All protests are not equal in the eyes of the police

I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du jour involved a bus company owned by a man accused of not much liking the gays. My generation were short on causes, so intermittently there would be a call for direct action against the bigoted buses. I slipped along once, not sure whether I really wanted to join in. Apart from the sight of a few dozen callow students preventing one of the guilty buses from progressing up the High Street, my main memory is the almost animalistic rage of a number of the bus’s passengers. Unable to be heard above the chants, they looked like flies in a bottle, getting ever more furious about being made to be late for their next appointments. I sloped away, reflecting that if I had been on that bus I would not have felt much more supportive of the cause after the protest than I had before.

It is a little noted consequence of public protest: the inconvenience you put other people to. Naturally, everybody in principle defends the right to peaceful protest. But whenever I have found myself on the side of the inconvenienced, it turns me subtly or otherwise against the cause at hand. The recent behaviour of Extinction Rebellion protestors offers one powerful example. Outside of a small group of misanthropes, most of us would like to save the planet. But few people were happy for their morning commute to be made even more miserable than it already was by people claiming to feel more strongly about the issue than they did. Likewise, some years back I learned that the thing that had caused me to spend an afternoon sitting in traffic was a ‘Pride’ protest. I don’t mind admitting that, stuck in a sweltering car, I thought things that would have shamed the Revd Ian Paisley.

In the era of Covid, you would have thought that protests would need an even greater reason than usual to justify going ahead.