IN GLASGOW and Edinburgh at the weekend, thousands rallied for Palestine and the cause of peace and justice in a far-off land.

The snow swirled in the howling wind as they marched through the streets, to supportive hoots from drivers and cheers from the determined shoppers who ignored the weather in an attempt to find Christmas presents in good time — some even joined the rally.

On social media, messages of support flooded in from those stranded by a Scottish transport system still coming to terms with the concept of winter after all these millennia.

From where I stood in Glasgow, it was hard not be a little inspired by the determination of people from all walks of life managing to set aside the myriad fractures of the Scottish left for a moment, for a cause, and for a people the so-called “great” powers of the West would see sacrificed on the altar of their own bigotry and liberal chauvinism.

As ever at such an event, the speakers list was long, but it didn’t lack in quality. Stirring speeches of trade union solidarity and experiences of the struggle thousands of miles away rang in the hall, and an address from former Scottish Labour leader calling for unilateral disarmament, calling out the cowardice of the Labour Home and Foreign Secretaries and the complicity of capitalism itself in the drive for war profits won plaudits from across the party divides.

Just imagine the impact that such a speech would have made from Bute House, or No 10. Some will argue that speeches are just speeches, marches are just marches; that they are without consequence in the great game of international affairs. As we hear from the Prime Minister whenever he can find and excuse to crowbar it in, the “politics of protest” is to be banished from the lexicon of power.

To desire such a thing is to believe that human society has reached its zenith, that there are no mountains left to conquer, no rights left to wrench from the powerful, no path to human dignity left untrod.

A few years back, when my daughter was starting at primary school, us parents and carers were invited in to hear about how certain things would be taught. We perched on those tiny chairs in the classroom, and some of us slipped for a moment back to our own early days of education.

When I heard the teacher talking about how the kids would learn about their rights and autonomy, I had a flashback of an otherwise great teacher dragging a friend by his ear down the corridor to the headie’s office.

Judging by the awkward fidgeting, I suppose I wasn’t the only one taking a wander down memory lane. If I’d been 10 years older, I’d have been witnessing a beating, and would probably have had a few myself.

We’re in more enlightened times now, though. Kids aren’t just spared the rod, but taught about their rights in resisting violence, enforced in the school yard, on the streets and all the way up to the UN itself.

It memorably inspired our then six-year-old to write a story about a mouse becoming secretary-general of the UN to stand up to the big cats…

This all ran through my mind on Sunday when I got an email from a comrade about a five-day hunger-strike protest taking place outside Holyrood.

In the message was a picture of a woman wrapped up for a Scottish winter, standing outside the Parliament with placards calling for an end to arming of Israel, listing the grim statistics of the slaughter of Palestinians that should haunt any human being with the merest shred of decency.

A video was included. I pressed play expecting to hear Sharyn Lock talk about the horrific death toll or the privations of the people trapped in Gaza, and she of course did all that. How could she not?

She did something else, too. She spoke of her recent visit to her child’s primary school, to talk about her experiences as a midwife volunteering in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.

Lock first visited Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement in 2002, and was shot with a fragmentation bullet — designed to shatter maximising the damage inside the human body — along with 10 others of her party by the Israeli military as they carried food, first-aid supplies and a banner along a road.

She, like her comrades, had been walking backwards with her hands up at the time of the shooting, having had their way blocked by an armoured personnel carrier.

Speaking to her, she was keen to be clear that this tale was one she told reluctantly, that she “didn’t want it becoming about me,” and while the horror of such an incident for her must surely be carried with her daily, she is of course absolutely right.

Recounting such a memory to young children might not meet with everyone’s approval, but children are far more capable than we give them credit for.

When she told the tale to the class, they immediately grasped the point, it seems.

Fresh from learning about their own inalienable rights, they understood the wrong visited on the person standing in front of them, but more importantly they understood the wrong being visited on a whole people every single day.

This is a generation that hasn’t had the humanity beaten out of them.

Understandably Lock has suggested that the politicians busily excusing themselves from discussions of international arrest warrants, of genocide — or facing the awkward truth that the technological knowhow of our workers is being used to kill children rather than save lives — may want to consult the next generation.

There are many ironies in the liberal order.

The lip service to the rights of the individual while slamming economic doors in the face of the many; the preaching of self-determination as long as that self makes the “correct” determination; the democracy evangelism delivered by bomb and bullet.

In so many ways this liberal imperialism sows the seeds of its own destruction with every passing day, and I wouldn’t mourn were it not for the millions of hopes, talents and lives it insists on sacrificing as it sinks.

For decades now, the political urge to tell the world how committed one is to the rights of the individual has been accompanied by a war against our collective rights and the tyranny of the exception.

Those who strived to put human rights explicitly into British law happily enabled extraordinary rendition, long-term detention without trial, trials held in secret.

Necessary compromises, we were told, to curb terrorism — a word they were only too happy to tie in with the Middle East in general and Islam in particular.

Years on, we shouldn’t be so surprised that these champions of human rights — not least a human rights lawyer Prime Minister — somehow manage to reconcile their cause with sitting back while kids in Gaza are picked off with British-built drones.

The greatest irony of the whole order might just be that the instance of politicians in ensuring the UN Declaration on Human Rights is taught in schools as a virtue signalling exercise is going to come back and bite.

The kids actually understand it, and therein lies the hope.

The kids are all right, and the politicians ought to listen.