membership & movements: all articles

Roger Scruton is right to bring fox-hunting and gay rights into a common frame of reference, but his political partiality blinds him to the changing character of protest movements in the context of history and global politics.

The packaging of ‘new’ protest movements by modern leftist intellectuals reveals a selective focus on favoured causes – feminism, racism, gay rights. This post–1968 template evades concerns, such as fox–hunting, that animate masses of ordinary people. From shallow argument it generates a politics without principle.

The politics of protest, from the Inuit and Aborigines to England’s Countryside Alliance, cannot be understood through old left–right categories. To explain where a movement is heading, we should ask: is its source of energy in the past, present or future?

From Stop the War to Save the Whale, from Liberty and Livelihood to Globalise Resistance, popular movements of protest and advocacy are a key feature of the political landscape. Why do they grow or fail? How will the movement for global change respond to the lessons of its early years?Tomorrow the world? The rocky path of social movements

The Countryside March across London on 22 September will be a massive demonstration of resistance to unjust power. One marcher explains how a story that starts with love ends in civic outrage.

From BSE to foot & mouth, from hunting to the Countryside Alliance, from Maff to Defra - out of crisis the countryside has moved to the top of the political agenda. But where is the Urban Alliance? Are the cities losing their way? And how can the fractured relationship of the last decade be healed in the next?