Protest

Debbie Moss on From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 by Mark Garnett.

Garnett's history of the rise in disengagement and voter apathy suffers from its lack of convincing explanations and an overly narrow understanding of politics.

(Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, Jonathan Cape 2007, 480pp)

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Recently I made a joke about a boring headline on Tom Nairn's speech on how globalisation now favours countries like Scotland. This time, the killingly dull headline was at the top of the page, in London's Evening Standard.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The hacks accompanying Gordon Brown to China felt intimidated by its one-party state security system. Quite right too. But I have a feeling that China is on the move on this front as well, driven by environmental necessity as tracked by the grown up daughter of openDemocracy ChinaDialogue. Take a read of this heart-warming story of what can be done. Popular protest over the absurd third Heathrow runway may be ground down in our Kingdom but in Xiamen, as Li Datong reports in oD, the people put their foot down, turned their text message functions on - and won.

Stephen Taylor (London, 5jt):  Here is a taste from Stephen's blog after he joined an OurKingdom cluster making sure that the liberty to protest was protected:  The prime minister’s first speech to Parliament was all about rolling back executive power and devolving it. There is nothing inevitable about freedom and democracy. The freedom of those who care sufficiently to demonstrate about an issue publicly will surely disappear unless periodically reasserted. If the last decade of New Labour government has anything to teach us about civil liberties, it is to think the unthinkable. The nodding through this summer of open official access to our phone records amounts to a revival of the notorious, bitterly resisted and supposedly long-dead general warrant. (Americans thought they had nailed this one two centuries ago, engraving a prohibition of writs of assistance into their constitution.) Email cannot be far behind.I was dismayed to find that at 1pm I could stroll easily into Trafalgar Square. Radio news tonight reported “hundreds” of protestors. Well, there were thousands, but not many thousands. How few seem to have grasped that what happens in Britain over the coming decades has more to do with our foreign policy – Iraq, energy sources, and letting millions die in our effluent – than any domestic agenda. Eventually the climate terrorists will get busy seeking our attention. The dribbling away of ancient freedoms parallels perfectly the melting of the ice caps. If only this were all metaphor.

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): I only just got back from the anti-war protest that took place outside Parliament this afternoon. It was a lively and good spirited affair, but entirely peaceful as you'd imagine. There was also a decent turn out given it took place at a time you'd expect most protesters to be either at work or in lectures. The timing was designed to coincide with the MPs' first day back after their three month vacation and Brown's big speech on Iraq. And so several thousand of us gathered at one o'clock in Trafalgar Square where we listened to Galloway, Benn, McDonnell, and other luminaries of the anti-war left, before marching down past Whitehall to Parliament. As Anthony has mentioned, the fact that the protest was even allowed to take place represents a significant victory on the civil liberties front. Despite Brown's pledge to reverse the ban on protests within one kilometre of parliament, the police, in dialogue with Stop the War organisers, had been trying to prevent the protest from reaching Westminster. The Met's justification this time was that it would stop MPs gaining entry to the building in contravention of an 1839 law (in February 2003 it was the grass in Hyde Park), but stopping the MPs entering Parliament wasn't the aim at all. Rather it was to communicate to them some of the strength of feeling that surrounds the occupation of Iraq and the possibility of an attack on Iran, in the hope they might fulfil their function as representatives and "Re-Present" these views in the House. I suspect that Brown realized how potentially damaging it would be to have imposed a ban on the march, given the determination of the protestors to assert their right to peaceful protest and the sympathy of most people in the country to their cause. A ban on the protest would have made Brown's "new politics" look much like the old on tonight's ten o'clock news, and in the end the threat probably only served to incerease the turnout. Anyway, here are some photos I took of the event.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Half way back from the march they wanted to ban but which the police let into Parliament Square bit by bit while managing the traffic trying to cross Westminster bridge. Photos and video will follow. The police gave way and permitted it to go ahead - I suspect that someone in authority read Brian Eno and Henry Porter and said we can't be seen to club down a peaceful protest, at least not just now, and as soon as it became clear that the numbers would be too big to cart off in a few buses, the police caved in. So strike one for democracy. Whether most of the demonstrators were speaking to the country, which is also an aspect of democracy, is another matter.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): We are finally getting the OurKingdom articles section into shape. Just published in it today is a fine essay by Katrina Forrester, pictured above. As you can see Brown's boys are still using the old technology.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I was on the radio twice over the weekend, once in a short BBC profile of Ian McEwan I have only just caught up with. It's here. I'm in a little sequence on his politics and talk about how he helped remove the final "tropes" from Charter 88. The other broadcast was in my openDemocracy role for the World Service about the Asia Pacific Summit in Sydney (I’ve not found the link). The police there have put up a long, huge metal barrier right through the centre of the city and are intimidating protestors in an appalling way. Also on the package was a dignified Alex Bainbridge of the Australian Stop the War Coalition who said they had no intention of "spitting" on policemen or attacking heads of state, who will now be caged up for the duration of the summit.

Sunny Hundal (London, Pickled Politics): Much of the talk in the press this week has been about how these "hippies" who attended Climate Camp were so smug and preachy, and probably flew to Heathrow to attend the camp. Are environmentalists full of contradictions? Do they not practice what they preach?

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): On 22 May a jury at Bristol Crown Court acquitted two protesters, Toby Olditch and Philip Pritchard, on charges of criminal damage, after they had broken into RAF Fairford and attempted to disable American B52 bombers just before the 'shock and awe' offensive against Iraq began.

The defence argued that they were acting to prevent war crimes against the people of Iraq, and that even a few days delay in flights would have allowed more Iraqi citizens to escape to safety. This has been a long ordeal for the two protesters - they were first tried for the same offence in October 2006 - but they made impressive witnesses: patently honest, sincere and informed. Pritchard's evidence on the evils of cluster bombs and shells strengthened by depleted uranium, which scatter bomblets and radioactive toxins with a life of billions of years, was chilling. Defence counsel asked Pritchard: had they run or walked within the base? Pritchard replied that they had walked steadily, to lessen the chances of guards shooting at them.