Naked fury

Nude protests are catching on. Those intrepid souls who don't mind baring all their physical imperfect-ions are doing so to oppose a wide range of injustices.

The latest campaigners to shed their clothes are those angered by high apartment rents in Berlin. They visit apartments on offer, strip off and dance.

The protests are organised by a group called Hedonist International, which has also stormed a neo-Nazi pub.

Some estate agents called the police while others were more laid-back and laughed it off as a harmless amusement. But Berlin's socialist mayor was rattled enough to announce rent-capping in newly-gentrified districts.

There have been many other nude protests - against the fur trade in Dublin and Barcelona, office dress codes and airport full-body scanners in Berlin, political reforms in Mexico City, animal cruelty in Sydney, bullfighting in Pamplona and tree felling in Los Angeles.

Naked campaigning isn't favoured in Britain though. I guess people are either too embarrassed by their wobbly bits, they don't think anyone will take any notice (except dirty old men), or they don't want to die of frostbite.

I wouldn't mind stripping off myself if the cause was right. I couldn't care less about my wobbly bits, we all succumb to gravity sooner or later. I stripped off often enough in front of my fellow pupils at boarding school to lose any sense of awkwardness.

Maybe the traditional British stiff upper lip is more than a match for mass nudity. We'd just survey a line of bare buttocks while sipping our Starbucks latté and mutter casually "Some rather enticing curves. Work-outs or anorexia, I wonder?"

Pic: Protest against the fur trade in Barcelona. The placard reads: "How many lives for a coat?" Couldn't find a decent pic of the apartment protest.

Challenge the bullies

I could have reacted in different ways to being bullied at school - getting my revenge by turning into a bully myself or doing my best to protect other victims.

It never occurred to me at all to put on the bully's hat and make someone else's life wretched, make them suffer the same way I had to. I don't know how people can harden themselves like that, freeze their emotions and become tormentors in turn.

No, in my case it bred a life-long sympathy for victims, not just of bullying but of any misery or hardship inflicted on the innocent by abusers of power everywhere. Knowing what it's like to be belittled and humiliated, knowing how much psychic damage that can do, I wanted to defend others in the same trap.

As a journalist in my younger days, I was always keen to write about people in rotten circumstances, neglected by officialdom or their own families. I exposed decrepit housing, health service cock-ups, lonely old people, unemployed youngsters, loan sharks. Hopefully I righted a few wrongs and freed a few people from anxiety and fear.

Later I took part in political campaigns to support women, homosexuals, council tenants and access to abortion. I joined in protests against the Vietnam War, poll tax and the National Front. It felt good to stand up and be counted, to be voicing my anger with hundreds of others rather than sitting at home shrugging my shoulders and saying "Well, that's the way of the world."

For five years I was a trade union rep, rallying my workmates when the management was up to something sneaky - trying to freeze wages, extend working hours or cut holiday leave. We'd dig our heels in and say a collective no to their relentless asset-sweating. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost, but I felt ecstatic those times when the bosses retreated.

If enough people stand up to the bullies, they can always be defeated. But it's easy to be intimidated by the sheer ruthlessness of those who regard treating other people badly as the natural order. If you're picked on time and again, it's hard to fight back, especially if you're left to flounder by those who could help. So don't be shy - throw someone a lifebelt.