‘A Most Felicitous Foray’

Dean Juniper shows the power of a ‘green’ Victorian pressure group in action.

It’s tempting to believe that the fully-fashioned pressure group – equipped with all the apparatus of modern communications, highly mobile, media and judiciary exploitative, capable of rapid descent on targets, ready to act directly, and, if necessary, to use violence – is a uniquely modern invention, a pristine manifestation of our own times. But to believe that would be to ignore the activities of some of the best organised pressure groups of the Victorian era and earlier, whose initiatives and actions brought variable results, but which could produce real legislative and social change.

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