We’re damned good at protest,” says the man from Greenpeace, relishing his memory of storming the Cabinet Office disguised as a builder. “I’d wager we’re second only to the French.” Ben Stewart is pleased that the environmental activists forced the Government to apologise for refurbishing its office with pound;400,000-worth of illegal wood from an ancient African forest. Direct action scores another victory. But his celebratory tone vanishes when he talks of the “contrarians”: “Those are the people who wag their finger and say ‘the hole in the ozone layer is closing, so what are you making all that fuss about?’ Why can’t they see that the hole is closing, because we made a fuss.”

The British have a history of making a fuss. The peasants rose up in 1381 against repressive poll taxes, just as there was a popular protest in 1990 against Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s community charge.

Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s painful steps towards abolishing the Lords would be regarded as 350 years too late by John Lilburne, persecuted leader of the republican Levellers. He wanted democracy. “I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to lead as the greatest he... Every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government,” as a fellow Leveller put it.

Eleven people died in pursuit of such a life at Peterloo in 1819, when panicking Manchester authorities sent in the troops to disperse a crowd of 60,000. The Chartists carried the democratic flame through the 1840s with mass petitions and peaceful protest. Then came the spat-on suffragettes - pioneers of direct action and proof of the power of chaining oneself to something. The roll-call of dissent continues: trade unions, Jarrow marches, the peace movement, the anti-Nazi league, anti-apartheid, anti-roads, pro-hunting, anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation; town and country, left and right, old and young - they have all waved their placards. The country’s history is steeped in protest and its repression.

The citizens of Britain can boast that they have the vote, that poll tax has been replaced by council tax, and feel righteous that Third World debt is now a worldwide issue. Yet, despite all that dissent has won them, many are still reluctant to look nasty, noisy protest in the face and say, “yes, that was what swung it”.

“We do not celebrate our radical past,” says George McKay, professor of cultural studies at the University of Central Lancashire. “Those radical strands in our history get lost, the moments are not cherished. The British establishment does not want to talk about a revolution - we talk about a civil war. Events such as the 1926 General Strike get forgotten.”

Stewart agrees: “Too often, too many people assume that basic rights, such as the vote, have always existed. We should appreciate more the efforts and sacrifices that determined people have made to win change we all benefit from.”

Why are the British ambivalent about protest? Do they prefer to be regarded as respectable and law-abiding, good at minding their own small businesses?

Professor McKay talks of the “traditional view of British reserve. We work through the system, proud to have a long-standing democratic tradition. We know how to write letters”.

Elizabeth Frazer, reader in politics at New College, Oxford and author of papers on political education says: “There is an aspect of British political culture, as opposed to say French or Italian, which emphasises peaceful, bit-by-bit reformist progress.

“The United States is founded on wars of independence and revolution. France is founded on revolution. Italy is founded on a nationalistic unificatory struggle. The idea of there being a moment of violence after which you get a political settlement is very high up in their history. It is not in ours, though some historians would argue that it has been hidden. There have been notes of violence, but we don’t accept them.”

In France, protest is respected in a way that it isn’t in Britain. The student demonstrations of 1968 are the classic example of French street power. Peter Lennon, then the Guardian’s correspondent in Paris, witnessed them, and a similar upsurge in April 2000 against the political rise of right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Lennon wrote of the anti-Le Pen students’ “energy, fearlessness and political recklessness” that “has long been both an exhilarating and a disconcerting element in French politics”. And he added: “There is a component in French student mentality - largely lacking in British students - which gives them the ability to recognise instantly the connection between a political development and the direct effect on their lives. This enables them to quite unselfconsciously, take to the streets to ‘defend the institutions and halt fascism’. They might find politicians despicable, but they are not paralysed by a posture of finding political issues ‘boring’.”

Perversely, the British sometimes turn the fact that they are able to protest against themselves. Dr Frazer says: “Demonstrators are told ‘you’re lucky that you’re allowed to get away with this. You should be grateful that you don’t live in Iraq or in Stalin’s Russia.’ The implication is that you should go home and shut up.”

Professor McKay, author of DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain (Verso Books, pound;11), is tracing the history of those who have refused to shut up. He calls it the tradition of “alternative Englishness”, one which celebrates protest as a constant feature of national identity. Even the post-Thatcher, supposedly post-ideological Nineties were really a decade of protest, he says, moving from anti-car to anti-capitalism, with a detour courtesy of the pro-car, cut-the-fuel-tax lobby.

Take the campaign against the Newbury bypass, Berkshire, in the Nineties. Britain’s biggest anti-roads movement took in every form of protest, from mass letter-writing and European lobbying to non-violent direct action and criminal damage.

Newbury was only eight miles from Greenham Common - the location of the Women’s Peace Camp set up in 1981 by protestors against the decision to site cruise nuclear missiles at the air base there, “so you have a connection”, says Professor McKay. “Some of the Greenham Common veterans were helping with the road protest, because they saw links with green issues, and ownership of the land. So you have the 1990s road protest movement moving forward, into anti-globalisation, and backwards into the peace movement, and so on.”

Newbury also saw the rise of eco-warrior Daniel Hooper, aka “Swampy”, the 22-year-old who had to be forcibly uprooted from a warren of tunnels dug by protestors. British youth may lack some of the political savoir faire of the French, but Swampy’s tactics strike a chord. Professor Ruth Lister, of Loughborough University, found that only three 18 to 24-year-olds of the 110 she surveyed last year had voted in the General Election. By contrast, three-fifths had been involved in some sort of “informal” political action, anything from organising a petition, to sit-ins for safer roads.

In Germany the picture is similar, while in Finland “their readiness for political protest and unconventional expression has grown. Young people are clearly more prepared for radical forms of action - even illegal demonstrations - than the mythical young people of the 1960s,” according to Finnish researcher Kari Paakkunainen.

The British Government says it is desperately concerned about political apathy, particularly among the young, yet its new citizenship curriculum does not address the politics of protest or the value of so-called dissident citizenship. The curriculum talks, mealy-mouthed, of “responsible action”; of maybe organising a “local meeting”. It wants “active citizens” who help out in the community. Angry ones are not discussed.

The citizenship curriculum was based largely on a report by Professor Bernard Crick, the man now engaged by the Home Secretary to draw up “Britishness” tests for immigrants. “The Crick Report stopped very short of saying that it is a good thing for people to demonstrate and march,” says Dr Frazer. “The idea of activism is couched in a nice ambiguous way, so it can be read as being safe and law-abiding. If citizenship were really done properly you would be asking people to be critical and get to the boundaries.” In the end, she says, it will be down to individual teachers to grasp or avoid the political nettle, to consider whether the best citizens are stroppy or acquiescent.

Even in France political education or “civics” does not approach these boundaries. It is seen as peddling the dominant ideology, says Dr Frazer, promoting the idea that we live in a harmonious society and not addressing the aspects of politics that are uncomfortable and conflictive.

Not addressing tricky issues can, however, get politicians into trouble, as Tony Blair discovered when he refused to recall Members of Parliament to discuss going to war with Iraq. A similar “democratic deficit” was grudgingly acknowledged by European Commission president Romano Prodi in the aftermath of the antiglobalisation protests at the G8 summit in Genoa last year. Legislation also increases this deficit. In Britain, people’s options for “legitimate” protest have declined as a result of the “war on terror”, increased powers of surveillance, and measures such as the 1986 Public Order Act, brought in after the Miners’ Strike.

However, this doesn’t stop them protesting. Professor McKay says: “In the past three to four years we have suddenly, massively - almost in spite of the old, established radical left - been talking about anti-capitalism and antiglobalisation again. A lot of the energy for that came from young people around the globe.”

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace puts it another way. “We haven’t had our 1968 revolution - yet.”