There’s been a lot of talk lately about angry mobs. When Jan Moir wrote a viciously homophobic attack on the recently deceased singer Stephen Gately and his grieving friends and family, she was confronted by an angry mob. When ace lawyers Carter-Fuck attempted to gag the Guardian’s reporting of a parliamentary question, the censored information was carried along the information super-highway on virtual placards by an angry mob. When Jonathon Ross and Russell Brand committed the crime of offending a man famous for offending the Spanish, the Daily Mail acted as the seed around which an angry mob crystallized.

Like it or not, angry mobs are a feature of democracy, which is after all a sort of mob rule. But do angry mobs get a bad name?

The phrase ‘angry mob’ is in itself a loaded term constructed from two negative words, carrying more baggage than the terminal of a small regional airport. It is a pejorative political label, and its pattern of usage is similar to the archetypal example of such a label: ‘terrorist’. The definition of terrorism depends overwhelmingly on which side of a particular debate or conflict you happen to be on; one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One man’s angry mob is another man’s legitimate protest.

The angry mob is also undeniably effective. As a society, our relationship with angry mobs is very much like our relationship with vibrators – we look down on them, we sneer and call them uncouth or vulgar, but the fact of the matter is that they get the job done.

And there’s nothing wrong with a bit of good old-fashioned anger. There are many things we should be angry about – legal systems undermining democracy, hate speech in the national press, climate change, quackery, it is right to be pissed off by bad things. As Rudyard Kipling famously observed in his poem If:

"If you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs, then perhaps you have misunderstood the situation." (D.K. Moran)

So I put it to you that an angry mob is not a bad thing. It is an effective tool of democracy, as vital and rightfully placed in society as, say, the speeches of Cicero. The problems start when outrage begins to undermine rationality. A protest can be well-meaning, and righteous, but still deeply irrational and misguided.

It was right, for example, that Jan Moir’s disgusting smear provoked outrage; however the reaction was unpredictable and had no logic behind it. The Daily Mail print bigotry on a daily basis and a quick search in their archives for terms like ‘Muslim’, ‘homosexual’ or a look at their general treatment of women brings up examples far worse than Jan Moir’s piece, yet it was just that one article that provoked outrage; a rage which burned so violently out of control that idiots posted Moir’s home address online. Why was there no similar reaction to the likes of Melanie Phillips?

Similarly, Trafigura saw a reaction that was to some extent a bit harsh on Carter-Ruck. The job of any lawyer is to offer their clients the best advice they can under the law. Carter-Ruck royally screwed up in this regard, and so their clients have a lot to be unhappy about. But the target of public wrath shouldn’t be a law firm acting within the law, but the law itself; a law enabled by the very parliament It was "gagging".

The public have an in-built desire to construct simple narratives around complex stories, and Carter-Ruck were, like Moir, an easy villain. They were effigies, and they burned, and we were happy for a time; but the wider issues – bad law and bigoted newspaper columnists – remained untouched by the overnight storm.

We've seen the angry mob applied to science in recent days by Professor David Nutt, constructively 'sacked' for publicly contradicting and undermining the government's rabidly-whipped line on drug classification. It's impossible to prove intent in this sort of instance, but we know that Nutt jumped before he was pushed, and either deliberately or otherwise he called upon the angry mob to support him, whipping up a frenzy of media activity in a very short space of time.

What effect will David Nutt's resignation have on science-based policy? Some have said that the timing of his resignation could allow drug policy to become an election issue, but given that the two main parties have the same line on drugs, this is vanishingly unlikely. Whoever wins the election, policy will continue down the same path. Even if the Lib Dems hold the balance of power in a coalition (which would likely precipitate a second election next year anyway), they won't be able to get reform past the combined opposition of the two big parties.

Angry mobs and lobbying are part of the democratic process, and people arguing for evidence-based policy should be willing to get their hands dirty embracing these tactics if they really want to effect change. They are another tool for the arsenal, and an angry mob can sear a message onto the public consciousness better than a thousand New Scientist editorials.

On the other hand, these tactics can be ineffective, or backfire spectacularly. It's one thing to make people angry, but quite another to keep them on message and under control (Ed: 'control# was the wrong word here, my point is that once you've instigated a mob, you can't always continue to influence it).

This isn't important when your message consists of blunt, reactionary points like "kick the darkies out", but for scientists trying to communicate more subtle messages about how irrationally we deal with relative risk in society that job becomes orders of magnitude harder. Melanie Phillips' dismissal of "Professor Nutty" is a simpler meme for people to consume and spread than "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that."

This is the point where I should conclude the post with my opinions on how I think science activism needs to progress, but the truth is I haven't got the answers beyond saying the obvious; that we need to get smarter and more effective at pushing scientific evidence into the public consciousness in key policy areas. If you have something better, you know where the comment forms are.

And you can join myself, Dr. Petra Boynton, Gimpy, and others at a special event in Westminster on November 24th, for a panel discussion/debate on this very subject. Hopefully I'll see you there!