The Rights and Wrongs of Public Protest

Pupils have taken to the streets of France to protest against the conditions of schools: severe underfunding, crumbling school infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, frequent teacher absences without replacements, and rigid university admissions platforms like Parcoursup (as reported by The New York Times).
So it made me think: what will the pupils achieve, and how can they best get what they want? Why do people protest: is it anger pure and simple?

Q1: Have we taken part in protests, student demos, anti-hunt protests, extinction rebellion or others? Do we feel we achieved anything by our actions? Have we changed our position on any of the beliefs we held?

The Tolpuddle Martyrs (1834)
Six agricultural labourers from Tolpuddle wanted to resist repeated wage cuts, which had left farm workers struggling to feed their families. They formed a friendly society (the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers) to bargain collectively for fair pay. They swore an oath of secrecy when joining, which was used against them under an obscure 1797 law on unlawful oaths. They were convicted and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. Mass protest followed, including a march of tens of thousands in London and a petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures. The sentences were remitted and all six were pardoned and returned. Trade unions were legalised more fully in later decades, and the TUC holds an annual Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival in Dorset each July.

Q2: Did the Tolpuddle Martyrs succeed because people thought their cause was just, or because they thought they thought they might also benefit from any outcome of the protest?

John Locke
It might be useful to look at the thoughts of philosophers. Here's a well-known line from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), on the purpose of law and liberty:
"Where there is no law, there is no freedom."
Locke's reasoning is that law, properly understood, protects people from arbitrary power rather than restricting them. That ties directly to his argument that a government which persistently violates people's rights forfeits its legitimacy, which is why he's often cited in discussions of the right to resist.
Here is the passage from Chapter 19, "Of the Dissolution of Government," §222 of Locke's Second Treatise of Government:
"Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence."
A second passage, from §225, speaks to why people rise up:
"But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves."
How to use them:

• §222 gives Locke's core argument: government exists by consent to protect people's rights, and a government that attacks those rights loses its claim to obedience.
• §225 shows that Locke saw resistance as a response to a pattern of abuse, not a single grievance. That "long train of abuses" language later echoed in the American Declaration of Independence.

Q3: Could it be argued that the French government lost its legitimate right to govern when it didn’t provide adequate school conditions? The rights of the pupils to a good education have been confiscated by the government?

Q4: What are the different forms of protest? Perhaps we can go through some recent examples, from the so-called poll tax riots to Extinction Rebellion. Did they achieve what they wanted? Why do some protests fail and others work?

Q5: Is there a danger that protest simply antagonises? I feel that a number of protests may have both antagonised and given a cause a negative effect.

What should the limits of protest be?
John Hume organised peaceful protests against the protestant regime in Northern Ireland. He was well respected for doing so, but it seems that the UK government was only brought to the negotiating table when the IRA brought violence to the mainland.

Q6: Did the government do wrong to “reward” violence? Should all protests be within the law?

A Duty, Not Just a Right, To Resist
Candice Delmas (A Duty to Resist, 2018) argues that citizens in unjust or imperfect states may have a positive duty to resist injustice, in part because of duties of justice we owe each other that don’t depend on the state’s legitimacy. Tommie Shelby (no, not the one from Peaky Blinders, but the philosopher) has examined the ethics of dissent and resistance against structural racial injustice, and how protest relates to our obligations to fellow citizens.

Q6: There’s an obvious problem with this though: we all have different moral standpoints, so what makes one person’s protest right? It almost gives us a right to protest about anything, doesn’t it, because morals are difficult to define, and we are all outraged about different things, but it doesn’t make us right about them?

Current Restrictions
The police have recently been given various extra powers, and they only seem to escalate. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 says senior police must now take into account any relevant cumulative disruption when deciding whether to restrict a march or rally under sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. That includes disruption caused by previous protests, whoever organised them. It also introduces a new offence of concealing your identity in police-designated areas around protests.

Q7: What do we think of the restrictions used by the current government on proscribed groups?

Q8: To circle back to my question at the start, do we tend to protest out of anger? Or are we really trying to change something?

Q9: How can we best get what we want?