Dan Kieran by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)

Author:I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7. The 'Ashes' of the Magna Carta

In terms of journalistic integrity and expertise you have to be careful not to overstep the mark when it comes to your story. Happily I’m an amateur, so that rule doesn’t apply to me. Besides, I was more taken with an approach I’d heard from the artist Damien Hirst: ‘Sometimes you have to cross the line if you want to find out where it is.’

From my journey so far and the people I’d met I had come to the conclusion that the problems we face in Britain exist only because so few people have the time or inclination to do anything about them. So, having done nothing since getting dressed up as a teddy bear, I decided it was time to get my hands dirty again.

But what do you do if you just want to do something? Conventional wisdom states that you need the press to poke people into action, and these days it has to be a grand and clever gesture to persuade the media to get involved. After watching others from the sidelines, I had begun to develop a few ideas about what might make a successful protest. I was convinced that the first step to getting your message across was not to give anyone an excuse to ignore you, whether that’s through having too many piercings, wearing tie-dye trousers, or looking and sounding like a politician. If you want anyone to listen you have to be wary of the pigeonhole you will put yourself in before you utter a word. Of course I was already in the most powerful pigeonhole I could be in, the one for white middle-class men, but I decided to make patriotism the other feature of my plan.

Patriotism seemed a good idea because everyone is patriotic to some extent, whether it’s to do with sport, hating the French, the Americans, or anyone else for that matter (in a humorous rather than racist way, you understand), or because of Thomas Paine, the Diggers, Guy Fawkes, Stephenson’s Rocket, Brunei’s bridges, Jeremy Garkson, Princess Diana or Margaret Thatcher. We all love our country, even if we do reserve the right to think it’s a bit crap some of the time. People care about Britain because there is something in the air or the light of this land that you can’t quite put your finger on. George Orwell wrote in an essay entitled Why I Write, ‘One day Patriotism and Intelligence will come together’, and I wanted to do something to try to bring about that change. Overt displays of national pride seem to single you out as some kind of moronic bigot, but I’m proud of my country, I’m not a moronic bigot, and I’m sick of being told I should be ashamed of our flag. So that became my plan, to bring the fight for freedom of speech and liberty within the realm of patriotism.

I also recalled, after the success of his school dinners campaign, Jamie Oliver saying

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