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Despite Boris Johnson's best efforts, a small army of protesters are still camped outside Westminster. So are they a symbol of Britain's healthy democracy â€" or just a pointless nuisance?

Since May, Kate has been living in the square in a small tent without a flysheet. "When it rained yesterday I had a little bit of a leak," she says. Kate is 27, thin and pale, despite these months of camping in one of the capital's most shadeless corners. Her tent sits directly on the pavement. But she seems surprisingly content. Until May she was just one of London's drifting homeless; now she has a purpose.

Behind her tent and along the square's eastern pavement, directly facing the houses of parliament, are large hand-painted banners: "End Afghanistan Corporate War", "Bring Our Soldiers Home Alive", "Don't Attack Iran/Syria", "Democracy Village: ON STRIKE for Peace", "24 Hour Ongoing Frontline Picket". Slogans of this sort have been a fixture in the square for almost a decade, ever since the anti-war protester Brian Haw set up camp here in 2001. Haw is in the square still, a few yards away, often sitting as still as a statue, well on his way to becoming a national institution â€" or even an international one: the subject of a Japanese documentary, the Most Inspiring Political Figure of 2007 according to Channel 4, the subject of a Turner prize-winning work by the artist Mark Wallinger.

Yet the protest that Kate belongs to is not so revered. During its four-and-a-half months of existence, Democracy Village has been called "nauseating" by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson; "squalid" by the leader of Westminster council, Colin Barrow; "a malignant infection" by the Labour MP Tom Harris; a "threat to public health" and an opportunistic piece of "free camping" by the Times; and both an exercise in "self-regard" and "self-righteousness" and "a wino's Glastonbury" by the columnist Tom Sutcliffe in the usually liberal â€" and anti-war â€" Independent.

Even Haw has condemned Democracy Village. "All their activities have been deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous," he wrote on his website in July. "Drink, drugs, threats, avarice, violence, disgusting behaviour, are the hallmarks of Democracy Village." The protest, he went on, was led by an "alleged agent provocateur", with the unspoken implication that it had been created by the British government in order to discredit him.

Eight weeks ago, after a protracted legal struggle that went all the way to the high court, Johnson had the then few dozen Democracy Village activists evicted from the grassy central portion of the square. Fifty bailiffs and 80 policemen were involved in the operation, which took place at 1am, and the protesters, caught slightly cold, put up limited resistance: a few locked themselves to the rickety metal structures they had erected, but were quickly pulled off and manhandled away. A truckload of metal fencing was erected around the grass, which over the summer, to much outrage from politicians and the press, had in patches been completely worn away. Round-the-clock security guards were installed behind this barrier to prevent any re-occupation of the land. Barrow commented that he was "relieved this dreadful blight of Parliament Square has finally come to an end".

Except that it hasn't. Immediately after the eviction, many of the Democracy Village activists melted away, but a minority, Kate among them, simply moved a few yards from the grass to the pavement and set themselves up next to Haw. And there they have stayed, studiously ignored or glared at by him, but gradually building up a new encampment until, by yesterday, there were 15 or 16 tents in a ragged line all along the eastern side of the square and curling round to the south. There are also two tall, walk-in wooden cabinets, almost like scoreboxes on a rural cricket ground, where the Democracy Village protesters lock their valuables; a padded office chair for them to rest in when not handing out leaflets and talking to passersby; and wooden pallets, liberated from builders' skips, to keep most of the tents off the damp ground.

"Boris Johnson's made himself look like an idiot," says Luke, one of the protesters. "He's moved us about two inches." Luke is 22, tanned and lanky and pretty sure of himself. He has a mattress in his tent, and his possessions all neatly tucked away on either side. "Before I was here, I was homeless for seven years, just wasting away in a hostel with alcoholics and crackheads." He sits comfortably cross-legged on the pavement, smoking a roll-up, as if he were at some idyllic rural pop festival, while the traffic shoots by just behind his back. "The only downside of being here," he goes on, "is the carbon monoxide."

The mayor's press office describes the current encampment delicately as "an ongoing situation". Some MPs are more robust. "It is a total farce," an unnamed former Labour minister told the London Evening Standard recently. "It [the protest] is as big an eyesore as it ever was." The Conservative MP Malcolm Rifkind told the paper that the coalition government should draw up legislation to remove it. In July 2009, even before Democracy Village appeared in the square alongside Haw, David Cameron told Sky News: "I am all in favour of free speech . . . But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it . . . My argument is: 'Enough is enough'."

Yet turning such rhetoric into action may continue to prove difficult. The square, which was created in 1868 from a graveyard and a patchwork of demolished buildings, is a small maze of jurisdictions. Its core of grass, paving and beleaguered old plane trees, strictly called Parliament Square Garden, is part of the royal parks, but managed by the Greater London Authority (GLA), which consists of the mayor and the London Assembly. The garden is covered by an array of fussy bylaws: "No person shall . . . wash or dry any piece of clothing or fabric" or "use any kite or model aircraft"; "written permission is required" to "exhibit any notice", "camp, or erect . . . any structure", or "give a public speech". Well before Democracy Village, some of these bylaws had been broken or tested to the limit by protesters from Haw to Tamil nationalists to an ex-soldier, James Matthews, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2000 for adding a green mohican made of turf to the square's statue of Winston Churchill during an anti-capitalist march.

The square's pavements, meanwhile, are another matter. Along the south and east side, where the Democracy Villagers are now gathered, they are the responsibility of Westminster council. The council does not currently have "the necessary powers", says Barrow, to remove the demonstrators. And nor does the Metropolitan police: "Officers," says a spokesman, cannot "remove tents or any similar structures from [this] public highway". So few passersby use this part of the square, put off by the traffic and the lack of pedestrian crossings, that it is hard to accuse protesters of obstructing it.

You might think that security concerns offer the authorities a better excuse for moving them on. Over recent decades, Westminster has become a near-fortress of blocked-off roads, 20ft fences, anti-truck bomb barriers, CCTV and armed police officers. In 2005, the Blair government's infamously draconian Serious Organised Crime and Police Act included sections to tightly regulate protests within a mile-wide "designated area" around the Palace of Westminster, including Parliament Square. "A person seeking authorisation for a demonstration," the act says, "must give written notice" to the police; and protesters must not cause "a security risk" or "disruption to the life of the community". Haw had to fight a long legal battle against the act in order to continue his anti-war vigil. Other Westminster demonstrators have been convicted under the legislation: for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, even for holding a tea party on the Parliament Square lawn.

However, the sheer complexity of overlapping laws and power means that protesters can continue to chance their arms and hope to find a loophole. So it was in May of this year's Day, when the founders of democracy village separated from the day 'S traditional left celebrations in the capital and occupied the Parliament Square.

At first, there were just a dozen scattered tents and a plan to stay for the six days until the general election. The national media initially ignored the camp. On election night, as taxis full of journalists and politicians raced round the square heading for interviews and parties, I found a few protesters sitting, ignored, round a brazier on the cold grass. But they stayed, and grew in numbers and ambition: banners went up about Afghanistan and the Greek crisis, about climate change and the consequences of the banking meltdown. The campers set up a kitchen and compost toilets, and planted a "Peace Garden", an oak tree and strawberry plants. Once the fever of the hung parliament had passed, reporters came to visit in numbers. Suitably dramatic quotes were provided: "We've got two governments now, their one and our one," Chris Knight, one of the leading lights of Democracy Village, told the Times. "This is genuinely the beginning of a revolution."

The villagers jeered the Queen as she arrived for the state opening of parliament. They climbed scaffolding on Westminster Abbey, on the other side of the square, to unfurl an anti-war banner. They staged a sit-down outside Downing Street. They set up a website; declared their support for the British Airways strikers; had militant letters published in newspapers.

The intolerance towards the village from Conservative politicians in particular sits ill with the coalition's loud talk of restoring civil liberties after Labour's supposedly authoritarian rule. In 2006 Boris Johnson, then a loose-tongued Tory MP rather than mayor of London, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that protests in Parliament Square such as Haw's, while they "spoiled the look of the place", also reminded people "across the world [that] Britain still stands for a certain idea of liberty".

Then again, Democracy Village's openness and unruliness did have their disadvantages. Gradually, says Maria Gallastegui, a veteran peace campaigner, "we were overrun by homeless people. Democracy Village became a place to come for shelter, for food. It became like an old sanctuary ground." For the original, politically committed residents, the camp became, she says, "unmanageable". The communal cooking utensils were stolen, and the kitchen had to be shut down. Drinkers settled in. "It degenerated into a Mad Max environment," says Quentin Cross, a slight, softly spoken Irishman and another longstanding resident. "I was beaten up several times. People were being ripped off."

Yet Gallastegui and the other remaining villagers insist that many of the negative press stories about the camp were exaggerated and politically motivated. In fact, they say, the protest's genuine activists regularly moved their tents to minimise harm to the grass, carefully collected and removed their rubbish, and quickly stopped using the smelly compost toilets in favour of nearby public lavatories. As for Haw's allegation that Gallastegui is an agent provocateur â€" she and her comrades roll their eyes. Until last year, she was part of his protest, before, as he puts it on his website, "she withdrew . . . by mutual consent".

On a mild autumn evening, Gallastegui has just got back from one of the protesters' daily "food runs" with a carrier bag of sandwiches and a thermos of hot water donated by a friendly cafe. Central London is a relatively easy place for a savvy protester to live on the street: the villagers also know which nearby council day centres for the homeless offer the chance of a shower and the use of a computer. And camping in Parliament Square, for all the noise and pollution, has its compensations; looking up from her tent at the golden, floodlit spikes and towers of the Palace of Westminster across the road, Kate says, "For all the bureaucracy that goes on in there, it's a beautiful building".

But hostility towards the protest regularly re-asserts itself. Sometimes, passing drivers throw abuse and bottles. At pub closing time, people come to argue with the villagers, and sometimes to kick and upend their tents. Tonight, a posh-looking young man holding a half-empty pint of lager comes over to tell the campers that their actions are "illegal". The campers tell him that they have police permission while his public drinking does not. He wanders off. And then there is the traffic, which never properly quietens: the villagers say they have learned to sleep through most of it, but never the sirens.

After a few hours out here, even on a warmish night, a chill begins to seep through your clothes. Most of the protesters wear fleeces and hiking boots, but cocky young Luke is in a long-sleeved T-shirt. "My brother would probably be laughing at me, living in a tent out here," he says. Then he suddenly turns sober. "My brother was killed in Afghanistan: 1st Para. When I hit 15."

I ask him if he thinks the protest is having a political effect. "I'm so out of touch with radio and TV, I don't really know." Gallastegui is more upbeat. The camp's anti-war message, she says, is increasingly in tune with public opinion as the Afghan situation worsens. But then she too turns downbeat: "I've been here for four years, and I need to move on. Well, I'm in two minds . . . this takes all your time. Away from here, I could be doing more writing, more networking."

Yet even if Democracy Village soon disappears from Parliament Square, whether because of its activists' exhaustion or shifting priorities, or the coming of winter, or some cunning initiative by the authorities, a precedent has been established. The square has become a kind of new Speaker's Corner, not like the old one, tucked away and basically toothless on the edge of Hyde Park, with an audience of tourists and shoppers, but right at the centre of British power.

Already, beside Haw and Democracy Village, other protests, currently about the alleged world dominance of the freemasons and the rights of fathers, are beginning to establish small encampments and jostle for space on the pavement. All these demonstrators may get an opportunity to spread out further. Thanks to the recent wet weather, the Parliament Square grass has quickly grown back, thick and lush. The security fence around it, the GLA acknowledges, is ugly and excludes the public. It will soon have to come down.

Some names have been changed

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