The kind of quote you don’t want to see:

A baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head.

I wasn’t sure whether I was bleeding or not. I moved off to the side and asked a police officer if I was bleeding. But he just said “Keep moving, keep moving”. Then I put my hand to the top of my head and looked at my palm and I could see there was blood everywhere.

I then asked another police officer, who was wearing a police medic badge, if he could help me. And he told me to move away as well and told me to go to another exit. By this point blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck.

No, this isn’t a quote from some irate blogger, demonstrating in a hostile regime halfway around the world. This is the account of journalist Shiv Malik at the London student protests (see the 4:31pm entry).

If this kind of thing was happening in a non-Western country, our MPs would be all over the news, saying how disgraceful such actions by the authorities are. But because it’s the UK and the authorities are clearly trying to put a young generation off of protesting for good, MPs and the police alike are denouncing the protestors as hostile scum, ignoring police provocation and kettling.

That’s not to say every protestor is well-intentioned, because that’s clearly not the case. However, what we’re seeing here is a new kind of police presence, one where disorder, dissent and disobedience simply will not be tolerated; it’s a depressing thing from a country that supposedly prides itself on being democratic.