RDN and Billy Bragg on BBC R5

I had a brief but fairly decent outing on BBC Radio 5 (0930hrs, yesterday Sunday, 4 March 2012), discussing protest with Billy Bragg. The essence of our disagreement seemed to be that he thought that most protest was valuable and I said surprisingly little was.

Mr Bragg seemed pretty content to assume that most protest – he identified the Occupy people in particular – could be compared with that of Rosa Parks. I said that this was really importantly wrong: RP was making a protest about serious discrimination and arguably had no other avenue of expression. These two elements to her protest were no part of the Occupy movement’s theatrically elegant staging of statements of a few commonplace views on capitalismm, which they make in a culture offering everyone zillions of outlets for their views.