While the No More Austerity march in London saw an attendance of close to 50,000 people, BBC has initially refused to carry a report on the event. This has led supporters decrying it as censorship and/or media blackout. This article reviews two counter claims made by those on the right and seeks to explain why they fail to make convincing arguments.

Fraser Nelson — an austerity sceptic/denier

In the Spectator, Fraser Nelson seeks to justify the blackout by claiming that there is no austerity in the first place. To paraphrase, the lefties marching on that day had got their sums wrong since there were no cuts imposed by the current government and that the march was the group’s way of ‘call[ing] for the downfall of governments. It’s their way of enjoying the weather’.

Nelson went on to produce two graphs to make his point. The first graph is linked to the Office for Budget Responsibility and Fiscal Outlook website but stops short of identifying where it came from.

A second bar chart compares the cuts that Denis Healey (Labour) made in the 1970s to the current cuts made by Osbourne. It claims that the current government took 8 years to make the kind of cuts that only took a 1970s Labour government to do so. Again, there was no mention of these figures were derived.

Setting these objections aside (the actual source, not just labelling), it is possible to ask a paradoxical conclusion that Nelson has unwittingly made in his blog. Firstly, if as he claims that the current government has increased its expenditures (and hence no austerity or cuts to speak of), then he is hard pressed to explain the second graph which shows a reduction of expenditures or increase in cuts by the current government. Either graph A is true or graph B is, but both cannot be at the same time.

Secondly, even if graph A is true, it still does not address or debunk the claims of people against austerity. After all, this is a diagram that appears to show aggregate government spending. The devil is in the details. Every government spends its allocated money in various areas or sectors and an increase in expenditure overall does not mean they are all distributed equally. It is quite clear that the protestors who were out on the streets on that day were clearly against austerity that affected them and their communities the most. In particular, the cuts against housing, education and public health were most pronounced.

That I have felt necessary to disprove Fraser’s claim of austerity as fiction speaks volume about how far off the mark his analysis is. After all, there is already widespread consensus that austerity is the game in town, accepted even by the right and the coalition government. The latter would of course prefer to frame it as a necessary evil to resuscitate the UK economy.

As early as 2012, the Independent reported that the Tories had reneged on its promise of preventing cuts on the NHS. While the Conservative party claimed that it has increased the NHS budget in real terms for the past two years, treasury figures showed otherwise. Late last year, another Guardian report revealed that up to 7,060 NHS staff, including ‘doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, ambulance staff and qualified scientific, therapeutic and technical staff’ had been made redundant since the coalition came to power. On education, cuts have affected children from disprivileged socio-economic backgrounds. A survey by the trade union, Unison, discovered that teachers recognised their impact on disadvantaged families and witnessed increasing school truancy. In March, Oxfam claimed that the current budget continues to endorse the principle of austerity which translates into Britain’s poor going hungry.

These few reports and findings are merely a selection of what many local and community organisations have discovered as a result of the ongoing recession and austerity policies. Research by universities and think tanks, news reports by the media, as well as official government statements and statistics all point towards the incontroversial fact that cuts have had a real impact on the lives of many in the UK. The middle class is squeezed while workers and the poor are left to fend for themselves. That bloggers such as Fraser Nelson would choose to ignore these facts suggest either ideological blindness or wilful ignorance.

Willard Foxton — 50,000 is nothing

In the New Statesman, Willard Foxton, a card carrying Tory, claimed that the media blackout was not a conspiracy. Instead, he argued that the demonstration was not newsworthy enough for the Beeb. I quote, ’People marching — even if there are 50,000 of them — just isn’t a big story’.

This leaves us with the question of whether Foxton can ever be persuaded by the presence and scale of public assemblies. How large would a protest have to be before he would take notice. I hazard a guess that no demonstration, however large enough, would convince him. It is safe to say that anything mildly associated with the left has no value or credibility in his opinion. As he put it eloquently, ‘‘People need to wake up to the fact that marches, for all their symbolic value to the left, just aren’t that relevant or newsworthy anymore’. This belittling of the presence of the masses can perhaps be summed up as such: ‘ignore the people who are angry. They don’t matter’.

Reasons people march

It is not rocket science if we want to know why tens of thousands decided to descend upon London on a lovely day to protest. Good journalism is common sense. We just have to ask.

In that vein, Guardian published a piece on the march and collated a small snapshot of protestor’s sentiments. For someone like ‘labmonkey’, he was under no delusion that the power-brokers would ignore him. He was however cognizant that this is a good way of galvanising the masses. Others such as Stephen Porter believed the peaceful marches would encourage others to participate in the future while ‘artery’ thought the Peoples’ Assembly is different in the sense that it has alternative proposals up its sleeve. Vice News also had a reporter on the ground. Says Michael, ‘you need to start cutting from the top and not at the bottom’ and added that the ‘system’ needs to be ‘better regulated’. Richard decided to attend because of his anger with the current state of affairs while Jon, a self-professed communist thought the long term solution is a unified working class. For someone like Clare, her predicament is real and immediate as cuts to benefits are severely affecting her disabled family members.

Conclusion — this is people engagement with politics

People have their own reasons for attending the march. While the call is to stop the harsh austerity measures, protestors were obviously motivated by different impulses. Some were ideological while others were personal. Protestors may not completely agree on what they want change but they recognised that cuts have significantly affected their lives and their communities. That the protest march could galvanise so many people to attend shows how disenfranchised they are with the current government.

Unlike other private media companies which might be beholden to its shareholders, BBC is formed by a Royal Charter and funded by public money with ‘public purposes’. Two of those statements, ‘reflecting UK audiences’ and ‘sustaining citizenship and civil society’ would have impelled the editors to report on the demonstration which clearly deserved reportage. That it has chosen not to do so is symptomatic of a news organisation that is losing its way. In a way, this mantle has since been passed onto activists, independent bloggers and the non-corporate media landscape.

While the likes of Nelsons and Foxton might be happy to dismiss the legitimate concerns of the protestors, there is much value in documenting ‘left’ protests. They are not merely ‘symbolic’ as Foxton believes. The protest shows an active participating citizenry who is willing to go onto the streets to demonstrate their anger. If this is not concerned citizens engaging in politics, what is?