Traffic III

Ken is on my side on this one. Apparently he says that:

“It is totally unacceptable that this man’s foolish protest is causing massive disruption to London and holding Londoners to ransom”.

I agree.

However, echoing the “your two pounds a month could save the eyesight of twenty Rwandan refugees”, Matt O’Connor, the founder of Fathers 4 Justice, says:

“In the extra 20 minutes you spend in traffic, one child will lose contact with their father. At the end of today, a further 100 kids will lose contact with their fathers”.

Tugs the heartstrings. But the difference between this stunt and asking people to covenant their two quid is that me and thousands of others sitting in traffic doesn’t affect whether Mr O’Connor or Mr Chick sees their kids one jot. In fact, what Chick is trying to do is to cause enough inconvenience/risk of harm (albeit fairly fanciful — but supposedly real enough for the police to see fit to cordon off the area and hence create the inconvenience) to large numbers of innocent people, that the Government (he hopes) will be forced to capitulate to his demands. Leaving completely to one side the issue of whether or not his demands are reasonable and whether or not I would otherwise support them, the name for this sort of action is “terrorism”. He’d better get down before Bush and the CIA come over to visit in a fortnight or he’ll end up in Guantanamo Bay (oh, sorry, he’s not a Muslim). But seriously, what do people think? Should Chick be locked up for this?