It seems appropriate right now to a share a few words about the USA’s Henry David Thoreau (born, rather confusingly, David Henry Thoreau).

There are two reasons why. The first is a personal one: the blighter has been following me.

Over the weekend, while aglow with lurgey and temporarily wife-less, I watched two movies in one day: All that Heaven Allows (which I’d never before seen) and Election (which I’d not viewed since its cinema release in 1999). A couple of days later, I read a Sherlock Holmes tale, The Noble Bachelor.

By coincidence, the story and both flicks feature characters quoting the work of Thoreau, who was a 19th century author, poet, historian, naturalist, philosopher and neighbour of transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, among other things.

What makes Thoreau relevant here is that he was also a tax resister: he spent a night in stir in 1845 for refusing to pay six years-worth of poll tax. This delinquency was as a protest against the practice of slavery and the Mexican-American war – which were among the reasons why he penned one of his best-known essays, Civil Disobedience.

The work argues that governments – agents of corruption – repress people’s consciousnesses, the judgements of which are equal, if not superior, to those of political bodies. The writer urges his readers to be just in all things and not give their support to anything that is unjust.

This kind of thinking seems to me to not entirely separated from that of the protesters across the UK who last week voiced their displeasure with the tax avoidance behaviour of Vodafone.

I’m not saying they were right or wrong, only that I believe their consciousnesses were telling them their action was just. And I imagine Thoreau might've approved.

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