Policied to Extinction, Part 2
Think Tanks wanted the canary in the coalmine dead. Now we’ll all asphyxiate.
You can read Part 1 here.
Part 2: Where we start from
When considering what constitutes a legitimate and justified response to climate breakdown, the perspective we begin from matters. If we start from a point of defending the status quo, or not accepting the full scale of the scientific evidence, then how can we act truthfully?
It matters for the media as much as anyone. We are locked into a trajectory of guaranteed social breakdown, and nobody is doing anything anywhere close to what should be done about it. That should be the starting point for stories that address the breakdown.
Just this week, the news reported that people expecting climate-related failures of systems like the power grid in Spain should make sure they have torches with charged batteries at the ready, and radios for contact with the rest of society if wifi goes offline. This is not a future issue that could put us all at risk; we are in it, now. Infrastructure is beginning to show it can't cope, and we know government plans for adaptation are insufficient or non-existent considering the impacts that have been widely researched and predicted. (And no, Telegraph, it was not down to renewables.)
Most mainstream media articles make it sound like we’re in a complex, divergent moment for the climate movement. On the one hand, there’s the Climate Majority Project; Rupert Read and many others are advocating against disruptive action, believing that the alarm has been rung. They accept that change has not been made in any sufficient measure. But because we are on course for a disastrous breakdown of all of the systems we rely on — something many people term collapse — then we need to prepare for the damage that we have caused. No one is coming to save us, so start preparing your self-organised adaptation efforts whilst trying to appeal to reason and positivity to win a majority of support. Perhaps even reach a political popularism.
And yet as the Climate Change Committee report stated earlier this week: “The country is not prepared for climate impact” [“that are here today, let alone in the future” adds Laurie Laybourn] and “adaptation is not yet a top priority across government”. Where does that leave non-disruptive action? Mother nature’s disruptive action plan is well underway.
Others are advocating non-accountable sabotage, like Shut The System and Andreas Malm fans who let down tyres.
In our democracy, before the think tank reports such as Policy Exchange’s “Extremism Rebellion” became laws, if you were willing to accept the consequence of an action which, say, “broke the law in a limited and short term way” (as Boris Johnson’s government planned to) then society, the judiciary and the public would say you only stepped a tiny bit over the line of what is deemed legal and acceptable. And indeed, there was a flexibility in the court system to see the intentionality and the scale of the problem you’re addressing, and to say, yes, our democracy allows for protest to be done to prevent far greater harm. The extremely high personal costs of taking that kind of action did also mean that those motivated to act were raising very serious concerns, not just minor complaints. Like the response inside a sick human body, heat appears where you need it; democracy is a living organism.
But the new crimes that came from these shady think tanks did away with the health of our political body.
Debates need facts, not fantasies
To have a real debate about what’s going on requires some shared facts; agreed facts, if you like, such as those agreed by the Crown Prosecution Service. In the case of the Whole Truth Five from Just Stop Oil, The Crown agreed the following was not in dispute:
the climate crisis is “an existential threat to humanity”;
global heating above 1.5C would have catastrophic consequences;
that in the previous 12 months average global temperatures were 1.6C above the pre-industrial baseline;
in October 2022 the government had opened a new round of oil and gas licensing.
Facts enough, you’d think? But on the climate there is a time lag, which to us humans can be difficult to collectively reckon with. If we can’t really see, smell, or taste collapse, then it’s difficult to act as if we are collapsing. Particularly when we don't share sets of agreed facts widely, and that are interrogated in a responsible manner. That’s why we needed canaries in the coalmine.
For example, when we launched Extinction Rebellion, I had to train myself as a spokesperson to be able to argue on national television with climate deniers, because they were still being platformed by the mainstream broadcasters. Since then, new media channels have been created explicitly to facilitate the presence of deniers — because the liberal media, like the BBC, actually, very rarely nowadays, will allow them anywhere near their shows. As far back as 2014 and beyond experts have said that balance is bias (see this video below, from ten years ago) and that scientific fact and opinion should be seen as different, not platformed as if they are the same. But the ‘debate’ went on. A well documented strategy from the opposition was being played along with by those in the fourth estate, as if they had no idea they were participating?
If we can’t agree on the facts of an existential risk, of course we can’t respond to it. And the think tank strategy – ‘intelligent’ from their power-mad perspective – that they took against us was to call us terrorists, extremists, ideologues, and to suggest that we wanted to destroy the economy and liberal democracy as we knew it. That we were a threat to The British Way of Life. And that we were extremely serious. That all sounds pretty scary, and it worked.
In response? Very little from what I would term ‘our side’ of the conversation to either push back on their framing, or to describe what has really happened in recent years.
But here’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Legitimacy can come simply from power.
Because a small fringe group or individual speaks of the need for a revolution in how we govern ourselves, they’re considered ideologically dangerous; perhaps it’s then easy to think of the fringe groups as “extremist”.
But when politicians with power speak of the same need – like Nigel Farage saying “I intend to lead a political revolt” – then somehow their claim has legitimacy. Why is this? It is what I’m calling ‘the legitimacy of power over reason’ and it’s a large part of the mess we’re in.
Just look at Donald Trump as the model that Nigel Farage is following.
Trump is an example of what has happened: a revolution, but in the opposite direction. That is, the fear Policy Exchange stoked up was that the climate movement was instigating a revolution to threaten everyone’s livelihoods. But that’s exactly what has happened, a revolution to destroy people’s livelihoods, but from their side. The side of the right-wing think tanks such as Policy Exchange and their authoritarian paymasters.
You only have to look at the success of Trump in being elected on the promise that he would destroy the machinery of the state. And that’s what he is doing, rather than the kind of revolution we were calling for: a new economic reality which was fairer and kinder and safer and more respectful of limits and nature and other beings.
Trump’s revolutionary success has been to spiral the system precisely in the worst direction that it’s already traveling, hoarding more freedom for the rich and ultimately only more suffering for the poor, hacking away at the systems in between — such as a welfare state — that softens the pain for the worst affected.
As I’ve said already, the strategists at Policy Exchange are not stupid. In fact, I have a great respect for their creativity. It’s just such a shame they hate ordinary humanity so much, and are cowards in the face of love, and that increasing inequality is what they are aiming for. They are part of this ‘revolt’ to destroy most people’s lives and its been going on for ages already.
So I have no respect for many of their political views and intellectual positions. They understood from the beginning that our movement was very serious about systemic and structural change to the way that we organise society, in order to be able to make different decisions in a different way with different people involved.
They could see that we knew what they knew: the system is completely rigged. Everything is stitched up in their favour, and the favour of their funders. So they focused on shutting us down. Pushing concerned citizens underground. “Policed to extinction” as the BBC put it. Or, as we say more accurately, policied to extinction. How did our politics become so easily corrupted by think tank ideology? And who paid for the R&D of the new anti-democratic public order laws?