Why Can't The British Protest Properly Any More?

Why Can't The British Protest Properly Any More?

Taking in this week's news, it's hard to believe that the British people once knew how to protest effectively - and yet there was a time when an Englishman would, on reading that Lords were considering changing the tweed of the national side's informal trouser, feel sufficiently outraged to take up the quill to scratch out a scathing missive to the editor of The Times.

The bluff old cove would rail away in exquisite copperplate, only to collapse into his wing-backed leather chair, his face flushed with excitement and his monocle rakishly off-kilter as he reached for the port and cigars necessary to bring him back down to earth after such a giddy rebellion.

Sadly, time has not been kind to the country that produced the Peasants Revolt, the Jarrow March and Emmeline Pankhurst. One can rarely walk through London nowadays without seeing some middle-aged kitchen salesman bulging out of an ill-fitting superhero costume as he scales a national monument, intent on unfurling a tablecloth onto which he has daubed a message to his ex-wife using the Dulux Weathershield he found in the shed.

Worse still are those people like the idiot currently clogging up our news media who, having been raised on a healthy diet of TisWas, Timmy Mallett and Noel Edmonds, now believe that any serious transgression by the ruling classes is put right by the high-velocity application of a gelatinous payload to the face.

We can and should laugh at these fools as the roughing-up, arrest and prosecution that they obviously didn't see coming is brought to bear upon them, but they only ever succeed in distracting the media from the real issue at hand and making those in opposition to it seem slightly daft.

Worst still is the group that does the most harm, and the one made up of the people of which we seem to have an inexhaustible supply. It's that scruffy mob of white upper-middle class straggly-bearded teenagers brimming over with misdirected anger at Mummy, and fuelled by the sort of burning self-importance that only the British public school system can engender.

I swear to you now that if I see one more khaki-clad dreadlocked Sebastian screaming his faux-socialist dogma through Daddy's expensive bullhorn as his pal Quentin kicks in the window of a Starbucks behind him, I will feel compelled to move back to the UK just so that I can leave it again, furiously slamming the door behind me.

In fact, it's enough to make a chap write to The Times. Now, where's my quill and inkpot...

Dear Sir...

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