Should protests be time limited?

I came over Blackfriars Bridge this morning a little after seven o’clock. The baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral was shining in the light of a cold, beautiful dawn. I was reminded of those wonderful opening lines from the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes
The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

The mood was somewhat spoiled by the sight at the foot of St Paul’s. The tent city is growing; more and more tents are being pitched in the grounds of the Cathedral and the gardens nearby. Their intent is unclear, but their impact is immediately apparent. Like the tent city outside Parliament, ‘protestors’ have hijacked a much-loved public space, made it unusable by the majority of passers-by, tourists, and people going about their business, in the name of a nebulous cause without demands or goals.

They might be there for decades. Brian Haw, it will be remembered, began his protest in Parliament Square well before the Iraq War began, and remained living in a public space for a decade. Only death prevented his continued vigil. The law was impotent. He was joined by idealists, anti-war protestors, people complaining about freemasonry, and mentally-ill people who should have been receiving NHS treatment.

The Tory MP Louise Mensch risked the ire of liberals on Twitter last night by suggesting that such protests should be time-limited. But as with all arguments, one way to examine the case is to consider the opposite. Are we really going to accept a permanent encampment of unemployed people, students, the homeless and people such as Chris Knight, 68, who this morning’s Times describes as a ‘retired professor of anthropology at East London University’, and who compares the Guardian-reading protestors sipping their Starbucks lattes in their Blacks tents to ‘our counterparts in Tahrir Square in Egypt.’? Should Parliament, St Paul’s, the Bank of England, Buckingham Palace, Nelson’s Column and other London landmarks be permanently surrounded by tents, sleeping bags and a shifting series of demands? They may as well adopt the political demands which Graham Linehan put into the hands of Father Ted and Dougal: ‘Down with this sort of thing’ and ‘Careful now’. The answer has to be no.

Time Limited? Yes. Permament? Never. The laws in the USA allow for moving, not static protests outside the White House and other public buildings. That allows legitimate protestors to make their point, engage with law-makers and the media, without setting up home on the pavement of Pennsylvania Avenue. The best example I can summon up is Lisa Simpson leading locked-out strikers outside Burn’s nuclear plant. They march in a circle, spurred on by Lisa’s protest song: ‘So we’ll march day and night, by the big cooling tower, They have the plant, but we have the power.’

Protest must be conducted within the rule of law in the UK, and it is clear that the current laws are outmoded. I share Emma Burnell’s wish that all of those willing to camp outside St Paul’s would come along to a Labour Party voter I/D session instead. But given that they won’t we have to acknowledge that there is now a standing army of protestors willing to turn up to any opportunity for a ruck with the police.

For the first time, the communications technology of the protestors puts them on an equal footing with the police. As we saw in the riots over the summer, and again this week at Dale Farm, there are always going to be people to want to hi-jack protests for their own ends. The public school anarchists want the thrill of facing a police line; the urban rioters want a new plasma TV. The woman waving a crucifix in front of a burning caravan at Dale Farm has motives only she can know. She isn’t a traveller, or a Christian, but has provided the dominant image of the eviction.

Wren told us that if we sought his monument to look around. But St Paul’s is not a monument; it is a working church, providing services of worship to a regular congregation as well as the millions of tourists. That ministry is now threatened. Many of the protestors want to close down global capitalism, but all they have achieved so far is the closure of a Christian restaurant and a gift shop selling Bibles.