The Government should stand up to the rent-a-mob campaign against unpaid work experience Back in the day, the revivalist meetings of the central organisation were the mainspring of this dedicated existence, and the gigs that punctuated the quasi-professional protester's life were the awayday bonding sessions. You met up at the demo (for or against whatever it was) with new comrades from the trade unions, and you were reunited with old friends whom you hadn't seen for - oh, at least a week or so, at the last demo in Southall/Walthamstow/Basildon. Your day job (almost certainly in the public sector, probably teaching in a polytechnic) provided a useful outlet for your ideological proselytising and an extension of your political networking, but it was secondary to the real business of your life which was the eternal round of protest venues. However, if joining up with a handful of sad mutts outside a Tesco or a Waterstones branch to register your solidarity with the "enslaved" jobseekers inside is your constitutional right, it does not follow that the mass media should treat you as if you were Martin Luther King. The reverent, and wildly disproportionate, attention which the BBC has paid to anyone expressing even the most ill-informed objections to this project is outrageous. The corporation appears to be adopting wholesale the wrecking campaign of the Guardian, which has apparently been ringing companies (whether or not they were involved with the programme) to ask if they were not uncomfortable with the idea that work experience candidates might lose their benefits. What company with any sort of public profile would put itself on record as feeling comfortable with the possibility of someone losing his benefits? I can understand why the Guardian, given its political orientation, would not want to dwell on this point. But should it not have occurred to the editors of Newsnight when they devised a shockingly biased programme on the issue last week, in which Kirsty Wark practically accused Chris Grayling, the employment minister, of people trafficking? Just as the BBC described June Hautot, who set upon Andrew Lansley in a headline-grabbing encounter, as a "pensioner" (instead of a union activist and organiser of the "Keep Our NHS Public" campaign), it treats every cowed retail boss as a conscientious objector to benefit reform. In the event, the chance of anybody actually losing their benefits is remote. Mr Grayling has made it clear that a candidate would have to abandon their work experience place with a huge dose of insolent defiance before they would be penalised. In short, you will not be deprived of your Jobseeker's Allowance because your mother is ill and you need to look after her. And, contrary to what I heard on the BBC news report on Friday morning, it is categorically not true that "failure to take part" in the scheme can lead to suspension of benefits. Taking part, as I mentioned above, and Mr Grayling has said over and over again to every interviewer who will listen (and even to those who will not), is entirely voluntary. Ironically, one category of work experience volunteers who certainly will lose benefits are those for whom the valiant protesters have won the right to be paid real wages by Tesco: state welfare bureaucracy being what it is, they may find it difficult to reinstate their Jobseeker's Allowance if things don't work out on the job front. So this ideological victory may be a mixed blessing for the recipients. There is an important lesson here. You have to get up very early in the morning to confront organised agitators. This is their life's work. Whether it is a hell's granny veteran of industrial warfare or a well-deployed miniature battalion, it will take more than the occasional laid-back speech about the virtues of capitalism to combat them and their fans in the media.