As campaigners bombard the Department of Transport with a barrage of paper planes in protest against plans to continue to expand our airports, the Guardian brings you a fairly random list of our top 10 campaign stunts.
Before we begin, let's quickly define "stunt"? According to the Oxford Concise dictionary a stunt is "something unusual done to attract attention". And the reason that campaigners come up with daft stunts is to attract attention to their cause, but it's true that they can often appear to be attracting attention to themselves. The best stunts get a tonne of attention, but, it must be admitted, not all of them have the desired effect.
1) Dow Chemical promises to clean up Bhopal
It's a controversial stunt which still divides opinion. When a member of the Yes Men, a group of US culture jammers , managed to somehow wangle an appearance on BBC news posing as a spokesman for Dow Chemical in 2004, he shocked the world by promising to liquidate Union Carbide, the company responsible for the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, which has never been cleaned up, and finally right the situation. Hours later a real representative from Dow Chemical went on air to deny the announcement of a clean-up was true.
2) Swampy
When pictures of a teenager in tunnels beneath a proposed new road in Devon were published in the papers in 1996, for some reason Swampy, as he was nicknamed, became a national star. He even appeared on Have I got News for You. Soon after that Swampy vanished from the public eye.
3) Letting off rape alarms
Plane Stupid campaigners have shown repeatedly that they're up for it: one of their most ingenious stunts took place shortly before they officially became Plane Stupid, when they burst into an aviation conference and let off rape alarms attached to helium balloons. The scene that followed can fairly easily be imagined.
4) Stop the Seventy
Peter Hain was among the protesters who led a spirited action against the South African rugby tour in 1970. They threw themselves on to pitches, chained themselves to goal posts and generally made a nuisance of themselves. As a result the planned South African cricket tour was cancelled, and another bar of pressure was added against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
5) Spiderman scales a crane at Tower Bridge
One of the most inventive stunt groups of recent years was Fathers 4 Justice. You may say what you like about their aims, and their personal histories: they were inventive as hell, and they made non-stop headlines.
6) Stop nuclear testing
Greenpeace's first expedition was not to save whales but to prevent nuclear testing: they set off in a leaky old boat up the Alaskan coast to try to stop the testing. The test went ahead, but during the journey the founding fathers of Greenpeace glimpsed their next mission: to save the whale. Brave and bonkers at the same time.
7) Throwing dollars at the New York Stock Exchange
In 1967, as part of his ongoing protests against life, the universe and everything, Abbie Hoffman and his followers threw money (mostly fake) into the pit of the New York Stock Exchange. The traders went beserk: dignity was not preserved.
8) Arrested while reading out dead soldiers names
In October 2005 a vegan cook called Maya Evans was arrested for standing on the cenotaph in London and reading out a list of the soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. She was found guilty of breaching section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, highlighting the absurdity of the act.
9) Child trafficking
In 1885 the legendary eccentric newspaper editor William Stead was so devastated by an encounter with a four and a half year old child who had been sold into a brothel and repeatedly raped that he vowed to "turn my paper into a tub! I'll turn stump orator! I'll damn and damn and damn!" He went as far as buying a child himself, and then exposed the child trafficking trade in the Pall Mall Gazette. He was sent to prison, but managed to force a change in the law.
10) Train hijacking
When members of the climate camp planning group calmly stopped a train delivering coal to Drax power station last month and then swarmed aboard, it was certainly one of the most audacious stunts pulled so far in Britain. They were taken off the train and arrested, but they had made their point with good effect.
