"What you see happening in this video clip is called ‘blading’. The principle behind it is, of course, perfectly simple, and familiar to everyone who’s ever used a knife to cut something. You don’t get anywhere by pressing the broad, flat side of the blade against whatever you’re trying to cut or chop: you need to concentrate all the downward force through the narrow edge…
Now, it’s entirely possible that you’ve never seen ‘blading’ done before now, so let me quickly explain that (i) the police are actually taught how to do it in their ‘public order’ training; (ii) the official line is that it is meant to be used only when encountering serious levels of violence and as a last resort, and (iii) it’s a practise that has led to highly successful civil claims for compensation against the police.
For all these reasons, your state-corporate media has, historically, not been at all keen to show how this technique actually gets used against non-violent protestors sitting or lying on the ground.
The tragic part is that this is not as egregious, and certainly not as new, as many people seem to think. The behaviour, and the coverage, during the last national coal miners strike was much the same.
Some readers may remember how every news broadcast carried a prominent scab-o-meter showing the ‘return to work’ figures as the ‘enemy within’ ‘crumbled’ before our ‘Maggie’. The covid death/cases/vaccinations straplines come from the exact same propaganda toolkit.
The fact that we now have footage evidencing police brutality leads to a new terrain of argument: should people be allowed to ‘publish’ these clips of our brave defenders of wealth, er, sorry, selfless pillars of the community? Indeed should they be allowed to film such things in the first place, exposing cops to the risk of hotheaded reprisals, horse heads under their duvets, etc etc etc?
The direction of travel is clear. Keeping us all safe’ trumps every other argument. Big Brother loves us, and the only logical conclusion, when the bruises wear off, is to reciprocate.
