Liverpool: Condoleeza Rice Protest [Photos]
Up to 1-3000 people, dependng on who you talk to, absolutely no trouble, lots of noise, I think Condi got the message.
She was smuggled in and out again, not much chance of engaging with the protesters as she intimated she wanted to do earlier in the day.
Everybody met up at 5.30, the usual pre protest speeches, notable was Omar Deghayes brother, and stirring stuff from a local Liberal [not lib dem] councillor, Steve Radford.
A minutes silence for the dead, the release of balloons and the march down Hope street. The aim was for Condi to simply know we were there, and having been told that we could be heard within the Philharmonic, by that measure it was a sucess.
The crowd filled Hope St from end to end as we moved down, lots of locals, but also support from further afield.
Like many, I was worried that our typical British apathy [and I include myself in that] would mean no more than a few hundred people. The numbers were closer to a few thousand, people were roused by Condi's visit which is maybe a sign that people disillusioned with mainstream politics are starting to vocalise their discontent. Im not trying to blow a couple of thousand people out of perspective here, but there were a lot of people there who were most certainly not the usual suspects, and the event had a buzz to it that other protests I have been to haven't...
The pictures tell more than my words, I added some small ones to our photostream [on the right sidebar], and uploaded a full higher resolution set to the gallery here and here.
wonderful photos, thank you
wonderful photos, thank you for doing this.
Last night's BBC news
Last night's BBC news described the reaction to the torturer general's visit as 'mixed', which imples a mixture of favourable and bad, but it looks to me like the mixture was made up of indifference and hostility.
Thanks for sharing your
Thanks for sharing your photos. I also have a set on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36-degrees/sets/72057594095184820/
It's laughable that last night the BBC reported 'a few hundred' protesters in Liverpool!
The established media were
The established media were predominately hidden behind Condi's police barrier at the Phil, thus saw little if anything of the protest. Let's face it, keeping them away from us, behind a police cordon was was genius media management! No pictures of the Cathedral have been shown, either on TV news reports, in print media or their websites, nor the aerial footage from BBC News 24 or Sky news, thus the extent of the protest can be hidden from the world and they can keep showing images of 100 or so people and a dog at LIPA.
The end of Hope Street is all of 20' wide, and they did not see that the entire road behind was crammed with non-usual suspects: a lovely atmosphere of families - lots of prams and kids - and a large number of baby-boomers and elderly - old enough to remember WW2 which is so often cited by those corrupt Neo-Con and NuLab warmongerers. Plus lots of disillusioned young people vowing never to vote, a handful of wheelchairs, and resourceful types dressed up and fitting in a bit of peaceful protest before a meal or a night on the tiles. There was a piss-poor showing by the unions, just that they had big banners and had typically pushed to the front.
Maybe if the world had seen these images Straw would not be so self-satisfied (as an aside, Blackburn's local council elections will be interesting to watch...)
Local BBC photos can be found here