Mate just wondering aren’t you shit scared
about climate change?
No?
I’m here on Westminster bridge on day one
of a planned two week shut down of SW1 by
Extinction Rebellion. There are up to 5000
activists in the area at the moment blockading
key roads and strategic points. People are
glued to the road, locked on in tubes and
I want to see how the activists are feeling
after many of their core organisers were arrested
just this weekend and their co-founder Roger
Hallam is currently in the nick. What I want
to know is this: Are you still planning on
love bombing the cops?
We know exactly how to deal with the police
and you know, some people will fight fire
with fire, we fight fire with love. We do
condemn heavily the police tactics, pre-emptive
arrests are never a good thing in a free society
and what we’ve seen here today; we’ve
seen police throw an elderly woman to the
ground, we’ve seen police throw a man of
off a moving vehicle and many other acts of
brutality from our met police that we did
not expect to be honest with you. But, now
that we know their tactics, we can rise to
meet them in a way that is conducive to our
aims and our message.
I think… yeah I think we’ve got to double
down our efforts on non-violence because I
think it could be so easy to tip into a slightly
different energy and I think that’s probably
what they’re angling for. All the more important
to ‘love bomb’ as you put it.
One of the things that’s really striking
about today is just how many young people
are here, and I’m not just talking about
millennials, I’m talking about teenagers,
I’m talking about kids, I’m talking about
toddlers. I even saw a baby dragging around
a protest sign! And I think one of the things
that really can’t be said enough is that
what the climate justice movement is responding
to isn’t merely the degradation of our environment,
it is a fundamental breakdown of the social
contract. Everyone here is here because they
think their future is being stolen. And you
know what? They’re right.
The XR strategy has been love bomb the police,
go in with kindness be very positive whoop,
avoid the bikes, today the policing has been
quite heavy-handed, quite aggressive.
From my point of view and I think for the
movement as a whole there’s been no assumption
for a second that because we’re trying to
be nice to them the police are going to be
nice to us all the way along. Inevitably,
movements like this face an escalation of
repression, but non-violent discipline in
the face of that extreme repression is the
best way to show the humanity of this movement
and the humanity of the transformation that
has to happen at an entire, global scale now!
Now! Now!
It has been a bit of a hairy start for the
Extinction Rebellion family today, but as
you can see, people are in this for the long
haul.
Fundamentally XR see their mission as
to create a non-violent and a loving space
in which people can join the climate movement
and not be put off by anything that can be
construed as spiky or antagonistic. That won’t
change the way that the police treat them
and yes that might alienate some people that
have had less good experiences of the police.
For all of my criticism of XR, and I do have
them, I think they’re doing the right thing.
I think they have shifted the way the climate
conversation takes place in this country.
We wouldn’t have had parliament declare
a climate emergency earlier this summer without
them and I think that their relationship to
the state, to politicians, to the banks, to
the police is going to evolve in the months
and years to come.
If you’re shutting down roads and shutting
down Westminster to fuck with the fossil fuel
industry… I’m cool with it. Critical,
but unconditional support for XR, let’s
see how this goes over the next two weeks.
Sorry, hey Steve.
Hello
My name’s Ash. I was wondering, because
I know you’ve got a fantastic pair of lungs
on you, could you give us a big ‘stop climate
change’?
STOP CLIMATE CHANGE
