Let's face it: moving a book is about all they will do, and then only if they read it on Facebook/Twitter. Real protest is not something people are generally interested in; they're too comfortably numb.

talking about politacal classes,i was watching last night of the proms on the bbc tonight and everybody was flag waving and happy and singing and joining in the renditions of land of hope and glory and rule brittania and good fun it seemed and i was even tempted to sing along myself but my sore throat stopped that,but i was wondering, is this event a preserve of the upper and middle ruling classes or is everybody from all classes welcome to join in the fun at last night of the proms,not to sure about this one.

"The fable that Britain has been living beyond its means and now needs to cut back is being swallowed"

Quite so. The cutters and slashers need to be confronted. There's no reason in principle why public expenditure shouldn't reach 100% of the size of the economy, well up from the 45% it is now.

It's without a doubt true that with public expenditure at 100% of GDP we'd have a fairer and more just society. It's therefore incredibly ideological for it to be any less than 100%! It's an ideological argument that can be made e.g. individual freedom trumping social justice, but if we forced the right to actually HAVE to make that argument, then it's up to the people to choose if they accept the ethics. Frankly we all know that giving individual freedom to the rich only ends up hurting the poor and the voters realise this.

Why can't we, for instance, target a doubling of expenditure to 90% of GDP? Then that still leaves 10% for the rich boys to play with... Even if the 90% target never gets reached, at least it would lay down a marker that would show up the slashers-and-burners for the ideological extremists they are.

Moving Tony Blair's autobiography in bookshops shows that young people are not willing to be sold the wrong story. Laurie, and you know the truth? There are no truths and there are no lies, there is something in between. There also is no conspiracies, but often just a series of political cock-ups, you sweetie, will understand this then you grow older.

Yes, it is :)

Of course, there were a few lolz on the February protests against the war - "Make Tea Not War" and all that - but they weren't the point. The point was over a million people on the streets, and they weren't just the "usual suspects" who everyone can easily ignore.

Interesting point that it did make a difference in how the War will be remembered. And how the War is remembered is likely to influence future decisions about Middle Eastern wars. I stand by saying it didn't "work", because we wanted to Stop the War and we didn't.

Kate,

I agree, the Iraq protest did make a difference (though evidently not enough - it also made clear that the will of the democratic majority can quite easily be ignored). A campaign of civil disobedience might have been even better - millions of people sitting down and accepting arrest in the streets of UK cities would have been an even more powerful action against the war. It was war after all, something so serious that it is worth protesting with all means available. But I'm not sure how realistic that kind of action really is (and can't claim to have ever been arrested myself).

Anyways, I believe that protest was strong because it was broad-based, with organisers from across the political and economic spectrums, and because it did not undermine its criticism with appeals to easy laughs.

It definitely wasn't all about the lolz. I can't imagine that the anti-war protest would have been as effective if it had taken the form of a campaign to post rick-roll video links on neocon websites, or to draw devil horns on Blair in the magazines of dentists' waiting rooms.

(Cheers Neuroskeptic - is yours the eponymous neuroscience blog?)

I like Tony Blair. He brought peace to Northern Ireland. For that he can all the money he wants. And you can tell he genuinely is trying to bring about peace in the Middle East.

To me he's trying to be constructive. I can't stand 'journos' like John Pilger constantly criticising him. Now you Laurie are jumping on the 'piss take' band wagon. You're one of the lefty SHEEP Laurie. YAWN. I couldn't care less about Afghanistan and Tony Blair.

The traditional left are so predictable and so ineffective, and yet they think they are being clever and doing something. You are doing nothing by criticising Tony Blair. And nothing will happen as a result of your hot air.

Use your energy to be constructive about changing society. Be practical.

Write something that people can do that will change so that society can change.

To make a point additional to my last: I do just sometimes wonder how we'd react if we switched on our televisions one morning and learned that two planes had deliberately struck two tall towers and taken them out in our capital, swiping out umpteen lives? I wonder.

@Left Is Forward: I don't know what motivates you to go to work everyday but I am motivated by getting paid. I don't think I'd bother if 100% of GDP just got redistributed to whoever held power thought "deserved" it. I'd probably do a lot of cash in hand work and barter. I know most people feel the same way to one extent or another. They must be represented also.

I believe the coalition is cutting faster than is sensible, economies take time to adjust; I think they are concerned about the duration of their mandate and they are trying to force as much medicine into the patient as they can before they lose power, rather than following a more conservative long term plan. Hope we don't overdose. Economic changes are slower than politics, and politicians lack the patience (or cannot afford it politically) to see those changes through.

Now now Bobby, you'd never get Gordon's Books on the cookery shelves, they're still too full of unsold Maggie's Memoirs under the bit....'kitchen sink home economics'! Oh god, now I'm being childish too.

"Our 'protests' are too self-indulgent. They are clever but not substantial. They substitute the 'japery' of a few individuals, who generally know each other, for any real claim to effecting change or representation of a broader spectrum of people - this is a problem which has been exacerbated by the false connectedness of the internet. The insistence on humour and the relentless use of irony, a facile and evasive device, only diminishes the gravity of the problems which are faced, and the dignity of resistance to them."

Hey, where's your sense of humor? It doesn't have to actually work, it's all about the lolz nowadays. Martin Luther King - not bad, but could have done with more jokes.

Hi Stuart, I would say that the long suffering people of Cuba were in dire need of a revolution when Castro came along. It’s a pity that his choice of a vehicle for creating a decent standard of living for his countrymen and women was the financial lunacy of Communism. Those lost jobs can in part be attributed to the loss of Soviet financial and military support.

hi buckskins,yer right,and what reallys gets my goat up is all these commies in the uk still rant on about (workers of the world unite and the workers united will never be defeated),funny that really because the most sucessfull economys in the world now now are china,russia,india who communist ideals seem to be thrown out of the window and are more capitaiist than the west.

Whatever next? They'll be publically burning Tony's book.
Sometime or other the world community is going to have to stand up to the Islamic facists like the Taliban and AlQueda and Bin Laden and defeat and eradicate them.
Strangely enough, I think that's the reason why we went into Afghanistan in the first place.
So it looks like we'll have to wait for Afghan Wars Part II. Lets hope thats the War to end all Wars.

Could Laurie remind me of the occasions when my generation (I was born in 1968) or my parents' generation burnt books? These things aren't done by 'generations' but by people working through an ideology that is odious to me, my parents, my grandparents.

Perhaps Laurie should google, say, Greenham Common, Suffragette, Chartism, and learn that protest wasn't invented by people born in the 1980s.

@swatantra nandawar

Sorry, I think you're way off base here.

For one thing, a slightly tongue-in-cheek, slightly humorous (but also substantively serious) protest really can't be equivalated to book-burning. There's a book-burning in the news just now. It's completely different.

And Tony Blair didn't take us to war against Islam. Although I'd totally disagree with him, I might be happier if he had openly declared war on "extremist Islam." Instead, what he did was take us to war on false pretences, with no regard for protest by huge numbers of british citizens. His disregard for the electorate was unbounded by comparison to the re-shelving you're objecting to.

And I hope you don't seriously believe in a "war to end all wars." At least not one we could hope for. I don't think such a thing could come about.

“Stuart Eels
12 September 2010 at 08:16
Once again that Redneck Neocon tea Party stay at home Glory Hunter "Buckskins" choses these pages to accuse the British of mass murder.
When Bomber Harris saw the firestorms at night over London in September 1940 he said "As so they sow so shall they reap" and they did. “

Got it, the British threshold of morality in murdering women and children is that of the Nazis.

“We lost over 64,000 civilians to German Bombers pal, how many did you Yanks lose?”

And your point is?

“Precision Bombing, your precision bombing managed to kill more Bristish Troops in the Italian Campaign than the Germans! Crawl back under your stone”

We must have done in the lot of them. What country did Bristish (sic) Troops come from?

BTW Sue your History teacher and you can retire in luxury.

Moving a book to another shelf is the equivalent of ringing the doorell and running away. It plays havoc with the libray cataloguing system, causes great inconvenience and just harasses the poor shop assitant whose got enough to worry about anyway.
'Protester, identify yourself'. Laurie is right. People are afraid these days to stand up and be counted; they may cover up their tracks for example, by using fancy anons on blogs, before having the courage to put their money where their mouth is.
The Spirit of; 68 has died, the spirit of student protest and of working class protest, and of intellectual protest.

Another good article from Laurie.

I think it's hilarious - I'll be out there moving books myself.

The 2003 march was a success, it has stirred the beast into consciousness, next will come the action. But first we need a new party of the left.

the anti american left are as usual anal in the rhetoric,buckskins, this disease of the left always attacking america and isreal makes you wonder whos side was they really on in world war 2.

zzzzz.

Up there with putting the Bible in fiction and Dan Brown in the children's section...

very middle class.

Broderick, I'm of a left wing view, how is it that you construe my post as attacking America? It doesn't and nor do I, you're generalising.

Bush/Blair. Quite close in the dictionary to confuse young numbnuts, I suppose.

The book is too long, too expensive and too self serving!

PS- Do something about these b'stard spammers, would you?

Iain Bagnall: "I don't know what motivates you to go to work everyday but I am motivated by getting paid. I don't think I'd bother if 100% of GDP just got redistributed to whoever held power thought "deserved" it. I'd probably do a lot of cash in hand work and barter."

If you're a high earner you should already be used to the idea of more than 50% of what you earn disappearing in tax (once you include income tax, NI, council tax and VAT on your spending, it could be well over 50%). What would be so wrong if that hit 70 or 80%?

The poor deserve money more than the rich for the simple reason that it buys them more stuff and that stuff is more important (e.g. buying the basics for 10 poor families may add up to the annual luxury income for a wealthy family).

It's also a fallacy to think that in a state with high % public expenditure, there's no incentive to work - most people would be working for the state anyway, removing the bonus culture and cost-cutting that is the bane of much of private industry. Surely nobody here believes that the railways shouldn't be renationalised, for instance, or for that matter road maintenance and the airports? Under the current regime folk still work for wages in these sectors, but those at the top disproportionately benefit - causing more social inequality, with the knock-on crime rates and health inequality that produces. In a more progressive country, they'd all still get paid their wages, the guys at the bottom would get a bigger slice of the cake, the senior managers won't get megabucks bonuses, no unhealthy profits would be being sucked off by shareholders, all the workers would still be incentivised as before, but it would just be happening out of public expenditure not private. Stuff happening in the public sector doesn't immediately imply that everybody's tax bill is 100%!

For simple proof: imagine the railways running as a non-profit company. Workers still get paid, work still gets done, no shareholders thieving the profits. Scenario A: the non-profit company is owned by a charitable trust, and the railways technically contribute to the private enterprise component of GDP. Scenario B: the company is a crown corporation, and so the railways are part of the state-run economy. Changing the name on the sheet of paper from A to B, hasn't resulted in a disastrous 100% tax rate for anybody. Socialism is possible and it can come with incentives!