Saturday, 12 September 2020

Don't Shoot The Messenger!

          There was quite a fuss last Saturday, when the activist group Extinction Rebellion (or XR, as its devotees call it) blocked a couple of roads, thereby deliberately delaying the delivery of print versions of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. This temporary disruption certainly registered high on the public-awareness scale: an attack on free speech, railed some; a dangerous diversion of emergency services resources, claimed others;  and a threat to the key planks of national life by “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals” said the Home Secretary, while threatening to classify XR as an “organised crime group”.

          There is, of course, another view of this: the billionaire proprietor of the newspapers targeted is a bastion of the system that has brought the biosphere to the point of imminent collapse, yet his media give scant publicity to the truth of climate change: our emergency services are far more stretched by having to respond to disasters caused by climate-change than they are by removing citizens from the streets where they – occasionally and peacefully – exercise their right to protest; and there is a case for the Tory party itself to be declared an “organised crime group”, given its raison d’etre, which is to extract value from society for the benefit of its members, regardless of the welfare of the majority of its fellow citizens, its illegal prorogation of parliament last November and its latest outrage, a declaration of intent to break, unilaterally, an internationally binding treaty that it only recently signed.

          Unfortunately for those such as the Home Secretary (what an innocuous title for an office with the power to advocate Putin-esque repression of dissenters), Rupert Murdoch and those who deny or ignore the catastrophic consequences of climate-change are set to be in a minority. One of XR’s demands is for a people’s assembly to tell the government what it may not want to hear. To its credit, the government has organised one such assembly, focussed on its declared aim of a carbon-neutral Britain by 2050 and it has just issued its report, which will be presented in Parliament (though the government is under no obligation to heed its recommendations.) Given that the assembly purports to represent a cross-section of society, its conclusions may be extrapolated to the whole. And those views are broadly consistent with the measures long advocated by XR.

          Another reason to be cheerful – if you are a reviled eco-crusader-criminal – is that there is more evidence that you are winning the argument. A recent report, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, suggests that the XR message is getting across. For all their perceived unpopularity amongst the public (thank you, right wing media, for your portrayal of concerned citizens as riffraff), XR protestors have succeeded in raising awareness of the climate crisis – and not in a negative way. Nobody seriously thinks we should continue to destroy our own habitat.

          Having been involved with XR for a couple of years, albeit peripherally as the partner of a more committed activist, I have met and, in some cases, got to know many of its active supporters, young, old and in-between. They are not a criminal gang. They are a mixed bunch of people, different only from their peers in that they feel sufficiently motivated by the human-made crisis we face to press for urgent action. Sure, we can all agree on recycling and green energy, but do we wait until vested interests have had their fill of profit before change is granted to us? Like the Greenpeace movement before them, XR activists are not the problem, they are the messengers issuing a wake-up call to the complacent. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, a character called Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replied. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

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