Extinction Rebellion: radical but right?
“How utterly predictable” that Extinction Rebellion should have launched its summer campaign last week, said Ross Clark in The Spectator – just as universities broke up for the summer. The climate change protest group, which blocked traffic in London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds and Bristol by parking life-sized model boats on busy streets, is – “above all else – a movement of students and left-wing academics”; the working class is notably absent. Its cohorts are happy to get arrested for the cause, as long as they’re allowed to finish their exams first. And they’re happy to call for lower living standards to save the planet – while being comfortably insulated from “the realities of a shrinking economy”. It’s amazing that XR, as it is known, is treated with such “indulgence”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. This lot are extremists: they want to slash carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 by rationing energy, and reducing aviation and shipping to nearly nothing. Obviously, few would vote for that, which is why XR wants to “impose its way of life on everyone else” by whatever means necessary.
There has been a hysterical right-wing backlash against XR, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. The think tank Policy Exchange recently published a report on the group, and characterised it as promoting “anarchism with a smile” and being hell-bent on breaking down the UK’s “civil order”. In fact, XR’s peaceful protests are “a textbook example of how civil disobedience should be conducted in a democracy”. And it’s impossible to argue with the group’s basic point: that the consequences of climate change are far too severe “to dismiss and ignore”.
XR’s tactics “walk a precarious line between motivation and intimidation, irritating as many as they inspire”, said Eleanor Steafel in The Daily Telegraph. The big protests it held in April cost police and businesses some £28m. Last week, one man called BBC Radio Bristol to say that he had been called to his dying father’s bedside, but had not got there in time due to traffic caused by the protest. Most XR members protest peacefully, but there are more extreme factions: one recently planned to shut down Heathrow using drones, which could have been both a threat to life and a terrorismrelated offence. XR’s leaders are certainly radical, but they “have the facts on their side”, said Sam Knight in The New Yorker. And they’ve already been remarkably successful. In May, British MPs voted to declare climate change an emergency, in accordance with XR’s first and “in many ways its greatest” demand: that governments “tell the truth”.