Iain Dale: Against Protest, Against Democracy

It's a couple of days old now, but Iain Dale has another post up about those protestors who were in Parliament Square. And it shows him at his smuggest, illiberal and most insufferable worst:

Oh dear, I seem to have upset some people on Twitter this morning. Hey ho. I can't see why. What part of what I wrote can be disputed?

Let's see what Dale wrote on Twatter Twitter then:

Going past Parliament Sq on the 87 bus. Rejoice! The squatters have been evicted. Dirty, filthy layabouts.

Hmmm. I have real problems with his statement on Twittier, but let's see how he defends it:

They have indeed been evicted.

That doesn't make the eviction right, though. It may have been rubber-stamped by a judge (although only on appeal) but that doesn't automatically make the judge correct of the law correct. It is possible for the justice system to be unjust in its decisions.

And the fact that the whole site stinks of urine and faeces indicates the people who squatted their had issues regarding personal hygiene.

Well, my understanding of Parliament Square suggests that there are no toilets there. And my understanding of camping is that the longer you do it for, the more compromised your personal hygiene will become. It isn't pleasant - especially for those who have to clean up - but it seems to be a fact of life that those who camp in areas with no toilet or washing facilities will end up with some personal hygiene problems. Which, as an aside, is one of the reasons why I don't go camping.

And I hardly think the word layabout is going over the top to describe them. What else should I have called them? Fine, upstanding members of society? I think not.

Yep, but this is pure opinion, and the concept of what constitutes a layabout is both relative and very much in the eye of the beholder. Some would argue that these people are upstanding members of society since they are directly using their democratic right to protest. They might even argue that these people are contribute much more to our democracy that preening egotistical bloggers like Dale.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. This is not, as someone said "a sad day for democracy". It is the day when the silent majority fought back and said "enough".

Really? You're really going to do that? You're going to use one of Nixon's terms (the President when the Kent State Massacre took place) to justify your tweet? Now I've got to admit, that's bold.

But this isn't the day when the Silent Majority fought back. It is the day when the Mayor of London managed to stop protest from happening in front of the Houses of Parliament (which does make it a sad day for democracy, by the way) - to the applause of illiberal idiots like Dale. This is all about an elite dictating the terms of protest, and making sure that it does not happen in their line of view. It is not a victory by some sort of grassroots movement.

And while we're on the subject, I seem to remember reading once that many of the letters sent to Nixon from "the Silent Majority" were actually fabricated by Nixon's aides for political purposes. I suspect that Dale's "Silent Majority" is rather like Nixon's - all in his head.

Well done to Boris for carrying through on his promise.

Or to put it another way, well done to Boris for doing something that Dale agrees with.

I'm not going to rehearse the arguments about why backing a clampdown on protest in the very heart of democracy in this country is bad, but Dale's objections still mainly seem to be about the aesthetics of the protests and the fact that he thinks the people protesting smell. It just goes to show how paper-thin Dale's liberalism is, and how in reality he is socially conservative through and through.