Paper Monitor
12:00 UK time, Thursday, 11 November 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Who didn't predict a riot?
"British students may not, like their French counterparts, feel their very identity is defined by protest," wrote Jon Henley in Wednesday's Guardian (Paper Monitor can't find a link) ahead of the 50,000-strong protest against tuition fees. "We've never gone in much for torching cars or hurling paving stones at police."
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And it tells us that a minority of demonstrators did, indeed, throw missiles at officers on a day that resulted in 14 people being taken to hospital; and the ransacking of Conservative party HQ seems a rather more dramatic gesture than burning the odd Volkswagen Golf.
Well, none of us can be right all the time.
So what did actually happen? The Daily Mail, conscious that much of its readership's offspring will been on the demonstration, deploys its rhetorical gifts to full effect.
"HIJACKING OF A VERY MIDDLE CLASS PROTEST," its splash headline concludes.
The pitched squarely at those mums who spent the day fretting about whether their son or daughter had been caught up in any unpleasantness.
It was supposed to be a day of peaceful protest, with students exercising their democratic right to demonstrate against soaring university fees.But anarchists hijacked the event, setting off the most violent scenes of student unrest seen in Britain for decades. Militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy.
Paper Monitor deplores violence, but fully endorses the rights of students to be pictured carrying inventive placards.
One particular wag is photographed in the Times covered from head to toe in fake (at least Paper Monitor assumes they are fake) banknotes, while carrying a sign which reads: "DO I LOOK LIKE I AM MADE OF MONEY?"
Paper Monitor's favourite vignette of the day comes
As darkness fell, students who had earlier been shouting as they stood feet from officers, fell largely silent. One young woman did her make-up feet from a uniformed riot officer. Another held up a sign reading: "We are hostages to the police. We are fine but want pizza, lower uni fees."
The 
