There’s a new favourite topic of conversation in the UK community of activists who once self-defined as ‘the climate movement’: It’s new-to-the-scene Extinction Rebellion (XR), and what it’s getting wrong. In a series of posts, blogs, WhatsApps and drunken conversations at parties, we’ve raised concerns about how white XR is, how unstrategic XR is, how privileged, middle-class and frankly naive XR is.
Then right in our faces, XR shut down key bits of London for over a week, with the promise of more to come, and they have since met with and convinced Labour to push a vote to declare a “climate emergency”.
Activists climbed on top of DLR trains, blockaded Waterloo bridge and beached a giant pink boat in Oxford Circus. It’s been an audacious protest that has resonated across the Atlantic. And finally , maybe too reticently, many of us have concluded that XR did a bloody good job.
