Demos did more harm than good
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• Last autumn's fuel protests had "evil" consequences that far outweighed the high prices that triggered them, two legal experts have claimed.
Dr Roger Geary and Chantel Patel looked at whether the protests amounted to civil disobedience or self-interest, comparing the protests with those mounted by civil rights champions Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
The law lecturers from Swansea Institute of Higher Education say Ghardi and Luther King broke the law to benefit others.
"The petrol protest, in sharp contrast, appears to have been motivated primarily by pure economic self-interest," they say in the Contemporary Review journal.
They conclude that the
protest was unjustified "because the evil caused by the protest appears to outweigh heavily the supposed evil of the relatively high price of petrol".