It shouldn’t take a Coronation to crack down on Just Stop Oil
The climate protest movement has reached the advanced stage of fissiparous breakdown remarkably quickly.
The New Left took a good 20 years or so before the divisions between Trotskyites, Maoists and old-fashioned, socialism-inone-country Stalinists reduced its objectives to fratricidal chaos. Extinction Rebellion (XR) now has its competing breakaway siblings – Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, and even something called Money Rebellion, which presumably wants to return to a barter economy – jostling for recognition.
XR is now taking on the mantle of respectable elder, ostentatiously issuing responsible statements and grown-up pronouncements, while its more militant offspring pointedly refuse to promise any limits on their disruption.
Although this farrago may look a lot like the familiar ideological factionalism into which Left-wing movements usually disintegrate, there is nothing Left-wing about militant climate activism. Its immediate goals will make working people poorer and take away the freedoms that a century of mass prosperity have, for the first time in human history, been available to the great mass of the population.
The vague promise of some distant utopian solution to the energy problem that might – some day, in some yet to be defined way – restore that prosperity and freedom occasionally hovers into view. But for the most part, the movement is brutally frank: we must get over the idea that travel, plentiful and varied food, and inexpensive, comfortable accommodation can be universal expectations.
Those things will, once again, become the sole province of the rich. And this ruthlessly elitist message is being delivered with quite unapologetic shamelessness by the sort of people who are themselves members of the social elite.
It is impossible to ignore the extent to which this bizarre phenomenon of anarchic disruption is permeated by the peculiarly British dimension of class snobbery.
The police are ostentatiously considerate – almost obsequious – in their treatment of the middle-class protesters. But they confidently threaten to arrest working-class people who are being prevented from earning their livings by the disruption.
Until now, there has been some ambiguity in the law, which apparently made it impossible for the slowmarching Just Stop Oil brigade to be apprehended, even though they were obviously impeding traffic on the public highway, which should be accessible to everyone.
A judicial solution to this difficulty has been found in time for the Coronation. The King and his procession will be untroubled by the sort of action that has been creating havoc in the streets for months.
Hopefully, after the great event this weekend, the white-van men who are trying to earn a living will have the same protection. Or is there one interpretation of the law for a state occasion and another for an ordinary working day?
As somebody whose political sympathies were once on the Left, I would really like an answer to that question. If it is the case (as surely it must be) that the change in the law will now be universally applied, can somebody tell me why it took the crowning of a King to bring it about?
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