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Human Rights

The hon. Gentleman makes his point well. We have seen new forms of protest evolve because the traditional forms of protest, frankly, do not attract any attention. It is inevitable that some people will be offended, as the whole purpose of protest, as I said earlier, is to cause some disruption; otherwise, no one would take any notice. What we have seen at the climate camp, and with similar types of activity, are new ideas on how to attract attention when protesting. We have an obligation, under human rights law, to facilitate protest, and sometimes that will be disruptive. The problem in this case is that the police cannot cope with something outside their expectations, and that is why we get that escalation. We must try to get to a situation in which protesters are confident that, if they talk to the police, they will not immediately be prevented from doing what they want to do. The police might want to fiddle around the edges, and a bit of to and fro in negotiations is fair enough, but if they simply say, "No, you can't do that," there will be no dialogue—we will have a dialogue of the deaf. We need a way of brokering an agreement when new forms of protest are used that are outside the police's basic experience, as that will enable the protesters to make their point in an acceptable way and the protest to be policed in a civilised way. The difficulty is how to get the two sides talking when there is absolutely no trust between them. Trust is what we have to build. Sometimes, a mediator can achieve that trust to kick-start the process. The sooner the mediator can pull out and the trust can build and ferment of its own accord, the better, but how do we get the process started when there is no trust to start with?