Extinction Rebellion

My response to the horrific news that MPs have voted, by 385 votes to 26, to uphold legislation introduced on Monday by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to proscribe Palestine Action, a direct action group, as a terrorist organization. Under the legislation, it is now a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for anyone to become a member of, or even to support the direct action of Palestine Action. I wrote most of this article before the vote, and in it I run through the long and noble history of direct action in the UK against arms companies and the government’s involvement in war crimes and genocide, which have generally led to jury acquittals. This latest move, condemned yesterday by UN experts, who insisted, correctly, that “mere property damage, without endangering life, is not sufficiently serious to qualify as terrorism”, not only seeks to equate property damage with mass murder; it also, most chillingly, demonstrates how the Starmer government is working not for the interests of the UK, but for the interests of its masters in Israel.

Marking the 40th anniversary, today, of the Battle of the Beanfield, the largest and most violent peacetime assault on civilians in modern British history, when a convoy of of 140 vehicles, home to around 500 individuals and families, was attacked with astonishing ferocity by around 1,400 paramilitarized police drawn from six countries and the MoD, as they tried to make their way to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. To mark the occasion, I run through the history of the free festival movement, the year-long persecution that preceded the violence of the Beanfield, its context as part of a broader assault on Thatcher’s perceived “enemies within”, who also included the striking miners, and the ways in which new forms of dissent arose in the wake of the Beanfield, most notably via the rave scene and the road protest movement. Nevertheless, the increasingly authoritarian laws passed after the Beanfield, and after the last major unlicensed gathering at Castlemorton in 1992, attacking the way of life of Gypsies and travellers, and severely curtailing our right to gather freely, have paved the way for recent legislation targeting environmental protestors, which is so draconian that a single campaigner stepping into the road to slow down traffic can be immediately arrested, and many dozens of climate activists are serving excessively long prison sentences for non-violent protest. Sadly, what has been revealed in particular over the last 40 years is how increasing authoritarianism is cumulative; once imposed, draconian laws are rarely, if ever repealed.

This is meant to hit hard, and I hope it does. It’s my analysis of how, faced with the the gravest threat humanity has ever experienced — wildly accelerating climate collapse, which will make the planet uninhabitable for humans, and probably in the not too distant future — our leaders have, instead, suffered a massive psychic collapse, unable to accept that, as I describe it, “everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us”, and have “collectively retreated into a broken psychic landscape in which, as so often in human history, if faced with something uncomfortable — as, in this case, our own wilful and self-imposed extinction — they have chosen to slaughter everyone instead, and to lay waste to human environments to make them uninhabitable.”

My response to the draconian and vindictive sentences — the longest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent protest — delivered by a British judge, Christopher Hehir, to five climate activists yesterday. Their crime? Taking part in a Zoom call to plan disruption to the M25 to highlight the climate crisis and to get the British government to commit to a ban on new oil and gas extraction in the UK. The sentences — of four and five years — are, as Michel Forst, the UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, explained, “purely punitive and repressive.” The reason Judge Hehir was empowered to deliver such punitive sentences was because of two horrendous Acts of Parliament, passed by the recently departed Conservative government, via two malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which specifically targeted the right to protest, and essentially criminalised non-violent, mildly disruptive protest. This legislation needs to be overturned by the new Labour government, but as I explain in my article, I fear that “Keir Starmer — and Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary — fundamentally share the contempt Patel and Braverman had for any kind of protest that causes any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.” The right to engage in non-violent, mildly disruptive protest is at the heart of what separates supposed liberal democracies from autocratic regimes, and it is crucial that it is upheld in the UK, because, otherwise, those engaged in its suppression, to preserve a cosy capitalist status quo, are failing to accept that it is precisely this status quo that is killing us all, because, as I also explain, “man-made climate collapse is the greatest threat humanity has ever known, as is demonstrably true, and as is becoming ever more apparent with every passing day.”

My report about ‘Restore Nature Now’, a massive march and rally in London on June 22 calling for the urgent protection of bio-diversity, which was initiated by the beloved environmentalist Chris Packham, but which, because it was family-friendly and non-confrontational, was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media, unlike the global coverage days before, when two Just Stop Oil activists sprayed harmless cornstarch-based orange paint on Stonehenge, and were compared to ISIS. Although catastrophic climate collapse is already happening — and much earlier than the warnings made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, when we were warned that we had until 2030 to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 to keep alive the prospect of a liveable planet — climate protest is in a parlous state, either sidelined or ignored when it is peaceful, like ‘Restore Nature Now’, or subject to hysteria and hyperbolic outrage when it involves even the mildest disruptive forms of direct action, along with the almost certain prospect of arrest, and possibly prison sentences, because of draconian laws passed in recent years aimed solely at climate protestors. Reviewing the last three decades of climate protest, I conclude that direct action remains the best way to try to effect change, but I struggle to understand how it can be undertaken when it faces increasingly draconian responses from government, and continued indifference or psychopathic hostility from the media and from the bitter and twisted ‘armchair warriors’ of social media. We truly seem to be living in the most demented end times imaginable, just a few years away from major collapse, and yet still encouraged to consume like never before, not to question the insanity of our leaders’ inaction, nor to question their psychically broken response — not dealing with the threat, but instead transferring all our energies into hideous proxy wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza, while our leaders prop up a neoliberal model that is so broken that ordinary people, confused and angry, are everywhere retreating into the false comforting arms of fascists with their dangerous explanations that the blame lies entirely with “the other”: immigrants, Muslims, and, increasingly I fear, everyone on the left. This is not a comforting time to be alive, and those of us with functioning brains, and with empathy, need to start working together like never before to create genuine solidarity as our civilisations collapse and the far-right become ever more empowered.

In my latest article about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I examine a little-discussed aspect of Israel’s actions — the lack of an exit strategy. With no prospect of any other countries accepting the population of the Gaza Strip as refugees, I conclude that Israel’s genocidal actions are actually a “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem”, and that President Biden, who leads the west’s largely unconditional support for Israel, also endorses this approach. Criticizing western leaders for the emptiness of their support of Israel’s “right to defend itself”, I also condemn their refusal to recognize that Israel’s two stated aims — to “destroy” Hamas and to free the hostages seized on October 7 — are either unworkable or self-defeating, and conclude my analysis by comparing how the west’s position on Israel is as dangerous and irresponsible as its failure to take climate collapse seriously, and warn that, by allowing Israel to so blatantly shred international humanitarian law, and by using fake antisemitism claims to suppress dissent and to further stifle protest, they are ensuring that, not only is nowhere in Gaza safe, but nowhere in the west is safe either — not from any external “terrorist” threat, but from our own governments.

My reflections, at the end of an unprecedented summer of catastrophic, human-induced climate chaos, about what we can do and how we can cope with ever-increasing climate collapse in the face of a persistent refusal, by politicians and the media, to respond to the gravest existential threat in all our lifetimes with anything resembling the urgency that is required.

As heatwaves of unprecedented ferocity grip much of the world, I ask why it is that the mainstream media are still unable to recognise that climate collapse is the biggest disaster in all of our lifetimes, and that they have an obligation to cover it as much as possible, particularly in the absence of any meaningful action from our political leaders.

My review of four decades of repressive public order legislation by the Tories, marking the 38th anniversary of the Battle the Beanfield, running from the 1986 Public Order Act to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, and on to the 2022 Police, Crime Sentencing and Court Act and the latest version of the Public Order Act. Aimed at criminalising the way of life of Gypsies and Travellers, the legislation is also aimed at criminalising any form of even mildly disruptive protest, of the kind currently being undertaken by climate protestors, whose actions would chime with the beleaguered travellers, festival-goers and environmental activists of 38 years ago.

The text of ‘We Can’t Trust the Weather Any More’, my first ever public speech about the climate crisis, which I made during Extinction Rebellion’s ‘The Big One’, on April 21, outside 55-57 Tufton Street, the home of opaquely-funded right-wing ‘libertarian’ think-tanks that are actively committed to maintaining the murderous status quo, including denying the reality of catastrophic climate change.