Has there ever been a time when so many have been hectored — and had their daily lives ruined — by so few?

AT TIMES this week, Britain has seemed on the verge of anarchy. eco-activists and woke culture warriors have run riot, while the authorities have appeared to be losing control of events. Ordinary Britons have been reduced to frustrated spectators, shouting at the tV news or fuming in endless motorway queues.

Hysterical Just stop Oil activists have caused mayhem, closing Britain’s busiest roads after climbing gantries, weeping into their smartphones and accusing the Government of ‘murder’ by refusing to ban fossil fuels.

Yesterday, the mail reported that, rather than remove a single m25 protester this week, the 17 assembled police officers opted to do her job for her, closing the motorway and stopping thousands of people from going about their legitimate business.

in York on Wednesday, a nailvarnished extinction Rebellion

supporter and former Green Party candidate threw eggs at King Charles during a visit to unveil a statue of the late Queen. Patrick thelwell, 23, screamed, ‘this country was built on the blood of slaves!’ before being bundled away by police.

meanwhile, the charity War on Want has suggested that Britain spend no less than £1 trillion on ‘climate reparations’, a deranged form of moral blackmail endorsed by Labour luminaries including ed miliband and apparently taken seriously by the Conservative government.

As if spineless police chiefs and pathetic politicians were not bad enough, the courts have also joined the love-in. some of the m25 disruptors have been arrested, bailed — and gone on to commit further criminality.

Has there ever been a time in modern British politics where so many have been hectored and pushed around by so few? Where the news agenda has been so easily set, and the public authorities so quickly cowed, by a handful of militant bigots? How have things got into this ridiculous state? And what can be done about it?

FIRST, let’s be clear that — mercifully — what we have witnessed so far is only a cartoon form of anarchy. torch-wielding mobs are not yet marching down Whitehall; violence has remained rare. there have been rather more childish tantrums on display this week than serious acts of sedition.

Just stop Oil, extinction Rebellion and the rest are an incestuous death cult, not a movement. With their private-school accents and leafy names (‘indigo Rumbelow’ was given space to proselytise for the mob on thursday night on

sky News), they are nothing less than petit- bourgeois poseurs. their protests are infuriating, but not sinister. However, things could get out of hand if nothing is done to discourage them.

the truth is: these screeching sirens have wreaked havoc only because they’ve been allowed to by our limp excuse for leaders. this is not an uprising from below: it is a crisis from above.

Britain’s politicians, police and courts have lost control. this is because they have abandoned the will to stand up for the traditional standards of a civilised, democratic society. the rabble of eco-activists and woke culture warriors are simply taking advantage of the collapse of authority.

After all, nobody could claim the eco-anarchists owe their successes to the power of their arguments. their predictions of imminent doom are as compelling as the oddballs who parade around city centres proclaiming ‘the end of the World is Nigh’.

One female activist, pink-haired and educated at the wildly expensive school st mary’s Ascot, declares reasonably: ‘As a young person, the only future i can see before me is one of mass famine, severe droughts, wildfires, floods and societal collapse.’

Her fellow activist, the Cambridge graduate Louise Harris — who bemused the nation with her hysterical weeping on a motorway gantry this week — accuses the Government of ‘driving us even faster towards mass crop failure, starvation, water scarcity and war. this is an act of murder.’

No: the real act of murder would be ‘just stopping oil’. Fossil fuels meet 80 per cent of the world’s energy needs — though rather less in Britain, which is a world leader in renewables. if our government did as these shrieking loons demanded and ended the use of hydrocarbons, this would freeze our most vulnerable citizens to death.

Yet instead of tackling these absurd claims head-on, our political leaders and the institutions of the state appear at times to be weirdly in thrall to the activists.

While Home secretary suella Braverman has urged police to stop ‘humouring’ the ‘extremists’ this week, it was her fellow cabinet minister mel stride who, asked if Just stop Oil had a point, immediately and bafflingly conceded that ‘Well, they do in [a] sense’.

the argument was reduced to a tactical dispute between friends about how best to pursue their valid point.

As for police, instead of ending the disruption using reasonable force, dragging the idiots off the road, they have too often been seen stopping the traffic and coddling the activists, even asking the road-blockers if they ‘need anything’.

it has been a similar tale of overindulgence in the row over ‘climate reparations’. Rather than dismissing the ludicrous demand at COP 27, business secretary Grant shapps said the Government was ‘accepting the principle there’s a discussion to be had’.

it took several days for the Prime minister to tell the House of Commons that, actually, climate reparations were ‘ not the right approach’ as Britain faces a crippling increase in the cost of living.

even then, however, mr sunak suggested money from UK taxpayers would somehow be found to help developing countries ‘transition to a cleaner future’.

Only Boris Johnson was bold enough to say what any rightthinking Briton could plainly see: ‘What we cannot do, i’m afraid, is make up for that with some sort of reparations. We simply do not have the financial resources.’

As for Labour leader Keir starmer, the former Director of Public Prosecutions seems unable to produce a coherent policy platform. Yet starmer would surely win huge plaudits from the ‘Red Wall’ voters who abandoned his party in droves at the last election if he castigated the eco-fanatics as the parasites they are.

instead, a prisoner of his party’s obsession with identity politics, he refuses to take a firm stand against the extremists.

Labour’s most powerful elected official, London mayor sadiq Khan, claims he does not support Just stop Oil’s disruption in the capital.

But Khan has already made clear which side he is really on, telling extinction Rebellion activists that ‘we can work together’ because ‘we see you as allies’ against the hated tories.

my point is that the anti-human, doom-mongering views of the green death cult feed off the deepseated fatalism and misanthropy at the top of our society.

Why should their apocalyptic vision appear mad to authorities, when no less a figure than UN secretary- general Antonio Guterres proclaims that humanity is on a ‘highway to climate hell’?

Why should their dark notions be dismissed when no less a figure than sir David Attenborough, the closest thing Britain has to a living saint, has described humanity as ‘a plague on the earth’?

Across the board, our leaders appear ineffective and out of touch as never before. As the respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi puts it, a defining characteristic of our age is ‘ the loss of self- belief of the Western elites’.

TBritain’s politicians, police and courts have lost control

HEY HAVE become estranged from our shared history and traditions, and abandoned the core values of the very society they are supposed to uphold.

Anybody who imagines this all somehow stems from a social fracturing brought about by the 2016 Brexit referendum might take a glance beyond our shores. Leadership is in crisis across the democratic world.

in this week’s midterm elections, American voters made clear they were not impressed with the leadership of either Joe Biden or the possible return of Donald trump. (instead some of the winners were a new breed of Republican led by charismatic, anti- woke and ferociously intelligent Florida governor Ron Desantis.)

Yet the timid technocrats who pass for political elites in Britain and europe operate in an evershrinking bubble, isolated from the public, relating to privileged groups of activists and lobbyists instead of the people on whose votes they rely. the mass of voters are treated as passive spectators of the endless theatre of political chaos.

this top- down permacrisis endangers our very democracy. the British people support the right to protest and tolerate a wide range of views. But not when, as with the Just stop Oil road- blockers, they see the protests are really aimed against the general public.

it is time our leaders and civic institutions took a firm stand against this suffocating culture.

the true values of our society are cherished by the majority. And as the past week has amply shown, if those in power do not stand up to defend them, elitist, woke and idiotic fanatics will seize the national discussion — and make it their own.