Someone disrupted the boat race yesterday. Apparently anyway, it's not high on my list of must watch TV events so I only saw the news and wondered if the oars would have taken his head off. But the fact he had the temerity to interrupt the race between Oxford and Cambridge was high up the news agenda. Despite the fact he is an idiot. If you read his blog (here), he comes across as a little bit of a nut. Which is unfortunate.
There are people slagging him off for having had a private education, so apparently he's not allowed to criticise them. He is, although I don't think he did it very well. The mentions of Emily Davison in his blog are a little ill judged. The thing with the suffragettes was they had a simple idea, Votes for Women, which people could support. It helped, but votes for women came in more as a result of the first world war, the suffragettes cause helped it to happen by pushing it onto the agenda, but it didn't make them change the law by itself, and Emily Davison lost her life in the protest, with the King asking for the horse at the time. Is he trying to get people to kill themselves for his cause?
So what was Oldfield trying to achieve? He doesn't exactly have a great rallying cry - "Elitism Leads to Tyranny" isn't going to cause the world to sit up and take notice, because we're not that sure what he's on about. He seems to be almost suggesting suicide to protest about elitism. But because he isn't arguing something simple, and isn't really making that great a statement or causing people to say I agree he's going to fail. And he's also going to set back the right to protest.
Given what he did, what I fear now is someone being shot during the Olympics, they were trying to do a peaceful protest, but someone will give an order to shoot first at the marathon, or some other of the more open events, because they will think terrorists have been given ideas by this guy. And they will not allow protest at these games, that seems to be clearer than ever. I'm expecting a protester to be killed by police this summer after Trentons' protest. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see later this year.
