According to a rather disturbing report in last week’s Observer, climate change protesters have been told they will have to pay for their own security at their march planned for next month. The Campaign against Climate Change (CACC) say London’s police and other authorities have told them they’ll need to hire a private security firm to oversee the protest.

The group says that this means that effectively they are being made to ‘pay to protest’.

About forty thousand people turned up for a similar march in London last September, and turnout at the Time to Act protest next month is expected to be much the same.

This demand highlights once more the fact that climate change protestors have become anathema to authorities and corporations in the western world. This was made shockingly clear by the 2013 report by the Center for Corporate Policy (CCP) in Washington which compiled evidence of how some of the world’s largest corporations work with private intelligence firms and even government intelligence agencies to spy on activists and undermine their causes.

The report was shocking in what it revealed about the collusion of corporations and state agencies in trying to infiltrate and destroy environmental or anti-big business movements. But even more shocking was the fact that most of the world’s media did not think this was a big story!

State intelligence agencies were co-operating with large corporations to silence activists -- often providing confidential personal information to facilitate their subversion of movements and intimidation of activists. This seemed a sinister practice but, apart from a few commentators, few journalists flagged it for what it was: an attack on democracy as well a criminal endeavour.

So is the money that big businesses or other powerful lobbies pump into crushing protest and discrediting protestors getting them the desired results? This is a question we need to think seriously about, because it certainly appears as if independent thought has been effectively neutralised -- not just in the media but in academia as well.

The funding of ‘think tanks’, and other programmes linked to journalism or academic research, is a case in point. These are set up to propagate particular interests and tend to operate in the guise of ‘independent research’. But those academics who are truly independent and intellectually honest will often find themselves quite marginalised if they don’t play ball with the funders and the patrons, the fat cats and the Hawks…

Money can not just obstruct (as with the climate change march), it can fabricate realities as well (as with ‘think tanks’ and patronising journalists). We need to be aware of the need to not take things merely at face value: to question sources and provenance and to try to find where the money trail leads to… and why.

Best wishes