I actually do have a duffel coat. But that’s not why I love protests. I love them because they’re what happens in a free society, and only in a free society, when people want to make a point. And, generally, when no-one’s listening to what they’re saying. Or, even more generally, when no-one cares what they’re saying. Like anytime a Corbyn picks up a banner, its time to watch the football. If its not Jeremy marching for Hamas or to defend some holocaust denier, its his insignificant brother spouting his anti-vax bullshit or denying the pandemic as something started by capitalists (errrr… China?) to repress the workers.

Yet we have to be indulgent. Just because people like the Corbyns are thick as pig-shit, dim as dead lightbulbs and worthy of being beaten with batons daily, does NOT deny them their democratic rights which I would defend myself and personally, just after I finished the beatings.

In Afghanistan they don’t protest. Or they do so with great care. And may pay for it in the most severe way. In Russia, you are completely free to protest. As long as its in full and total support of Putin. So protests represent a freedom which we are lucky enough to enjoy.

But you have to make people take note of what you’re protesting, otherwise it is totally futile. To have sixty people march round in your own back garden will achieve nothing. That’s why extinction rebellion (they’re unworthy of capital letters) like to take their morning nap on Trafalgar Square. Or chain themselves across Oxford Circus. So that there is disruption and chaos and thus we, the unprotesting masses, get to learn of their views. Which, even for a bunch of tree-huggers-ambushed-by-hard-left-militants, like ER, are valid and relevant to us, to a degree.

But ‘Insulate Britain’ have taken it too far. They’ve clogged up the M25 numerous times this week. Either lying down in the slip roads or latterly, gluing themselves to those roads. Which firstly causes miles and miles of jammage, and secondly causes masses of extra pollution which, for a green movement, is where irony meets the absurd.

The police act too slowly in these situations. They consider the welfare of the protesters. And I would too. I’d give them 10 minutes to get the fuck off the road. Then I’d send in the bulldozers. A lot of them. Driven by people wearing headsets. So they can’t hear the screaming.

Protest all you want but fucking up the M25, the world’s most already-fucked-up road, is so inconsiderate, unfair and stupid that it elevates the protest from the moderately daft to the criminally selfish.

Happy Yom Kippur

A xxxx