It’s a sweltering Bangkok afternoon and I’m surrounded on all sides by red shirts: supporters of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

They’re carrying enormous bottles of their own blood on their heads and hoping to pressure the government into resigning.

They love loudspeakers and are yelling and chanting their rhetoric so loudly it’s hard to hear anything else.

They’re trying to get through police lines and more and more are banking up behind me.

The press of the crowd is enormous and the closest thing I can compare it to is a mosh pit and being pressed up against a barricade at a music festival.

Eventually the numbers become so great that dozens break through and I’m carried along with their momentum to the front gate of the Thai parliament house.

Immediately they begin pouring their own blood under the front gate.

It congeals in sticky puddles which form underneath the boots of the soldiers and police inside the building.

A man in a wheel chair spins around and forms perfect circles of blood.

The reds then bring a Brahman holy man who places a curse on the parliament.

Later a representative from the Prime Minister’s party pours holy water on the ground to cancel the curse.

The next day the red shirts are back on the street.

They virtually shut down one of the busiest streets in Bangkok, Sukhumvit Road.

Prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s house is surrounded and the red shirts throw blood on the front fence.

They also hurl the blood equivalent of a water bomb, plastic bags filled with blood which splatter on the wall.

Shortly after, their big, noisy, unwieldy convoy of buses, trucks and cars is off back to their headquarters to plan the next move.

So far it would seem they’re a long way off forcing the government to resign.

The blood protests look dramatic and get a good run in the media.

However they alienate potential supporters who view the blood throwing as extreme.

It’s also ineffective in terms of placing political pressure on prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

He retains the support of his Democrat party, and even more importantly his coalition partners who he relies on to form government.

Even as a symbolic gesture it appears to have failed.

The reds wanted to make the point that cabinet ministers would have to walk across the blood of the Thai people to get to work.

Of course public health teams were in place minutes after the reds left, sanitising the area.

The red shirt numbers have also now dwindled to a fraction of the 100,000-plus that turned out on Sunday and Monday.

The estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 left in Bangkok.

Many are from poor rural areas in the north, hundreds of kilometres away and need to return to their farms.

One option is for the remaining protesters to increase the stakes by moving their demonstration to somewhere like the airport.

If the reds do decide to up the ante and begin more disruptive protests with their remaining supporters, it’ll be a high risk strategy.

It may increase the pressure on the prime minister but it also risks attracting a brutal response from the army which has cracked down on the reds before.