Pussy Gaol-Or Not

I don't hold any brief for Putin who appears to have dragged Russia back to its old Soviet ways in some respects but on the issue of public protest I think he has got it right.Many people in the West make the common mistake of conflating freedom of speech with the right to express it any place they choose be it a church or so- called public space, the latter of course being any oxymoron of which more later.Your right to express your views does not give you licence to come on to my property uninvited and express them there.So it is with the girl punk group Pussy Riot who made their protest in a church violating its laws and rules in a crude egregious and inapropriate way.The sentence they got was of course draconian and no doubt politically motivated but the fact remains they had no right to stage their protest where they did.

Here we get to the crux of the matter (pardon the pun) for it is on the issue of'public spaces' and the inherent ambiguity of the concept that so much mischief is made for the conflict of interests it throws up is insoluble because all the while it occupies this indeterminate status of no man's land the public space becomes a battleground for contending protest groups whose conflicting demands cannot be resolved.

This dilemna can only be resolved by two means,namely the Putin way of banning political protest in public across the board or privatising all public space leaving it for the owners of the land to determine who can and cannot protest on it which of course is the resolution I favour.All the while we have public space the right solution is to ban all protests there.