Calls to fire water cannon on Extinction Rebellion

Remainer diehards should accept that voters feel a profound attachment to community and place

POLICE should be able to use water cannon against Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters, says a majority of the public, as one of the group’s leaders backed industrial “sabotage”.

A poll for the radio station LBC found 58 per cent said forces should be able to use water cannon as well as Tasers, riot police, tear gas and plastic bullets.

It came as a video emerged showing Simon Bramwell, the group’s cofounder, telling a Deep Green Resistance UK meeting last November that activists should “en masse” shut down fossil fuel industries.

Protests by Extinction Rebellion cost the Met Police £40 million last year, more than double the £15 million it spent on its violent crime taskforce, which tries to reduce the number of stabbings and other violent crimes.

Cressida Dick, the Met Police Commissioner, said it had placed “horrendous strain” on London, with officers using arrests under public order laws and restrictions on the locations for lawful protest to police it.

The Deltapoll survey, however, showed the public wanted police to go further. It found 63 per cent backed the use of riot police, with just 23 per cent opposed, 44 per cent supported tear gas versus 42 per cent against and 57 per cent backed use of Tasers versus 30 per cent who disagreed.

More than half (53 per cent) also said there should be restrictions on people being able to return to protests if they have previously been arrested, a key plank of LBC’S “enough is enough” campaign which was launched today.

Yesterday, Extinction Rebellion announced its next mass protest would be on May 23. “Expect something bolder, more creative,” it said.

Britain has finally Brexited, but for a minority of diehard Remainers, the battle is not yet over. With eminent historians willing the dissolution of the United Kingdom, former diplomats denouncing their country as “stupid”, and activists wishing coronavirus on Leave supporters, it is clear that many Remainers still cannot comprehend Brexit, nor the opinions of millions of their fellow citizens.

Leave supporters should not want to lord it over people who sincerely hold a different view of Britain’s future, and most were right to resist any temptation to succumb to triumphalism. But if we truly want the country to come back together, and put the pain and division of the past few years behind us, we should all do more to try to understand one another. Remainers could do worse than start by watching a maiden speech made in the House of Commons last week by a new MP named Danny Kruger.

“The call of home”, is what Kruger called the “impulse” behind Brexit. And impulse it certainly is, which is why so many of those opposed to leaving the European Union are so baffled by its supposed irrationality.

The utilitarian cost-benefit analyses say it’s a bad decision, they insist. It will leave us worse off, they complain. And of course it is true that Brexit brings economic costs as well as opportunities. If we try to go on exactly as we are with more friction in our trade with Europe, we will end up worse off than before.

But if we see Brexit as a moment to seek change, and remodel ourselves, we can prosper. Leaving the European Union – free to diverge from its rules and regulations – means we can negotiate our own trade deals, reform public procurement rules, change state aid policies, establish free ports, and enter into regulatory competition with European countries in high-growth, high-value industries of the future, such as technology, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing.

And many of our strengths will endure. Our universities produce world-class research. Our tech sector is already the strongest in Europe. And for countless reasons – not least the nationalistic aggression of French regulators – financial services have not fled, en masse, from London to Paris. The City will stay exactly where it is, outside the European Union.

It is, however, a mistake to think about Brexit – and the reasons people voted to leave the EU – in these terms. The decision to leave cannot be reduced to spreadsheets of likely costs and benefits. The decision to leave came from a simple impulse: the belief that a country is a community of kin that ought to be free to determine its own future. As Kruger said in his speech, humans are not rational economic maximisers, out to get the most they can get for themselves, but deeply social animals.

This social nature probably dates back to the evolutionary advantages enjoyed by past societies that learnt to cooperate with one another in the face of external dangers. This is why Jonathan Haidt, the respected psychologist, says we are a strange combination of “selfish and groupish”. We compete with one another in some contexts but come together to defend the larger community. We have it within us, Haidt says, to be “profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups”.

Our willingness to make sacrifices and take risks for others, therefore, is not based on some naive notion of a “brotherhood of man”, but comes instead from proximity, shared identity, and trust – the reasonable expectation of reciprocity when we do the right thing.

This was Kruger’s point when he told Parliament that “patriotism is rooted in places”. It was also the point made two and half centuries ago by the great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. “To be attached to this subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,” Burke said, “is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Modern liberals – and many supporters of the European Union – have forgotten this lesson. They treat the nation as though it were a platform, a random piece of land upon which anybody from anywhere in the world can come to perform economic tasks for their own benefit.

They treat our relationships as though all we care about is to be left alone, free from the interference of others, and free from the obligations of community, tradition and nation. And they believe our values and interests are alike and simple to reconcile, read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion which is why they believe not in the particularities of a place and its culture, but in the possibility of a universal, harmonised civilisation.

If you believe in these things, as liberals do, supranational government – making decisions affecting a diversity of communities many hundreds of miles away – must make a lot of sense. The problem, as Brexit and countless other acts of democratic rebellion across the West have showed, is that these liberal beliefs are wrong.

People value community. They cherish tradition. They respect their obligations. They care for institutions. They love their country. They may not spend much time thinking about why they revere these things that, added up, comprise the civilisation to which they belong, but they have seen enough of a world that disrespects and denigrates the things they hold dear. We have come to see that without these things, there is more suspicion and less trust, more selfishness and less generosity, more social struggle and less solidarity.

And so, in voting for Brexit, people were, as Kruger said, heeding the call of home. It might not seem rational, it might be a mere impulse, but that does not make it wrong. Who can deny that government, including supranational EU government, is distant from the governed? Who can argue against the premise that remote government is failing to mend social dislocation and atomisation?

There is no better way to confront the problem than by returning to an age-old truth. We love our country because we love the places we live in and the people we live among. As Kruger says, the solutions to our problems will lie in our answer to the call of home.