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Best bit:
quote:But official numbers never match those of demonstrators. The government of the time said that 15,000 Chartists had gone to Kennington Common in 1848. Later analysis suggests it was more like 100,000. During the great CND marches of the early 1980s the police would automatically, the organisers say, halve the numbers that CND gave. At least one senior police officer has told protest organisers off the record that "if you say 12 people were there, we we will say nine".
The unexplored suggestion is that the police do not have to be told by any government to spin the figures - they do it as a matter of course as an inbuilt protection of the establishment which they serve. When the Countryside Alliance marched on London in 1998, the march organisers released numbers ranging between 284,500 and 300,000 and the police, after saying that there were only 100,000, eventually backed them with a figure of about 250,000, a number that many people questioned. Three Napier University researchers calculated that the numbers were no more than 151,400. They had used video grabs taken 2km into the march every three minutes throughout the five hour event. |
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