Who are Extinction Rebellion and how can they help to bring about environmental change?
Pete Stevenson reports on a public meeting in rural Somerset.
It was a packed but rather odd meeting. The main speaker spoke for an hour and was followed by another who spoke for 45 minutes. That was too long and unlikely to activate the inactive and the curious.
Contributions were not allowed from the floor so the meeting became depressingly one dimensional. I had to argue for my points to be made which were allowed after a minute’s silent reflection making the meeting feel like a religious gathering.
The speakers appeared not to accept that only political power will save the planet. There appeared to be a naivety regarding the massive challenge with Trump, Bolsonaro and others on the right refusing to accept the causes of climate change.
So what can we do? I offered the following way forward:
To take power in the UK is the great opportunity. We now have with a strong environmental Labour Party Manifesto (For the Many Not the Few 2017). There were middle class conservative voters present at the meeting who will continue to vote for a party that is very weak on action on climate change. Millions of working class people will bewilderingly vote conservative at the next election. Sadly without mass support from the working class Extinction Rebellion campaigns will achieve no success. Depressingly the meeting was led by anarchists with Lib Dems and Tories looking on.
Crucially the Tories (who may do well at the next election because of sinister support from the mass media especially the BBC) continue to promote the policies of war, austerity and greed. It’s vital that Extinction Rebellion recognises that it is capitalism that feeds on these three evils claiming that war is about democracy, austerity is necessary for the economy and greed is about profit for us all. All are false claims. These three pillars of modern capitalism are used to justify inaction on climate change. Environmentalists must recognise that war is important to the Tories because it divides working class people, austerity is about making the poor pay for the blunders of the super rich and greed is about making the super rich even more wealthy. There appeared to be no such recognition.
Sadly, the shallow anarchic political positions of those Extinction Rebellion members I met at the meeting and at the recent mass protest in Bristol reject the idea that to support Labour and the Greens to remove the Tories is the immediate great opportunity. I remain unclear about the Extinction Rebellion way forward in terms of winning the political changes required to save the planet from environmental destruction and the public meeting offered no clarity.
Frustratingly, Extinction Rebellion resembles the early days of CND, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. White, middle class and, for want of another word, “alternative” people naïve in the field of political action therefore easily picked off by the Establishment. However, happily the picture changed especially in CND.
It is crucial we learn from history. How successful have environmentalist been in the past fifty years? A study reveals few significant achievements but The Greenham Common women deserve recognition because they won the campaign against US cruise nuclear missiles on our land in 1989 – a success gained after a long campaign that mobilised a mass movement of hundreds of thousands of anti nuclear activists and trade unionists from all social classes, crucially with the support of local people. Peace groups emerged in almost every town in the country and it was a great achievement to have these missiles removed from Berkshire and dismantled. This then led to a further temporary reduction in nuclear weapons in UK and US possibly avoiding a nuclear war. I was proud to be part of that campaign.
Unless ER learns from this crucial lesson they will remain a minority movement dominated by anarchists, vegans, home-schoolers and others on the social and political fringes and continue to have very little influence on our political masters.
The Morning Star 2019
Pete Stevenson is a performance poet, teacher and human rights activist.
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