XR’S protests will be their downfall
You cannot ask to be taken seriously, then roll out a man dressed as broccoli
It was the broccoli that did it for me. I had some sympathy for the protester who had painted his body green and enveloped his head in a lifelike floret, only to be arrested on the streets of London by police. He was as harmless as people dressed up as cruciferous vegetables come – really, what was the point of carting him off to the cells and wasting precious public money processing him through an already underfunded system?
But, by Wednesday morning, any support I had for this Animal Rebellion protester, a vegan offshoot of the Extinction Rebellion anti-climate change movement that has been disrupting London for a fortnight, had disappeared entirely. He/they/it – I am afraid I don’t know what pronouns to apply to a person who identifies as a broccoli – appeared on
Good Morning Britain, where he/they/it was torn apart by Piers Morgan, who had, not unreasonably, asked the protester/broccoli to explain why it is so important that humans stop eating meat. “Give us the science!” bellowed Piers.
Mr Broccoli reached into his jacket pocket to take out a banana, which he then put to his ear. “I’m sorry, I’ve just got to take this call…”
Look, if you are going to go up against Piers Morgan on Britain’s premier morning bear-baiting show, then you better believe that you need to know your onions.
Or your broccoli, and bananas, and any other fruit or vegetable that you believe humankind should switch to in order to save the planet.
Did Mr Broccoli and the organisation behind him think that such a wilful display of ignorance would endear him and his cause to anyone watching over the age of five? Here was an opportunity to win over a huge slice of the population, and they burnt it to the ground as if it were a fossil fuel.
Extinction Rebellion and the celebrities who back it believe that hypocrisy is fine
– see the open letter this week signed by the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Bob Geldof and Steve Coogan, who suggested that the high-carbon lifestyles they lead were, in fact, the fault of the fossil-fuel economy we are all stuck in. This is, of course, a good point, but one can’t help thinking they would be better off making it by refusing to fly to Los Angeles for work, or at least only doing it in a more carbonefficient economy seat. Back down on planet earth, where travel doesn’t come with a flat bed and a wine list, normal people cannot stomach hypocrisy – mostly because they don’t have much energy left for it after a week spent trying to get to work without a protester jumping on top of their Tube train.
I write all of this with the greatest respect for Extinction Rebellion, as a journalist who is also a human who happens to be right behind them. I believe in what they believe in. But as any one of the actors and creatives who signed that letter will know, narrative is important. The stories we tell matter. They really matter.
You cannot preach truth while choosing to ignore the inconvenient truths about the way you live your own life (I borrow this phrase, of course, from the 2006 Al Gore film about global warming). You cannot ask the Government and the media to take you seriously, and then roll out a man dressed as a broccoli on national television.
Nor can you afford to be making dunderheaded strategic mistakes, such as disrupting public transport, as happened this week at Canning Town station. The hard-working people who take the Tube are just the sorts you want joining you in your fight, rather than turning against it. And you do not have to be a master strategist on the scale of Dominic Cummings to see that.
Extinction Rebellion want us to get real about the climate crisis, and yet they cannot seem to do this themselves. Clare Farrell, their co-founder, defended the protest, saying “the public, I don’t think, realise quite how serious the situation is”. If that’s true, and I really don’t think it is, then there are a million better ways of spreading the message than gluing themselves to an electric train.
Plus, all this reference to “the public” separates the group from the people they need most. Extinction Rebellion’s aims are noble and important. It would be a great tragedy if, thanks to the naivety the group is currently displaying, they were to make themselves extinct.