The Telegraph will not be silenced
This weekend witnessed an appalling attack on all our liberties. On Friday night and Saturday morning, Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestors blocked major newspaper printing presses in a blatant attempt to shut down free speech. It was nakedly partisan: every paper affected was centre-Right, none on the Left. And it was shrouded in Orwellian double-speak. “Free the truth,” said the mob. But since the Enlightenment the West has flourished on the principle that you cannot get to the truth unless ideas are freely contested in the court of public opinion. The ethic of Voltaire has been summed up as: “I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it” – and freedom of expression is at the heart of what we do as journalists.
XR is anti-reason, anti-dialogue. They have, in previous demonstrations, brought chaos to Britain’s transport network; their contempt for working people is self-evident. They claim to be concerned with fighting climate change, which means they should welcome this Government’s drastic carbon emission plans, but in reality all of that rhetoric is window-dressing for their true purpose: a revolutionary, extremist movement set on overthrowing our society.
In 2019, Policy Exchange published a report that pointed out that XR might be committed to nonviolence, but its supporters have proposed actions – such as flying drones at airports – that could cost lives. The movement is against freemarket capitalism. It advocates a model of “civil resistance” that encourages supporters to break the law, cause disruption and place strains on police budgets – a classic Marxist tactic to push the democratic system to the brink of destruction on the assumption that socialism will arise from the ashes.
As for democracy, if it does not deliver what XR wants, they have contempt for it. “We are going to force the governments to act,” Roger Hallam, one of XR’s leading figures, once said. “And if they don’t, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose.”
Where does this belief that your opponents are so evil they must be silenced come from? There have always been fanatics, of course, but what we are seeing here are the fruits of a particular brand of the radical Left’s long march through the institutions – the triumph of so-called Critical Theory, of autocratic ideas dressed up as “liberation” and spoon-fed to students who have not been trained in logic well enough to see the lies and contradictions.
The far-Left has weakened universal principles that must be widely shared for a democracy to cohere: free thought, free speech and tolerance of disagreement. They have rhetorically raised the stakes to the point that extremists believe their opponents are the enemy of all that is good and, therefore, the enemy is fair game for awful acts. And they have amplified selfbelief to the point that refusal to engage with an alternative point of view is seen as a virtue. You can find this madness in “cancel culture”, or in the summer of protests in the United States that were triggered by genuine, awful racial injustices but hijacked by neo-Marxists.
In short, what happened this weekend is the natural consequence of everything that came before. And worse will come, unless these ideas are challenged and debunked.
Condemnation of XR’s action has been nearuniversal, with particularly strong statements by the Home Secretary and Prime Minister. Corbynite MP Dawn Butler was one of the few who openly supported the activists, showing just how lucky Britain was that Labour lost the last election.
Finally, the actions of the police, especially the Hertfordshire Constabulary, were derisory and slow, reflecting a wider failure to act with speed when necessary to restore order. The police seemed far more interested in defending what they saw, wrongly, as a straightforward right to protest rather than the freedom of the press. Yet this was not a protest, as these are normally defined: it was an act of politically motivated sabotage.
Without order, there can be no freedom because we will have the law of the jungle, and the bullies will dominate. The Government must fight back, and reassert the rule of law’s primacy. As for this newspaper, we will never be cowed. We will lay out the arguments; we will publish the facts. We will continue, in the face of the mob, to do our job.
In reality all that rhetoric is window-dressing for their true purpose: a revolutionary, extremist movement set on overthrowing our society
The far-Left has weakened universal principles that must be widely shared for a democracy to cohere: free thought, free speech and tolerance of disagreement