This week’s Extinction Rebellion actions in London have produced some notable headlines, one being the Daily Mail’s “Extinction Rebellion mothers stage mass breastfeeding after police escort children and their buggies along Whitehall”. On a more political front The Daily Telegraph had the writer Julie Burchill under the headline “What must Hongkongers think of Britain’s privileged eco whingers?”, but perhaps the most unexpected contribution, at least for the Mail, was Janet Street-Porter’s “Never mind the nose-rings, Boris, a lot of these climate-change protestors are your people, and they have a point”.
She is pointing to one of the most striking aspect of the XR phenomenon: the sheer range of people who have been suddenly and determinedly motivated to act, even facing the risk of arrest. You have to go back a long way in the UK to find a comparable example.
One happened forty years ago, when Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in the UK, with Ronald Reagan following as president in the US a year later. We were entering a new and highly dangerous phase of the Cold War, not least in the UK, where the decision to upgrade the country’s missile submarine force and to allow the US to base ground-launched cruise missiles at the Royal Air Force’s Greenham Common and Molesworth bases caused immediate controversy and reawakened the anti-nuclear movement.
