Protest is the mark of a free society but that doesn’t mean that upstaging Parliament and causing disruption and much worse is the best way of resolving society’s arguments.
Posted by RDN under Handling protest on 9 April 2009. No comments.
Police still don’t realise that they are now doing their jobs in a goldfish bowl. It’s just as well there’s plenty of video about when coppers seem thuggish and their bosses seem thick. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Politics and campaigns on 6 April 2009. No comments.
The recent G20 meeting went off without much fuss and with about the right approach to protest. But we need to be much more explicit about the rights of protestors and the police. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Politics and campaigns on 26 March 2009. No comments.
Quite a bit of commentary suggests that extreme protest will become more common as The People feel themselves ignored by politicians who appease and bail-out capitalism. Tosh. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest on 23 March 2009. No comments.
I know, I know, it’s the parliamentary committee on human rights. So it’s bound to fret about whether the police bend over backwards to safeguard protest. But even so, this new report does rather miss the point. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Handling protest / Politics and campaigns on 19 January 2009. One comment.
It seems obvious that expanding Heathrow Airport with a third runway is bad for climate change. But the thought does not bear inspection. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Politics and campaigns / RDN's media cribsheets on 18 January 2009. No comments.
A Radio 4 show is interviewing me about modern protest, not least because the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights is nearing the end of its inquiry into policing and protest. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Mind and body / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 31 December 2008. No comments.
Jarvis Cocker of Pulp seems like a good egg, if a little coddled. He was guest editor of the Today programme on New Year’s Eve and agonised about climate and financial meltdown. Strikingly not-novel, his account was partly based on a trip to the Arctic made by a group of artists. How deliciously lacking in irony it all was. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 24 December 2008. No comments.
Hardly surprisingly the Baby Boomer media elite have been reliving their youthful rebellions and revolutions of 40 years ago. More surprisingly, many have lost their triumphalism. Sadly, too few understand the death of “institution” which characterised the Sixties. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest on 14 December 2008. No comments.
This is a diary of a few salient 2008 manifestations. It has been another year of young trendies doing more harm than good as they fool the media into thinking they are democracy refreshed. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest on 9 November 2008. No comments.
We should be tougher in the way we think about protest. That was the burden of my written evidence to a Parliamentary committee on Human Rights. Sometimes we seem to get heavy about very little. But more often we think disruptive or vicious protest is really sort of OK. It isn’t.
