What joyful revenge on eco zealot Ruperts and grungsters

Enough is enough. Following a long, hot summer of delays and travel frustrations caused by Extinction Rebellion and their preposterous protesters, fedup Londoners yesterday took matters into their own hands.

After two protesters attempted to shut down the Jubilee Line by climbing on top of a train at Canning Town, they were dragged down by furious commuters. An uprising at last! hurrah.

The welldressed men — in nice jackets and shoes, one of them had a bouncy ponytail — had scrambled up to unfurl a banner that read: ‘Business As usual — Death.’

That was enraging enough in itself: it was in reference to the commerce carried out in the nearby City of London. While ecowarriors may turn their noses up at capitalism, this is what stops this country from turning into one giant mud field, with a few turnips rotting in the gutters where Kent once stood.

however, the only business going down at Canning Town was the bubbling frustration of the commuters. Who are as mad as hell and are not going to take this any more.

Look at them. They are the normals, the everyday civilians, the overlooked ordinary Joes just trying to get to work. or desperate to get home after a draining night shift.

hardworking people who never get a favour or a lucky break or the opportunity to smugly tell everyone about how they have just offset their carbon footprint and have solar panels on the swimming pool roof.

ThE

only footprints they make are on the commuter trudge to and from work — only this time to find themselves thwarted by smug dogooders protesting about the state of the planet. Somebody threw a cup of tea over them right at the beginning, so matters were clearly fraught.

one of the rabble was Mark ovland, 36, who gave up his fulltime Buddhist teacher training studies this year to join XR as a ‘fulltime protester’. Fulltime waste of space, more like. I wonder who is funding his disputatious lifestyle? You don’t need me to tell you. Probably all of us.

ovland was booted off the train roof by a furiouslooking bloke in a tracksuit top. Even Buddha himself couldn’t save him from falling into the maw of the crowd.

he could have been beaten to a pulp by travellers driven mad by the fact they had missed their connection, had not other commuters formed a protective ring of padded jackets around him.

I mean, hang on chaps. We might be angry but we are still British.

I don’t condone the violence and the ugly scenes, but I have to be honest. I wanted to cheer the pugnacious commuters to the rafters. For ordinary citizens were doing what the police have so dismally failed to do this year, which was to stop one of these XR events in its tracks. one has to wonder why this XR mob were always treated with such kid gloves, even as the city ground to a halt around them.

one thrilledlooking granny who had glued herself to the top of a train yesterday had a safety helmet popped on her head, a harness wrapped around her body and clearly a nice chat and a laugh with the police officers who unglued her.

These demonstrators put themselves in harm’s way. They should not be treated by the police like naughty children while lawabiding citizens are expected to suck up the disturbance without complaint.

The right to protest ends when you violate the rights of others to go about their daily business. That is not protest, it is civil disobedience.

There is no way that holding up commuters is going to make them sympathetic to your cause — surely Extinction Rebellion and their pathetic celebrity ecoterrorist chums must see this is a warning of what is to come?

Certainly, my patience ran out long ago. There is a lot of good in their cause, but they preach an apocalyptic rhetoric of death, claiming billions of people are going to die soon because of climate change.

BILLIonS?

Come off it. Cofounder Roger hallam even promises that ‘ your children are going to die of starvation’ unless the economy is completely transformed in five years.

They talk of imminent catastrophe, mass suffering and deaths, but science doesn’t back this up. (hallam has said it is ‘great fun taking down capitalists’. So at least he’s honest about that.)

The alarmist language is bad enough, but a lot of goodwill is being washed away by their hardline stance and the utter ghastliness of many of their supporters.

The welltodo grandparents, the trust fund kids, the anarchists, the octavias, the Ruperts, the Buddhist students, the grungsters, the unemployed, the bored, the Benedict Cumberbatches and the rest.

The elites are on the wrong side on this one, supporting this mass, inchoate movement so fond of hysterics and superglue.

once, XR fought against public indifference. now, they must contend with public rage. good.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD MP praised the public’s action. ‘This response has my full support,’ he tweeted. Extinction Rebellion supporters were quick to condemn his words. ‘This is a Tory MP supporting mob violence. He should either apologise, or have the whip withdrawn.’

In fact, this is a Tory MP who ran towards stricken police officer Keith Palmer after the terrorist attack at Westminster. He gave mouth-to-mouth and CPR as he tried in vain to save PC Palmer’s life. Mr Ellwood is a former Army captain and a hero. And don’t you shower of crusties forget it.