Meet the Tory voters backing the climate change protestors
Rosa Silverman meets the Tory-voting baby boomers who’ve joined the latest Extinction Rebellion protests
Before this week, David Stewart had joined only one protest during his 73 years: a demonstration against the ban on fox-hunting. He characterises his politics as “slightly right of centre” and says he would tend to vote Conservative, but when Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters took to the streets on Monday for the start of a fortnight-long takeover of a large stretch of central London, the father of four travelled from his home in Scotland to be among them. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt and dark suit jacket, he isn’t clutching a bongo or shouting, but quietly holding a sign saying “Earth Protectors”. A far cry, then, from the stereotype of what the Prime Minister dubbed “uncooperative crusties” who should stop blocking the streets of the capital with their “heaving hempsmelling bivouacs”, but still one no less committed: “There’s a real climate crisis and I just feel everyone should stand up and be counted,” he says.
There is an upbeat, carnivalesque atmosphere among the protesters. I find demonstrators in their 80s, preschool children and everyone in between. Almost all are keen to stress that the need to act on the climate emergency transcends party politics. Nico Kist, 31, from London, is a statistician with a pharmaceutical company. He voted Conservative in a local election and describes himself as “not a Leftist”. But he’s protesting because “climate change is the most important challenge facing us today”. Further down Whitehall, Kate Oldridge, 44, a former corporate lawyer and a mother of two, removes her bee costume, which she and others from the Henley-on-thames chapter of XR had donned to make a point about saving the species, to reveal a smart navy blue dress and jacket. Do many of her friends back in well-heeled Henley feel similarly passionate about the cause? “My friends feel it’s an extreme movement that’s not relevant to them,” she admits. “It’s important the public see people like lawyers and doctors [taking part].”
Dr Hayley Pinto is among them. The consultant psychiatrist from near Aylsham in Norfolk has been involved since around the time XR launched in the UK on Oct 31 last year. Since then, the 51-year-old mother of three has twice been arrested while protesting: on Lambeth Bridge last November, on suspicion of obstructing the highway, and in Parliament Square in April for a public order offence (she was in contravention of a section 14 order allowing police to restrict where demonstrators can gather). Following the second arrest, she was tried and found guilty at Westminster magistrates’ court, given a year’s conditional discharge and ordered to pay prosecution costs of about £400. Spending almost a day in police cells was a novel experience. “It was weird going from being a busy working mum to being stuck within four walls with nothing to do,” she says. “Police were saying, ‘it’s nice to know you’re not going to bite me!’”
Dr Pinto, who had never joined a protest march until last year, belongs to Doctors for Extinction Rebellion, which argues that “climate crisis is a health crisis”.
“People are dying in large numbers due to heat,” she says. “There’s got to be system-wide change. We need to look at the way we eat, farm, consume. It’s [about making] fundamental changes to the way we live.”
It’s an ethos that chimes with older generations, who did not grow up with today’s disposable culture and probably broadly agree that we should reconsider our wasteful modern lifestyles, with our addictions to fast fashion, foreign travel and conspicuous consumption. These aren’t, in essence, modern ideas; rather, a return to something simpler: to making do and mending, growing our own vegetables and appreciating what we have.
With Sir David Attenborough, 93, doing more than most public figures to highlight the perils of climate change – and receiving a rapturous reception at Glastonbury this year – those new to demonstrating have been inspired by this very establishment figure, who has proclaimed that “we cannot be radical enough” in dealing with it.
Even ex-members of the police have joined the protests. Rob Cooper, 60, a former chief superintendent of Devon and Cornwall Police, is among those demonstrating this week.
“When I joined the police,
I did it to make a positive difference and protect communities, and I’ve got the same feelings coming back,” he says. The Plymouth father of three and grandfather of one has voted Conservative in the past and has policed many protests in his time, but until he joined the XR action, he had never been on the other side. He’s not the only one to make the switch.
“There’s a small group of former police officers [protesting],” he says. “If you think of XR as a bunch of tree-huggers, it’s just not the case. I would invite anyone who’s got children and grandchildren to think about this. It’s a broad church. There are people from all walks of life and we all have the same concerns.”
It is, in fact, such a broad church that members of the actual Church are involved. Next to the closed-off Lambeth Bridge, on the north bank of the Thames, Canon John Halkes, an 80-year-old retired vicar from Lostwithiel in Cornwall, makes a theological argument for preserving the planet. “Whose planet is it?” he asks. “If you think it’s God’s gift, who are we to trash it? We’ve got to become more valuing of our neighbours and animals. We should be saving it for future generations.”
His grandson, Joel Scott-halkes, 27, works full-time for XR. “I’m genuinely terrified of four or five degrees of warming,” he says, standing beside his grandfather. “I would love to have a family but at the moment I just wouldn’t do it.”
The Rev Helen Burnett, 60, has planned to attend the protests for most of this week and next, popping back to take services at St Peter and St Paul’s church in Chaldon, Surrey. “It’s the single biggest crisis that we face at the moment,” she says. “We have to start being neighbours to God’s creation in a way we haven’t been for decades.”
Fred Carter, 26, is one of her four sons, and teaches English literature at Edinburgh University. He couldn’t make it down to London at the start of the week, but says of his mother: “I’m just so proud. It’s inspiring, phenomenal.” Is he worried about her at all? “She’s pretty sensible,” he says. “She’s thought about it very carefully.”
Several hours later, I learn that she has been arrested. I remember the scarf she was wearing. It was black with white lettering that read: “We are frightened, but we do not lack courage.”
‘It was weird going from being a busy working mum to being stuck in a police cell with nothing to do’