Have you ever considered living in a protest camp? There are several of them around, although Mainshill, the anti-coal camp up in Scotland, is currently being evicted by bailiffs. 
 
There’s a camp which has been running outside Faslane, the nuclear submarine port in northernmost Scotland, for several years. There are several occasional camps which pop up once a month outside some of the other military bases. There are camps which run for a weekend, or a week every year – you know Climate Camp, obviously, but there’s also the Peace News Camp which has started up in the last year, there’s the Earth First! winter and summer gatherings, and there was – up until last summer – the Big Green Gathering.

No matter how enthusiastic you are about camping, you need to be particularly doughty to put up with the privations of life in a protest camp.

In fact the short ones are as much as most of us can take. No matter how enthusiastic you are about camping, you need to be particularly doughty to put up with the privations of life in a protest camp. It goes without saying that the toilets will be – at best – primitive. The food will probably be vegan and of, lets just say, variable quality (occasionally you’ll get a genius cooking but mostly it’s, um, not). Inflatable mattresses, hammocks, on the floor, in a tree, a proper bed; your sleeping options will be one of the above. And, as everyone I’ve ever spoken to admits, the company can at times get a little crazy. “Sometimes they’re the best places in the world. And sometimes it’s the seventh bloody circle of hell.”
 
Do they work as a form of protest? Well, 15 years ago the Battle of Newbury raged in Oxfordshire and protest camps were all the rage. That particular campaign was aimed at stopping a road being built through the beautiful countryside outside Newbury; it failed, but the government announced soon afterwards that the gigantic road building programme would be scaled down, and the Labour Party (then in opposition) promised to stop building roads altogether.
 
Since then the long-term camps have been less successful. Camp Bling, it’s true, managed to derail a road widening in Essex. But they don’t hit the headlines, they don’t generate the same kind of press. The fly-by-nights do better, the hit and run tactic used by Climate Camp.
 
The Mainshill camp has been there for several months. Did you know about it? It’s hard to win a campaign if no one knows you’re fighting it. Would you go and live in one? Maybe it’s time for a new kind of protest camp.

Image: Flickr user Gemma Freeman