Much of the political and media establishments in this country are shameless.

They are deeply incestuous, they are in large part the same social set,

there's a revolving door between them, people who work in the media often end up working for politicians. Those in the political world end up in the other direction, taking up media positions. And they have these overlapping prejudices and world views when it comes to key issues.

They frequently treat politics as a soap opera.

They'll see themselves as made characters in it.

They dislike scrutiny, they can flay legitimate heated critiques with genuine threats to

personal security and they often see mass movements as a dangerous mob.

Which brings me to why all of a sudden the story is about how we need to restrict protest

and protect the political establishment from the mob. Now there's a long

tradition of elites using calamities which they helped create and turning them into opportunities for themselves.

The financial crash that's such a major case in point.

Total catastrophe caused by the private sector by the greed of the banks letting the market run

riot that's what caused it but then the Tories came along and rebounded it is a

crisis actually of the public sector is overspending by the government that caused the mess and it's all an opportunity

to roll back the state not to sort out market anarchy. Extraordinary.

Now this time round, politicians being complicit complicit Britain's role in directly

facilitating Israeli war crimes has become a big old moral panic about

protest the protests against that it's not the politicians with big questions to answer

about, for example, the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people, it's the people protesting

against them. Now this was particularly sparked by Labour,

according to the party's own sources,

blackmailing the speaker to overturn parliamentary protocol

...