Friday evening I went to a demo in the city. I arrived an hour early and the first thing I noticed was the staging: police everywhere, news crews loitering, including Sky News, conservative-leaning and clearly expecting trouble. The assumption was written into the atmosphere—something will kick off, and we’ll be ready to frame it.
Nothing did.
A few hundred people turned up to protest the anti-protest legislation. In a city of more than five million, that’s sobering. I always think of what Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said in the late eighteenth century: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance—often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. A few hundred bodies to defend civil and political rights. That’s what the “vigilance” looks like now: thin, tired, outnumbered by cameras.
Churchill’s line—people get the government they deserve—gets thrown around a lot, and it’s too neat, but in a functioning democracy there’s a sting to it. When things go wrong, media isn’t the only culprit, but it’s often a willing accomplice. Conservative outlets at the demo looked like they were waiting for a scuffle so they could run the familiar story: barefoot lefties, soft-headed idealists, terror-sympathisers. When it became clear there’d be no spectacle, they drifted off. No conflict, no product.
I mostly sat off to the side and listened to the speakers as best I could—maybe I’m going a bit deaf; too much loud music for too long. I also felt a kind of alienation, the sense that my presence was only useful in increasing attendance by a factor of one. And underneath that was another thought: all these demonstrations feel increasingly beside the point if we can’t face the main problem bearing down on everything—climate.
I tried to say something like that to a man around my age handing out flyers for the far left. The script was the old one: blame capitalism; the workers will unite; the global revolution will arrive and set things right. My point, as always, is that we don’t have time. Not for a worldwide class awakening on schedule, not for a miraculous pivot by Russia, China, India and the United States, not for the whole planet to discover virtue and coordination in the next few years. And besides: that mass revolution was predicted two centuries ago. It still hasn’t shown up.
I can forgive it in the young—because I hear my younger self in it. But in older people it lands differently. They should know, by now, that the future of the young is on the table, and waiting for history to do the right thing is just another way of choosing inaction.
I was a hardcore leftie in my early teens. By my mid-teens I’d started to suspect it was often less about rescuing workers from misery than about personal empowerment—the thrill of being righteous, the intoxication of belonging. Since then I’ve put my faith, however imperfectly, in parliamentary democracy. And where we are now, the only realistic way forward is to work with what exists—which includes free-market economics.
Use the system. Price the damage. Stop treating the atmosphere like a free sewer.
Factor the environment into economics: put a cost on using nature as a dumping ground. Push for a universal tax and enforcement regime that capital can’t simply dodge. Hit exports from nations that miss emissions targets with heavy tariffs. And, crucially, give industry the certainty it needs for large, long-term investment—because capital moves when rules are clear and the future is priced in.
It might not be as hard as it sounds. Hard, yes. But not mystical.
After a few hours I headed for a train back to the suburbs, feeling irrelevant, and telling myself I should check next week’s weather—work out when I’ll go up the coast and see if the yacht is still afloat. That’s the whiplash of the modern mind: civil liberties, planetary physics, then the quiet personal audit—is my own little vessel still sitting on the water? The big and the small, all braided together, and somehow we keep walking around as if they aren’t.
If nothing else, the evening was a reminder: the machinery of control is always ready. The machinery of attention is always hungry. And the machinery of public will—when it matters most—often struggles just to turn up.