Sir Charles Walker’s milk protest

‘It is illegal to go outside without a reason the state deems ‘necessary’, and so wandering around with a pint of milk has gone from a mundane act to an act of dissent.’

Sometimes I feel reality has lost touch with me, and hearing Sir Charles Walker MP divert the parliamentary debate on foreign aid to declare that he was going to walk around for ten hours with a pint of milk, to protest nothing in particular, I felt this more than any other time in my life.

His speech was deeply bizarre, one of the strangest I think the commons has seen for a good while; but strangest of all is that his point, illustrated via the vehicle of milk, is a good one.

What will happen when the coronavirus legislation, that no MP actually voted for, runs out?

Will the Government attempt to renew it perpetually with one excuse after another, or will they finally relent and make the first step towards unmaking the dictatorship they have instituted in this country over the last year?

Somehow, I think the tousled haired tyrant in Downing Street will not want to relinquish the grip his grubby claws have over our daily lives and freedoms. The anti-protest bill, or Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill as they call it, is an obvious example of the Government doubling down and expanding on their ability to quash dissent. Of course, Sir Charles’s protest has a point in that it has been for a long while illegal to go outside without a reason that the state deems ‘necessary’, and so wandering around with a pint of milk has gone from a mundane act to an act of dissent.

Of course, I could be reading too much into this milk protest, it could simply be an event done to confuse us on purpose. Personally, I find great comedy in doing things which are both inexplicable and deeply baffling to those around me; I suppose it is the act of creating an in-joke that only you understand. But in reality I think it is an act, a rather quaint one maybe, of defiance against the stifling of our freedom and the caging of us as a people. Indeed, I believe that we have for too long been led down drooling into the catacombs of our own prison, and so I welcome any act that could contribute to clawing our way to freedom.