"The attempt to drown out the PM’s election speech outside No 10 reflected a sinister trend in our politics"
Telegraph: 25th May 2024: Janet Daley asks why those, with the power to do something about it, have taken a conscious decision to allow noisy minorities to drown out debate (and the media are complicit)
"...Most of the commentariat has judged Rishi Sunak’s announcement of an election, standing outside No 10... to have been humiliating. At best, a symbol of his poor judgment. At worst, an omen of the doom to come... But the real people I talk to speak of the one thing that they found most notable about that scene: the infuriating, outrageous blasting of amplified music from what was described on the broadcast media as a “protest” outside the gates of Downing Street.
This “protest”, as it happened, was not a mass demonstration of organised discontent with the Government... a handful of mates and a boombox... What it did... was create a sense of belligerent disrespect not just for Mr Sunak and his party but for the institutions of government and for the population which was being addressed...
..It is important to see it for what it is: not just a few obnoxious clowns making a nuisance of themselves but part of a much larger pattern in which very small groups of people can take over the public space and bully much larger cohorts of people into silence...
The activist minorities are, in effect, making it impossible to debate not just their views but the very idea that such views might be debatable... "