A lot of the "well done, boys!" amateur rhetoric this morning (from, it has to be said, people who now seem to think it was an anti-Royalist protest with some other stuff on the side) runs on the belief that demonstrating anger through civil disobedience is the only way things get changed.

But it isn't any more, is it? The huge French protests of a few weeks ago over a change in the pension age? The proposal went into law unchanged. London's last riots? The anti-capitalism protests. The poll tax riots? Mass non-payment campaigns had more effect on the eventual scrapping, and that reversal led to the VAT increase to 17.5% and, some say, the Tory 1992 election win (because thousands of protestors refused to put themselves on the electoral register). Plus with the right wing press heads ever more right-wing plenty are looking for the Aunt Sally, hence today's front pages.