Claire Perry said her encounter with this (until now) obscure group had been ‘good and productive’
Getting to see a government minister isn’t easy. I’d challenge any reader to see how long it takes to persuade the civil servants manning the bureaucratic barricades to let you bend a minister’s ear about whatever concerns you.
Yet somehow they found a space in the diary for a group called Extinction Rebellion (XR) to lobby the Minister of State for Energy, Claire Perry.
Ms Perry told the Mail on Sunday that her encounter with this (until now) obscure group had been ‘good and productive’.
Really? Extinction Rebellion is this week launching mass protests designed to shut down or obstruct transport links, causing (more) misery to commuters and business. If that’s the result of ‘productive’ talks, I wonder what would happen if they had gone badly.
But making Britain hell for business (and anyone who drives a car) is what Extinction Rebellion stands for. As the Energy Minister must know, its mission is to ‘save the planet’ by eliminating Britain’s CO2 emissions entirely by 2025.
Brutish
Or in other words, to reduce us to a state of mere subsistence, last seen in the pre-industrial age when life was (for the great majority) nasty, brutish and short.
As if to emphasise the primitiveness to which they wish us to return, this is the group which on April Fool’s Day performed a naked protest in the public gallery of the House of Commons.
Actually, this is the only way people with such views could take part (so to speak) in parliamentary debate. Because any party which tried to get MPs elected on a policy of mass immiseration would not win a single seat. There might be some thousands of middle-class students and drop-outs sufficiently aesthetically offended by mass consumerism to vote for such a manifesto, but that would be it.
This is the group which on April Fool’s Day performed a naked protest in the public gallery of the House of Commons
Unsurprisingly, the leaders of this movement tend to come from well-to-do homes, which have never experienced scarcity or privation. The figures behind the demonstrations planned for this week include Tamsin Omond, granddaughter of the Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees; Stuart Basden (who said his week in prison after an earlier action was ‘a bit like boarding school’); and George Barda, son of the distinguished stage and music photographer Clive Barda OBE FRSA and a 43-year-old postgraduate student at King’s College London.
I am distantly related to one of the inspirations for this movement, the environmentalist author and journalist George Monbiot (we are both scions of the family which created the J Lyons catering and food manufacturing empire). Monbiot is anything but a hypocrite. He leads the life he preaches to others: he doesn’t own a car, never flies and, so far as I know, survives on a purely plant-based diet.
The figures behind the demonstrations planned for this week include Tamsin Omond, granddaughter of the Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees
Last week, Monbiot appeared on Frankie Boyle’s television show, New World Order, and was cheered by the youthful audience when he demanded action to end economic growth, adding that this meant ‘we’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it’.
Monbiot has been consistent in this: in 2007 he wrote an article for the Guardian welcoming the prospect of a recession, even though, as he acknowledged, ‘it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes’. (He got his wish: it turned out not to be popular).
But if it’s the planet you want to save, and you believe its very existence is threatened by excessive emissions of CO2, then what happens in this country is almost beside the point. The UK contributes little more
