Trendy protest: 2008 update

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.

Here, I have concentrated on Plane Stupid and Climate Rush. This is protest at its silliest. And it certainly isn’t harmless. I mean that real people were put at inconvenience or expense (and maybe worse) in what amount to stunts on well-publicised issues which were already receiving plentiful political attention.

Most media commentators seem to believe that these protests are attractive signs that democracy is not quite dead. The only commentators reliably against it are from spiked online and its general stable of writers. Some commentators seem rather stuck on a “Posh Protest” angle, as though greenery had not always been fairly high-tone.

8 December 2008
Stansted shutdown by Plane Stupid
This protest attracted mostly friendly coverage from the media, though there was some comment that these were “toff’s stunts”.

There was an interesting comment response to this Guardian piece by one of the Plane Stupid activists. My quick reading of the posts suggests that about a third, maybe less, were wholly for the Plane Stupid action. Most of the ohers were more or less onside about climate change, but resisted the Plane Stupid protest as being wrong or counterproductive.

28 November 2008
The “Green Banksy”
A lone individual seems to have sauntered into Kingsnorth power station and certainly shut it down.

19 November 2008
Tamsin Omond (of Climate Rush)
Fined for her part in February’s Plane Stupid action

14 October 2008
Tamsin Omond
Banned from Parliament for October 2008 Climate Rush

12 October 2008
Westminster protester prepared to risk jail in cause of climate change
Tamsin Omond ready for protest

July 2008
Number 10 Super glue to PM

14 April 2008
Plane Stupid’s Scottish Parliament protest

27 February 2008
Plane Stupid at HoC
A deliciously pseudo-dissident piece by Jackie Ashley in The Guardian