Assembly Points

Rather convoluted circumstances have prevented my attendance at the People's Assembly Against Austerity. In the absence of Press TV, there has presumably been no television coverage whatever.

On 9th November 2011, Press TV reported an enormous student demonstration in London while the BBC and Sky News refused to do so, instead pretending that it was not happening. At least on air. There might have been something on the websites if you looked hard enough, but you would have had to have looked very hard indeed. Soon afterwards, Press TV alone reported an attack on the Iranian Embassy in London.

And soon after that, Press TV was stripped of its British broadcasting licence, ostensibly because it was subject to overseas editorial control. Well, Fox News is subject to no British editorial control whatever; the American station is simply broadcast simultaneously in this country, and that is that. Yet it recently endorsed the EDL, both on air and on Twitter.

Press TV, although obviously based in London at least in part (look who is on it), has certainly never interfered directly in our political life like that, still less has it ever endorsed a terrorist organisation on our soil. The Islamist terrorists here are in fact the ones whom we support in Iran, the likes of Jundullah. Those are also the ones whom both we and Fox News support in Syria.

The matter of Fox News and the EDL is now in hand. Watch this space.

And I suppose, even expect, that there might have been something about the People's Assembly on Russia Today. That largely London-based and famously Anglophile station has two million or more viewers in the United Kingdom. It has been known massively to increase the British parliamentary by-election votes of parties and politicians whom it has covered, not as interference, but as honest and balanced reportage.

One such party has been UKIP, with Nigel Farage long a fairly regular fixture on Russia Today. Is the People's Assembly movement to Labour as UKIP was until recent weeks to the Conservatives? No. The same unions fund them both. The People's Assembly's Grand Old Man is Tony Benn, who would never tell anyone to vote any way apart from Labour. And its megastar is Owen Jones, who is very likely to be a Labour candidate in 2015.

If anything, what we are seeing is the unification of the Left, together with a vastly wider coalition of those dispossessed by the cuts, behind the return of a Labour Government. The very opposite of UKIP's impact, if any, on the next General Election.