The street is tyrannised and conquered by the automobile, whose pollution of the body politic is much more lethal than the exhortations of even the most misguided street “lecturer” who ever threatened the Queen’s peace.The traffic of the mind that took place on numberless street corners has been supplanted, squeezed out of existence by the upholstered traffic of impervious people in cocooned and carcinogenic pods, who watch Friends and Neighbours but do not know who lives next door.”Reclaim the streets”, of course, valiantly embraces this tradition in defiance of the “arrogant petty tyranny” as embodied in the Criminal Justice Act, and the neutering of public gatherings. None the less, it requires a considerable leap of the imagination to visualise London as it was between the wars, in the days of the great anarchist speaker, Bonar Thompson, Sean O’Casey’s protege.These were the venues available for an itinerant speaker, such as Bonar Thompson: Highbury Corner, Finsbury Park, Brockwell Park, Victoria Park, Peckham Rye, Clapham Common, Parliament Hill Fields, Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead; the World’s End, Chelsea; Jolly Butcher’s Hill, Wood Green; Beresford Square, Woolwich; Golden Square, Soho; Catherine Street, Croydon; and Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road, in addition to Tower Hill and Marble Arch. There were legions more throughout the country: the Bull Ring in Birmingham, Glasgow Green, Bigg Market in Newcastle, to name but a few.Michael Foot declared himself an “addict” of Bonar Thompson, and “in the midst of the strident ideological confusions which abounded in the 1930s,” he came to believe that “Bonar Thompson’s scepticism was, I suppose, the sanest thing in the land”.Thompson’s pacifist war cry was: “Half the misery in the world is caused by ignorance. The other half is caused by knowledge.” He was a fierce opponent of militarism and would say, with provocative relish, immediately after the First World War: “When a monarch, or president, a premier or other national leader announces that he will fight to the death, he is generally in dead earnest.

He is referring, of course, not to his own death, but yours.”Donald Soper, still speaking at the age of 94, took up the pacifist cudgels in the Second World War, courageously enduring the bear-baiting of uniformed soldiers on leave. (On one occasion, in mid-sentence, the Bible was blown out of his hand by the blast from an incendiary bomb.)Coleman conveys a sense that these men and women, rather than just blowing in the wind, were fine-tuning the cogs and balances of social cohesion – and in the majority of cases they were doing it for free (unlike the grasping TV gurus and guru-ettes of push-button la-la-land). His freelance orators revitalised the Zeitgeist with their insights – they were often martyred for so doing – and because what they were saying was spontaneous and impassioned, it remained in the mind for far, far longer, giving the audience the feeling that they were present at a unique and unrepeatable event. They couldn’t catch it again on video.Hyde Park was, and is, man speaking in tongues, speaking in the wilderness; the Sermon on the Mount, the trickster, the fanatic, the holy fool. By contrast the Palace of Westminster is the democratic Vatican. Both strands are of equal importance but there have been 18 years of viral attack on the communities. All hands are required on deck.Dr Stephen Coleman is the director of the Hansard Scholars programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Not uninfluenced by his own background as a long-term observer of Hyde Park in action, he is now instrumental, with others, in bringing “armchair mavericks and eccentric ideologues”, and anyone else who cares to participate, out into the open through “UK Citizens On-Line Democracy” ( http:// www.democracy .uk), which is, in effect, a virtual People’s Parliament, where the rough and tumble of the hustings can be incarnated in cyberspace, and where those old, urgent voices long stilled by vehicle traffic, may be heard once more on the information superhighway – a virtual parliament, which could, if accessible enough, turn into an ongoing deliberative democracy broadening “public space” to nigh-on infinite proportions.Elitists and dyed-in-the-wool Luddites alike will be aghast; but, if nothing else, the great Web differs from Cobbett’s great Wen in that it remains mercifully, anarchically, and perhaps even utopianly unresponsive to the devilish talons of the media moguls who have all been obliged to retreat from cyberspace, their greedy claws blunted by frustration.’Stilled Tongues: from soapbox to soundbite’ by Stephen Coleman (Porcupine Press, pounds 8.95).. It is about 5am, on Tuesday I have woken up early, for some inexplicable reason But I never wake up early. So why have I woken up early on 6 May at 5am?

No matter.
To get myself back to sleep, I try to think of something to worry about, and for some reason I think of my son’s project at school This term his class is doing “rivers” as their project. They are learning all they can about rivers, and how these vast bodies of water begin life as small springs in the mountains and end up as major sources of the salaries of directors of water companies …As we live beside a River Avon, I feel my nine-year-old may already know something about rivers, so I asked him the other day what he knew about the River Avon.He said he knew that Avon was the Welsh word for river, and that River Avon just means “River River”, which was pretty impressive, until I realised that he got this from me and that it is the only thing he knows about the River Avon, so I have tried to increase his river knowledge by taking him to the Claverton Pumping Station.

This is an installation on the Avon near Bath which pumps water 40 feet up into the Kennet and Avon Canal from the River Avon, and the extraordinary thing about the pumping station is that it uses only the force of the river to drive the pump. No other motive power – no engine, no fuel – was ever envisaged, apart from the huge water mill-wheel which to this day can be driven by the weight of water to fill the canal.It is a wonderful sight.Even my son was quite impressed by the size of the wheel, though rather more impressed by the range of souvenirs and sweets on sale.It is at this point that a cockerel crows very close by. This explains why I have woken up, and started worrying about rivers. I have been woken by the cockerel.But this is strange in itself, as there is no cockerel living within a mile of our home, so I go to the window to look out and to my amazement there is a jug of milk on the window sill covered in snow.In a flash I wake up I am not at home at all. I am staying at the West Arms at Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog in North Wales, where we have gone on Bank Holiday Monday to visit my step-mother. There is a jug of milk on the window sill because my wife likes to keep some fresh milk cool for the morning cup of tea and had put it out the night before. The milk is covered with snow because it is snowing hard.We have also come here – clever, this – to visit the nearby Pistyll Rhaiadr, which is the tallest waterfall in Britain.Why is this clever?Because my son is doing a project on rivers.Meanwhile, it is snowing thickly On 6 May 1997, at 6am.