A COMMON response to those protesting is to dismiss it is a waste of time — “the government doesn’t listen” or “things never change,” opine the naysayers. Frustratingly, this argument is sometimes even made by those doing the protesting themselves.

On the 10th anniversary of the huge February 15 2003 anti-Iraq War march, author Tariq Ali, who spoke at the rally in Hyde Park that day, said “It was a huge show of anger, but that’s about it. It left no lasting legacy.”

Leftists and activists working for progressive social change would be wise to steer clear of this kind of negativity and instead remember that actions and protests often have unexpected positive effects on other people and the wider world.

This rule very much applies to protests that seem like a failure at the time.

For example, in the early 1960s, Lisa Peattie, a young US widow, took two of her children to a vigil in front of the White House to protest against nuclear testing.

“The vigil was small, a hundred women at most”, Paul Loeb, a friend of Peattie’s, writes in his bestselling 1999 book The Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times. “Rain poured down. Lisa’s children were restless. Frustrated and soaked, the women joked about how President Kennedy was no doubt sitting inside drinking hot chocolate, warm, comfortable and not even looking at their signs.”

A few years later, Peattie attended another march in Washington DC about nuclear testing, this one significantly larger. One of the speakers that day was the famous paediatrician Benjamin Spock. “Spock described how he’d come to take a stand on the nuclear issue,” Loeb notes. “Because of his stature, his decision was immensely consequential and would pave the way for his equally important opposition to the Vietnam War.”