ORDINARY PEOPLE:

When is a 'popular protest' popular?: The packaging of 'new' protest movements by modern leftist intellectuals reveals a selective focus on favoured causes--feminism, racism, gay rights. This post-1968 template evades concerns, such as fox-hunting, that animate masses of ordinary people. From shallow argument it generates a politics without principle. (Roger Scruton, 02 October 2002, Open Democracy)

Mass protests by ordinary people, which do not originate in the grievances of the protesting classes, are rare. I have witnessed only two in my lifetime: that of the French people protesting against Mitterrand's proposals to nationalise the Church schools, which brought half a million peaceful demonstrators on to the streets of Paris, and that recently catalysed by the Countryside Alliance, which did the same to the streets of London.

Although such protests are comparatively rare, they include more people than can be mustered on behalf of the 'left-wing' causes mentioned by Lent. Unlike Jordan, I believe the terms 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' to be useful, and see no real improvement in his division of causes into the 'pro-active' and the 're-active'. Equally useful is the distinction between the 'progressive' and the 'conservative' mentality. Such labels are useful because they identify contrasting - and equally necessary - human types.

The movement represented by the Countryside Alliance is a movement of people most of whom vote Conservative. But they vote Conservative for a perfectly respectable reason, namely, that they are conservative. They are attached to things as they are, and suspicious of change; they value inherited freedoms, and are prepared to fight when those freedoms are taken away. The small farmers of the Indian subcontinent, the African Bushmen, the people of the Amazon, the nomads of the sub-Sahara and the persecuted Christians of Somalia are the same. And those indigenous people have far more in common with the indigenous English, Welsh and Scots who marched through London on 22 September than they have with the protestors at Seattle.

The problem actually is that they are so rarely prepared to fight when those freedoms are taken away. In this sense the Countryside Alliance is a misleading thing. It's great that they're trying to draw a line, but look how far back they've drawn it. Far too many freedoms have already been lost to the state in Britain and here. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2002 9:17 AM