“Some may well find Brian Haw and his activities irritating, but being an irritant is a pretty fundamental part of our democracy.”

Brian Haw is an anti-Iraq War demonstrator and has been demonstrating outside the Houses of Parliament for the past couple of years.

The government passed a new piece of legislature recently in order to prevent people like Brian Haw from demonstrating within a designated distance from the Houses of Parliament.

The Courts had no choice but to find that Brian Haw had indeed broken the law (but only because the government had enacted that law to make his actions illegal) and so ordered him to move or be removed.

Shame, really. It made me feel better about the world everytime I passed Brian Haw on the bus while it went around the roundabout at the end of Westminster Bridge. It made me feel as if there were people out there who cared.

And it just doesn’t seem fair for laws to be enacted just to penalise people who were previously carrying out perfectly lawful acts. It’s like they could suddenly say all the pavements in the UK are now off-limits and we all have to walk on the roads.

I hate all this anti-terror legislation and its bastard children and grandchildren.

[update: Londonist has written a very funny entry on the Brian Haw eviction.]