Protest is the means by which both these enclosures and the laws protecting them are challenged. It forces our representatives to listen to those they have failed to represent. It inoculates the political agenda with new ideas and new perspectives. When the law is allowed to become the exclusive arbiter of public morality and when politics is confined to parliament, society fossilises. Its inherited iniquities are set in stone, and new thefts from the public realm are honoured and validated.
Government becomes, once again, the exclusive province of the propertied.