I protest

In the United Kingdom, apparently, you need a license to protest within a kilometre from the Mother of all Parliaments. With advance notice and all. Crikey.

But it gets weirder. The easiest and quickest (six days' notice) licence to get is for "lone protest"—a single person carrying a sign).

Imagine. What if our netas decide that since we inherited the Parliamentary system from the Brits we should copy this too? Imagine: one more source for ghoos! Except, of course, the cops might whack the crap out of you anyway. Because they can.

But we digress. According to Times Online, the comedian Mark Thomas "has called for hundreds of solitary protests next Thursday — all at the same time.

Officially, then, they'll be protesting about all sorts of things. War. Student fees. Belly-button fluff. Anything. Secretly, they'll all have a common cause — protest at the requirement to apply for a licence to protest in the first place."

Rocking!

[Times link via Confused of Calcutta, the most recent addition to our Bloglines feeds.