The climate-change protesters arrested yesterday join an honourable line of middle-class activists. Once again it is students and young professionals who disrupt the peace to make a point.

Plane Stupid chose a cold black night to brave sub-zero temperatures - well padded with Barbours and good strong boots - additionally warmed by the fervour of their conviction that they were in the right. They were there, as they proclaimed, to undo the wrong done by their parents' generation.

Those of us who recall the early Aldermaston rallies (I was a schoolgirl in my new second-hand duffel coat on a chilly Easter Day in 1963) remember that the leaders were eminently respectable: Canon Collins, Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot, Sir Julian Huxley, J.B.Priestley, the Bishop of Chichester, A.J.P.Taylor: what the novelist Rose Macaulay, herself a member, called “the stage army of the good”.

The first meetings of the embryonic National Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took place at a long pine table in Well Road, Hampstead. A sociological analysis of the CND members (made in 1968) revealed that they “came mainly from the more creative and socially oriented professions and that they were more interested in the humanities than in commerce”. Well, no surprise there.

Whenever the voice of reason strives to make a point by disruption, you will find students, lecturers, teachers and actors. At Grosvenor Square and Sizewell B, at Greenham Common and the Newbury bypass demos, there they were again. Greenpeace is an overwhelmingly middle-class enterprise.

Have you been to a public meeting in your area recently? Anyone who takes a stand against the local council - for example by suggesting a sensible use for existing buildings rather then knocking them down and throwing up costly excrescences - will know the sensation. You look around in astonishment. The neighbourhood may appear, by day, to be populated by derelicts and the ubiquitous underclass, but hold a public meeting in the evening and out come the professional voices, the articulate debaters and the unmistakable middle-class types of the kind drawn by Posy Simmonds.

Last year I found myself lying down in the road in Little Green Street, Kentish Town, a cobbled Georgian lane, in front of a seven-and-a-half -tonne Ford Cargo truck driven by the actor Tom Conti. He lent his services to residents protesting against Camden Council's mad plans to use the lane as a run-through to the wasteland where they wanted to build a gated development of luxury flats, houses and underground car parks.

Architects, professors, historians, writers, actors and (naturally) students made up the protest lobby. They won - the plans were shelved. Another victory for environment over commerce.

As the great environmental guru Satish Kumar says: “I am all for Nimbyism. If everyone said ‘Not in my back yard', no back yards would be spoiled.”

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