Between 60,000 and 80,000 people protested at Sunday’s anti-austerity demonstration outside the ruling Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester.
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A flash mob at Manchester Piccadilly railway station featured protesters waving placards reading “Tories not welcome, go home” and a knitted banner reading “don’t stitch us up”. “We need to visibly show the anger of the city”.
Mild mannered Jan, from the People’s Assembly, was outside the Conference Centre all week trying to engage delegates… Alan, a campaigner for the Socialist Worker’s Party, had travelled from Glasgow for the demonstration.
Richard Currie, a 34-year-old disability rights activist, said he opposed austerity because the government’s “neo-liberal policies” were having a negative effect of the lives of disabled people.
‘We must ensure that as we reform welfare and we cut taxes that we protect the hardest working and lowest paid, the retail staff, the cleaners, who get up in the small hours or work through the night because they have dreams for what their families can achieve, the people without whom the London economy would simply collapse.’
Conservatives attending the conference have been warned not to wear their passes or lanyards around the city. And so Mrs May’s last line rang out: “Let Britain be a beacon of hope”. “The cuts are harming democracy”.
Colm Lock, 19, a Manchester University student who stood for the party in the 2015 local elections in the city was hit while watching the protest.
“…[It was when] a shopkeeper told me that he had definitely made up his mind and he was switching right across from Labour to Tory because he just didn’t think that Labour under Ed Miliband would be on the side of a business like his”.
A wide range of campaign groups aimed to bring different issues to attention, focussing on various aspects of Tory policy. They have the same ruthless methods as the old colonialists that they purport to despise, in that they believe in divide and rule. The Conservative party of Prime Minister David Cameron is gathering its members in Manchester for a series of events that wraps up on Wednesday.
But make no mistake: thanks largely to the influence and insights of George Osborne, the Tories are speaking an appealing, modern language and gleefully seizing ground left vacant for them by the new Labour party.
“Today is just the beginning”. You’ve only got to look outside to see all the protesters. Referring to the atmosphere at the first Conservative conference with the party holding a majority in the Commons since 1996, he said: “I know the press are expecting it’s going to just be an orgy of backslapping and self-congratulation… we’ll leave the orgy bit to the next Ashcroft book!”
A good stage trick is to remember that whatever you’ve said, it’s how you finish that grabs them.
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Perhaps less flatteringly there is also Being There, the last film featuring Peter Sellers to be released in the actor’s lifetime, as a humble gardener called Chance who ends up being viewed as a political sage after his accidental remarks to a U.S. senator about the garden are interpreted as astute economic and political advice, taking him to national public prominence.
