game, that somehow its rules are skewed against us."

 http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/10/23/tory-mp-agrees-with-occupylsx-says-capitalism-skewed-against-us/

3. The Independent says Western nations "are ripe for revolution"

"If there is going to be a revolutionary outburst you do not get much warning. Writing of the European revolutions of 1848... one historian recently noted: "At the beginning of 1848 no one believed that revolution was imminent." Now the reason I have gone back to accounts of 1848 is because this date has kept popping into my head as protests against contemporary capitalism have spread round the world... Should we say the same thing today about the industrialised world? That is an important question for all of us who would be appalled at the prospect of anything approaching revolution coming our way. Yet there seems to me to be one good reason why we should be fearful. For during the past 25 years, the gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has been steadily widening... In the industrialised West the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10%... In many cases, directors earn 200 times more than their lower-paid workers. At some point, this excessive difference is going to cause trouble. Has that moment come?

... Prof Stearns wrote that most of the revolutions of 1848 broke out rather haphazardly. "There was usually a brief, confused period of demands and demonstrations, during which governmental uncertainty helped prolong the tension." No change in that regard, then. And Prof Pouthas added that when the 1848 revolutions broke out, "its leaders and instigators were intellectuals devoid of political experience, not men of action". This amateur aspect of the protesters of 1848 is repeated today. A description wouldn't be very different from Professor Pouthas'. In 2011 one would say the "leaders and instigators" of the protests are women's rights organisers, self-employed IT consultants, middle-class, jobless squatters, unemployed music teachers, freelance artists, charity volunteers, social workers and media studies students... Surely, one might reflect, there is nothing to fear from such a group. Nonetheless, what the men devoid of political experience did in 1848, and the inexperienced protesters in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt did, is simply to endure, to keep the spark burning. There are two characteristics of a pre-revolutionary situation - a valuable insight widely shared and the ENDURANCE of those who hold it. We have the first, but it is not yet clear whether we have the second."

 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/andreas-whittam-smith-western-nations-are-now-ripe-for-revolution-2372930.html

4. Analysis of these news items

It speaks for itself that the Daily Telegraph writer quoted above fears for his prospects in receiving NHS treatment in old age, after the Telegraph did nothing to help defend the NHS from being savaged by Coalition attacks... talk about not taking responsibility for your own actions! It also speaks for itself that the Telegraph defames protestors as "demented" for highlighting the very issues discussed by their own articles, and that this libel is predicated on the assumption that everyone who protests against corporate greed must, by definition, be "Marxist". Hypocritical and lazy journalism is the stock-in-trade of the "quality" right-wing press, but nonetheless this article forms part of consistent pattern showing how even far-right media are no longer able to dismiss issues whose profile is standing proof of the protest movement's very real (albeit short-term) success. Whether the current protest movement is able to build on that success in the medium to long-term depends on our ability to cross the cultural divide and to resist the right-wing media's attempts to stereotype and defame us as they've done so many times before. At the risk of stating the obvious however, it is not enough to simply blame the right-wing media and moan about their actions - it is our responsibility to be aware of how the media WILL misrepresent us, and it is our responsibility to pro-actively take control of how our protests come across to the general public, and to strategise our presentation and PR tactics accordingly.

We need to frame our messages and presentation not only in terms of projecting our own beliefs and perceptions (and/or even ideologies) to the broader public, we need to frame our messages to take into account how those messages will be filtered by the media through which they're communicated, and to take into account how those messages will be interpreted and perceived by the broad mass of the general public.

People who attend protests are people who have time to do so, that doesn't mean people who don't have time don't support protests. Generations of protestors have been defamed by right-wing media on grounds of the transparently obvious - that protests are generally populated by people who have time to spare, which is misrepresented by the hard-right media as "proof" of the alleged divide between protestors and the community at large. It's a simple misrepresentation, but it worked for decades. Now however, particularly through on-line activism, it's much easier for everyone to make their voice heard, and the lesson of The Independent's analysis is simple - if we want to win, we've got to keep on going.

See you at OLSX this weekend

 http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/18996

 http://www.facebook.com/n30strike

The protest movement will succeed if it defends true democratic principles, but fail if it is perceived to be opposing them -
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/09/485130.html