NICK HERBERT AND THE WRONG SORT OF SANDWICHES
From badgers to fracking to Occupy, these anti-democrats are deluded to believe they're courageous rights activists'
So Mr Nicholas Le Quesne Herbert, "Nick" Herbert to you and I, believes that protest is not what it once was; the 40 year old MP for Arundel and south Downs grows misty eyed when he looks back on the struggles of the NAACP and the speeches of Martin Luther King. Nostalgia for those days makes him reflect on the ‘pygmy’ character of today’s protestors who it seems, amongst their other failings, are middle class and eat Marks and Spencer sandwiches![1]
It is a long time since I regularly attended protest marches, as far back indeed as the 1980’s when I attended, amongst others,[2] Anti Apartheid marches, at a time when Mr Herbert was standing as a candidate for the Conservative Party, then led by Mrs Thatcher who tried to do everything she could to support Apartheid South Africa against the threat of sanctions. In those days I seem to remember that people brought their own sandwiches, though admit moral standards may have declined. I even understand from Paul Mason, the BBC reporter in his book 'Why is it still Kicking Off Everywhere,' that some of the demonstrators in Tahir Square, whom Mr Herbert affects to support, may have sometimes used fast food franchises. Perhaps in the light of this information Mr Herbert might need to re-appraise his support?
Mr Herbert believes that as we have the good fortune to live in a parliamentary democracy we need to leave it up to the wisdom of our elected betters to make such decisions as may be required; protesting being it would seem inherently anti-democratic. Mr Herbert seems unaware that the same arguments were presented to Mr King, protesting he was told would only stir up trouble. I recommend to Mr Herbert Martin Luther King’s 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ in which he responds to such criticism.
I my self have criticised some aspects of contemporary protest but I’m not going to take lectures on fighting for ‘human rights,’ from a member of a party that consistently attacks the poorest and most vulnerable, someone who has just voted to strip away legal aid protection from the disadvantaged and belongs to a party that within living memory contained a leader who was a cheerleader for Pinochet and the Aparthied South Africa.
[1] Oh the decadence of it. Though where Mr Herbert gets his information from respecting the source of nourishment of protestors he does not specify. As to the curious, indeed Marxist argument that ones class background should disqualify one from protest I can only say if this is what he believes, this is indeed what he believes. As it happens by the standards of the southern states of the USA Mr King was indeed very middle class.
[2] I realise that having
supported more than one cause I may have seriously discredited my self in Mr Herbert’s
eyes, since he seems to thinks that ‘pygmy protesters who move from one
fashionable campsite and cause to another,’ are wholly to be despised. Well
fighting Apartheid might well have been ‘fashionable’ amongst the charity
workers with whom I then mixedin the 1980's, though
it was not considered fashionable in the Conservative party at that time, a
party of which Mr Herbert was not only a
member but stood as a candidate. For my self I hope that the fight against
injustice always remains ‘fashionable.’
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