The new acronym in town (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, 2005), was given a stern test last night by a bunch of fearsome, aggressive, militant…carol singers. This savage mob of Jinglebellers was attempting to test this ludicrous law to its limits by arranging a gathering of people to sing some carols. The test was whether the Police would interpret this gathering as some kind of "protest" and so chuck everyone in jail. Unfortunately for the blood-thirsty media, the police were far too busy mugging motorists to pay much attention, or just maybe they were told what idiots they'd look had they try to intervene.<\/p>\n
Just in case you were not aware, those free spirited parliamentarians that you<\/strong> voted for, decided to create a law that makes any form of protest an offence, within 1\/2 mile of the houses of parliament. Oh, unless you obtain prior permission from, erm…the police. Yes, yes, this really is Britain in 2005. I was having a good whinge about it to a hairdresser yesterday during my annual pre-xmas chop, and found he was genuinely quite astonished to hear that this law even existed. I then wondered how many other people live in this world of apathetic, blissful ignorance? Probably far too many. This still doesn't excuse him for giving me possibly the worst haircut I've ever had (and I've had some bad ones, believe me).<\/p>\n So, I thought I'd go and check it out. I managed to infiltrate these almost-protesters by cunningly disguising myself as a bloke who'd just left the office. Clever eh. I obtained a "carol service sheet" (no doubt a coded Al Qaeda training manual) and proceeded to sing deck-the-halls and other assorted gems for the next 60 minutes. My apologies to the lady in the red hat in front of me who's ears were at the same level as my gob. I suspect it was obvious that I hadn't sung a carol for years and her trauma was apparent by her constant necking of whiskey.<\/p>\n Brain Haw was ranting about not being able to rant, the diminutive and gutsy Maya Evans was there looking a bit startled with her recent accent to cause celebre<\/em> status, there was also a lone hoodie, some young kids (tomorrows hoodies), me (an older hoodie) and the remainder of the 100 or so singers were just…..people, utterly normal people who happen to share a belief that what is happening is wrong. 100 people doesn't sound very much, but perhaps everyone else was too busy doing important stuff, like Christmas shopping or getting hammered at the annual office toe-curling party. But we all have an MP who represents us and a 10 minute letter with a 30p stamp can be surprisingly effective. But apathy's a very debilitating condition and I've found that it does go away if ignored for long enough.<\/p>\n Incidentally, every Sunday there is going to be a picnic outside the houses or parliament. Obviously this won't be a protest or demonstration of any kind. Just a nice little picnic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The new acronym in town (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, 2005), was given a stern test last night by a bunch of fearsome, aggressive, militant…carol singers. This savage mob of Jinglebellers was attempting to test this ludicrous law to its limits by arranging a gathering of people to sing some carols. The test was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}