Austin Williams
spiked.com
Over the past week, large groups of protesters have brought traffic to a standstill in central London. They have glued themselves to bus stops, pavements and Jeremy Corbyn’s fence. They have stood on top of trains, barricaded bridges, painted slogans on corporate headquarters and planted trees in the streets. Meanwhile, politicians have remained on holiday or cowered in Westminster. The police appear to have no idea what to do when confronted by a mass of people who don’t care if they are arrested. This is Extinction Rebellion (XR) – a new environmental protest movement that is spreading across the country.
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spiked.com
Over the past week, large groups of protesters have brought traffic to a standstill in central London. They have glued themselves to bus stops, pavements and Jeremy Corbyn’s fence. They have stood on top of trains, barricaded bridges, painted slogans on corporate headquarters and planted trees in the streets. Meanwhile, politicians have remained on holiday or cowered in Westminster. The police appear to have no idea what to do when confronted by a mass of people who don’t care if they are arrested. This is Extinction Rebellion (XR) – a new environmental protest movement that is spreading across the country.
I’d argue that three things have influenced the rise of this movement. The first is Brexit.
Indeed, the politics of anger, disillusion and frustration unleashed by
Brexit are possibly the most significant. There are no statistics on
the Leave / Remain make-up of the environmental protesters, but one
suspects Remain is overrepresented. That said, to her credit, Dr Gail
Bradbrook, self-styled co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told the Today programme that similar disruptive tactics would be ‘perfectly reasonable’ from Brexiteers ‘if democracy is not being honoured’.
The XR protesters – as Jon Snow might say – are mostly white, middle-class and often elderly. They are demonstrating their frustration that environmentalism isn’t getting enough coverage in the press and that, as XR puts it, ‘conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change’. The first claim might seem to fly in the face of reality for the rest of us, who see climate campaigns, global-warming paranoia and environmental journalism at every turn. But the second point is the most contentious.
The conclusion drawn by XR activists is that democratic change is impossible and disruption is the only way to force change. Rather than pledging to improve the democratic process, to hold people more firmly to account, they are campaigning to work around it. It is the democratic process that they seek to overturn, not capitalism. Forget the old-fashioned arrogance of the Occupy movement’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Forget the stubborn Remainers’ assertion that 48 per cent takes precedence over the 52 per cent. XR types say that they only need ‘the involvement of 3.5 per cent of the population to succeed’.
The XR protesters – as Jon Snow might say – are mostly white, middle-class and often elderly. They are demonstrating their frustration that environmentalism isn’t getting enough coverage in the press and that, as XR puts it, ‘conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change’. The first claim might seem to fly in the face of reality for the rest of us, who see climate campaigns, global-warming paranoia and environmental journalism at every turn. But the second point is the most contentious.
The conclusion drawn by XR activists is that democratic change is impossible and disruption is the only way to force change. Rather than pledging to improve the democratic process, to hold people more firmly to account, they are campaigning to work around it. It is the democratic process that they seek to overturn, not capitalism. Forget the old-fashioned arrogance of the Occupy movement’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Forget the stubborn Remainers’ assertion that 48 per cent takes precedence over the 52 per cent. XR types say that they only need ‘the involvement of 3.5 per cent of the population to succeed’.
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