Across the Red Line

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Factual: Politics

Anne McElvoy invites figures on opposed sides of a political issue to listen to each other

Anne McElvoy, working with conflict resolution experts Gabrielle Rifkind and Louisa Weinstein, invites two figures on opposing sides of an issue to listen to each other.

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Across the Red Line: It can be necessary to be a public nuisance in pursuit of a higher cause

It can be necessary to be a public nuisance in pursuit of a higher cause

BBC Radio 4 - Across the Red Line, It can be necessary to be a public nuisance in pursuit of a higher cause

Anne McElvoy and resolution expert Gabrielle Rifkind ask Peter Tatchell and Bruce Anderson to test their differences over public nuisance demonstrations.

A steady flow of demonstrations over climate change inaction and continued dependence on fossil fuels have resulted in public nuisance offences.  Demonstrations that cause public nuisance are nothing new.  But do they work, and can they ever be justified in the name of a higher cause? , Anne brings two powerful debaters together from either side of the red line. On one hand Peter Tatchell, while no advocate of causing nuisance for nuisance sake, argues that history is littered with demonstrations that disrupted, and with that were effective in forcing attention on a cause.  By contrast writer Bruce Anderson, who has youthful experience of confrontational demonstration is adamant that they invariably damage the cause they espouse and at worse can destabilise democratic systems.  

With the help of conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rifkind, Anne invites both men to try and explore their differences by listening carefully to the arguments and personal origins of those arguments.

Producer:  Hatty Nash

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Across the Red Line

It can be necessary to be a public nuisance in pursuit of a higher cause

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