As the Guardian noted yesterday afternoon:
Counter-terrorism police placed the non-violent group Extinction Rebellion (XR) on a list of extremist ideologies that should be reported to the authorities running the Prevent programme, which aims to catch those at risk of committing atrocities, the Guardian has learned.
The climate emergency campaign group was included in a 12-page guide produced by counter-terrorism police in the south-east titled Safeguarding young people and adults from ideological extremism, which is marked as “official”.
XR featured alongside threats to national security such as neo-Nazi terrorism and a pro-terrorist Islamist group. The guide, aimed at police officers, government organisations and teachers who by law have to report concerns about radicalisation, was dated last November.
The official document looked like this:
I stress that I am, of course, aware that the police say that this was a mistake. But let me add, of course they would say that. And for the record, let me say that I do not believe them. I am quite sure that someone (and quite possibly a majority) in the police do think XR an extremist organisation.
Also for the record, I have signed up as an XR supporter and so find myself labelled as an extremist. I have, however, never been to an XR event. That does not mean I would not. I think peaceful, non-violent and respectful protest everyone's right.
I think there are three obvious things to note.
The first is the definition of an extremist used here. Seeking ‘system change' is the crime. In other words, what we have is normal. Opposing it is a crime. And this is true even when, as is apparent from climate science, maintaining that so-called ‘normal' has the likelihood of making human life on Earth very difficult, if not impossible because of the stresses it creates.
Second, there is the assumption that change must only take place through the process of asking nicely. If ‘please' won't do then the person asking is in the wrong, and so an extremist. And yet change has simply not happened in this way. Change either happens as a consequence of war, which I hope we would rather avoid, or as a result of the actions of those willing to violate existing norms. And since, as a matter of fact, those who created those norms tend to have considerable personal, intellectual and even financial capital invested in them, their reaction to a request to change them is exceptionally unlikely to be positive. Deviant behaviour of some form is, then, the invariable resort of those seeking change. And since change has actually been the norm throughout human history, it is the defenders of the status quo who should, in many cases, be defined the extremists: it is their behaviour that is usually anti-social. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of climate change.
Third, what I find quite astonishing is what this supposed mistake says about the mindset of those who wrote, authorised and circulated this document (and the fact that many would have been involved completely blows the cover of the ‘mistake' claim). First they can label compassionate, informing, caring people whose concern is unselfishly focussed on the future of human and other life on our planet as extremists. Then they can claim this was a mistake, when glaringly obviously this description was approved. All that actually happened was that they were found out, so they changed their story, like a common criminal. And, with respect, no one is taken in. The police say that XR might mislead vulnerable people. I suggest it is the police who are deliberately seeking to mislead. And it really does not help their case that they do so. Finding out more about the processes that resulted in this claim being made, and requiring a consequent process of police re-education, might be the most useful outcome of this episode.
One final thought: I was about to use the word fiasco rather than episode in that last sentence. But I can't. This is not a fiasco. This was part of a deliberate aim is to make climate activism extreme to preserve the current market based destruction of our environment. The question as to who this reveals the real extremists to be has to be asked. And the answer is not XR.
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I agree with you that this was not a mistake and that it was a very sinister development.
The current … erm… “Prime Minister” is on record as calling XR: Noseringed-Crusties, which suggests that the police take their cue from PM Fatberg. Also as a matter of record the new European Commission recognises the concerns of XR and plans to act on them – should I report the new European Commission to the Met Police? – since they certainly fall into the Police category of “extremist” (the plods missed their chance to grab that well known XR terrorist & head of the European Commission Mrs Von der leyen when she recently visted the fatberg in No 10….oh dear perhaps another time?)
Jokes aside, the plods take their cue from the politicos who set the tone/mood music. It is clear how PM Fatberg views XR – the withdrawl of the notice is a set back – a test of “public opinion” – there is no doubt that further attempts will be made to make sure that XR is categorised as “extremist” – power dynamics demand it – otherwise fatberg & Co lose control of the agenda & we can’t have that in U.me..me..me..K – can we?
As an XR member I am often asked ‘what is the strategy for dealing with China and India?’. These two countries account for a big proportion of current CO2 output, and a stupendous proportion of the predicted extra output in the next decades. My answer is to say that we should set a good example and ask nicely.
An assymetric carbon tax would make a difference but that’s not part of the XR strategy.
If we are to treat people equally then the same strategy must apply to our fellow Brits, which is setting a good example and asking nicely.
Come to a meeting in Hertford some time, by bicycle ideally. It’s only 4 hours away if you e-bike. You’ll find people that are quite happy to labelled as extremists. It’s just a label and really doesn’t matter
Jeff,
I’m not sure why China should be cited as a problem. They appear to ahead of most industrialised nations on this account.
https://theconversation.com/china-is-positioned-to-lead-on-climate-change-as-the-us-rolls-back-its-policies-114897
And India is showing real promise.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/
The Chinese and Indians are motivated on this partly because they are big exporters and know that further down the track they would become vulnerable to climate related sanctions should it come to that.
They are also oil importers, they know that know that renewable power is now much cheaper than coal or gas and that electric vehicles are becoming a lot more affordable. The Chinese are leaders in developing affordable EVs.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5
Maybe the strategy for dealing with Australia and the US would be more relevant.
Marco Fante says:
“I’m not sure why China should be cited as a problem.”
Elementary ‘whataboutery’ is the answer to that, Marco.
Given that the industrial Revolution was basically our invention we can hardly blame the Indians and Chinese for ‘starting it’, so we have to resort to whataboutery.
Even if China was taking no steps at all to ‘clean-up’ their act that would not be a justification for us to cut off our noses to spite our faces. They were playing catch-up and suddenly they look as if they’ve changed the game to leap frog. We need to be addressing our own problems and the first stage is to accept that we have them. Exporting solutions could be very lucrative indeed, and business as usual is a recipe for disaster in various forms; not least economic stagnation which will bite our bums even before climate change goes critical.
China is building stuff like this. They are intending there to be a future.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/zaha-hadid-architects-completes-chinas-newest-cultural-center?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=ad&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR26t15OK25OpI_ryi0qIcFLbGQMXAQoYF9mvljfBw1_RyTKgwDWFtLmFrk
This is indeed a very worrying development, thought police belong in 1984. Where does it stop, how does the establishment become more rational if people cannot question them?
For the police to consider ‘speaking in strong or emotive terms about environmental issues’ an extremist threat really makes you wonder how effective they are in dealing with actual criminals. That’s the real threat to us, that the police do not know the difference between a dangerous person and one expressing a viewpoint, then they cease to have any capacity to protect us from danger, and cease to be much use. To us. It must suit the powers that be: a very worrying consideration when our elected representatives are meant to, well, represent us.
Thanks
A very useful insight
The Hong Kong protesters, the vast majority of whom are peaceful, know all about a police force that either can’t tell, or doesn’t care about, the difference between a dangerous person and one with a viewpoint.
True….
Change operates via democracy. XR supporters are clearly in a minority and some of their views are clearly extreme. The fact that many are willing to cause criminal damage needs to be addressed.
By all means protest against things you don’t believe in, and campaign for change, but when you unreasonably disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens going about their lawful business, then you’ve crossed a line and something needs to be done.
Did you read a word I read Barry?
And do you really think it better that the planet die rather than someone be 5 minutes late to work?
If so, why?
Please explain because your irrationality is what is very obviously extreme here
Barry said:-
“By all means protest against things you don’t believe in, and campaign for change, but when you unreasonably disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens going about their lawful business, then you’ve crossed a line and something needs to be done.”
The climate is now disrupting peoples lives, you’re right something needs to be done, XR are calling on the politicians to do just that.
Desp
Oh dear. If we followed that logic, we’d still be in a feudal system.
Maybe we’re heading back there when I think of it…
Suffragettes didn’t ask nicely for the vote, for example. Were they terrorists? You probably think so. I don’t. They were activists. And they didn’t always say please. Or thank you.
When a government orders the police to brand ‘disturbing’ activists as terrorists, it’s not the activists you should be worried about, but the type of government which attempts to control your thoughts and actions, as well as your police force.
I’m sure that in the past technically half the population would have made the police’s “Prevent” list namely in the form of suffragettes! I’m almost in favour of mandatory IQ testing for the UK’s police force although with the disintegration of the UK I’m very tempted to think that should also apply to voters!
By way of an historical parallel this police document reminds me of the way that Edwardian era police tried to demonise the Suffragettes, portraying them as dangerous radicals. Meanwhile all the sensible people at the time knew that the protestors were merely advancing a reasonable cause that was bound to prevail anyway.
True
When it comes to climate change and the establishment, various expressions come to mind, boneheaded, myopic, illogical, irrational, willfully ignorant being just a few. What the police did, as you say Richard, is to confirm the mindset at work. And it is working against the existential interests of my children and grandchildren.
For me it just confirms that the author of the Gaia theory was correct when he said:
“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change” — James Lovelock Guardian 29th March 2010.
We either work with the planet or the planet will exclude us when the reset button is pressed. People making this point are not terrorists or misguided or anti-social. They may pose problems for the current economic model but also introduce the prospect of new, innovative, green, industry. The evidence exists. It is long past time for the establishment to wake up.
A subsequent article in The Guardian has this “On Friday DCS Kath Barnes, the head of CTPSE, said: “I would like to make it quite clear that we do not classify Extinction Rebellion as an extremist organisation. The inclusion of Extinction Rebellion in this document was an error of judgment and we will now be reviewing all of the contents as a result.”.
So nobody reviewed ALL of the contents before publication? Wow.
Or they did and they thought it was just fine as first published
How far up, or should it be down, the chain does this ‘review’ go before someone says….”Stop this nonsense”?
I presume the need for such a list was ‘suggested’ at a political level …?
Hi Richard,
I wouldn’t take this too much to heart,
bear in mind that you also associate yourself with a longstanding movement that has been at odds with the ‘status quo’ for centuries,
considering a history of seeking freedom of religious worship, gender equality, opposing war, slavery, seeking social and prison reforms, being labelled an ‘extremist’ for being supportive of Extinction Rebellion’s aims is a trivial matter!
you are after all, my dear Friend… a Quaker!
Indeed
Its governing body is called Meeting for Sufferings because it was created to record those in prison for dissent
Bella Caledonia is as aggrieved as you, Richard: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/01/11/domestic-extremist-3/
Rightly so
I like the argument and the direction of blame
I consider that planning to fly drones over Heathrow as a “protest” counts as a terrorist event, as well as being criminal. Still, it was just a splinter group?
As for climate change……it will makes things difficult. Not quite as difficult as the next ice-age will make things, but … and global warming will not affect it either!
Still, we have several thousand years to work-out nuclear fusion and other energy sources…
Come on…a splinter group is not the group
The rest of your comment I admit I find incomprehensible
How do you know? I suppose those climbing on the train roof/s were another “not the group” group?
Incomprehensible?
1. We are still in an ice-age, the warm bit inbetween cold bits.
2. We will be back in a more icy version of it in a relatively short period, historically speaking.
3. The next ice-age, with ice, will be an extinction-level event.
4. You won’t stop it by cutting CO2. Or by any other way. Although it is a possibility that global-warming-changed ocean currents may hasten the return of the ice age!
With a govt “owned” by Big Business, green is not high on the agenda.
And unless we take into account the amount of CO2 we “produce” by producing our goods elsewhere, I don’t see much green occurring anytime soon.
John
I deal in the settled science on this issue
I accept there are margins for error
But with respect, there is no space for the crassness of climate change denial here
All such comments will be deleted from now on. I am sure you can find other places to post such time wasting hypotheses
Richard
John M says: (and he’s not the only one who trots out this sort of complacent indifference. I’ve heard similar comments frequently.)
“2. We will be back in a more icy version of it in a relatively short period, historically speaking.”
Nature has cycles. Who’d have thought it?
There is the distinct possibility that all this fossil carbon burning will simply put itself right in the long cycle. Re-creating the climatic conditions that led to its being laid down in the first place. This is very comforting for those people who are concerned to ‘save the planet’ and I’m pretty sure they have no need to fret about the planet. As long as the Sun keeps working the planet will be fine.
Unfortunately there will be no humanity around to observe the completion of that cycle because unless we buck the extinction trend and prove to be eternal, we will be long gone.
Students of economics will be familiar with Keynes observation that in the long run we are all dead. He concerned himself with trying to make sense of the here and now and understood the need for flexibility appropriate to the current circumstances. He was mocked to a considerable extent for ‘changing his mind’, but the result was that for most of his life he was ahead of the curve rather than clinging to outworn doctrines. We need more of that kind of thinking in place of the witless nihilism that takes as a given that in the long run we are all dead and therefore nothing matters. (Except money of course).
Armed drones make for “terrorist events”. Unarmed drones constitute a lesser offence. Hyperbole won’t help your cause (whatever that may be).
A drone impacting the cockpit window of an inbound aircraft at 250mph would constitute an “armament”. Calculate the kinetic energy of a 1KG drone impacting, or being impacted by, an object moving at 250mph. It’s an impressive figure.
Richard: I shall no longer be commenting on your blog, although I have learnt quite a lot from reading it, and may continue to so do. I shall however, paste a section from a ‘book’ written some 98 years ago, here, which facts have not changed since then:
“Abundant evidence seems to show that the degree to which the air can be warmed by carbon dioxide is sharply limited. Humphreys, in his excellent book on the Physics of the Air, calculates that a layer of carbon dioxide forty centimeters thick has practically as much blanketing effect as a layer indefinitely thicker. In other words, forty centimeters of carbon dioxide, while having no appreciable
effect on sunlight coming toward the earth, would filter out and thus retain in the atmosphere all the outgoing terrestrial heat that carbon dioxide is capable of absorbing. Adding more would be like adding another filter when the one in operation has already done all that that particular kind of filter is capable of doing. According to Humphreys’ calculations, a doubling of the carbon dioxide in the air would in itself raise the average temperature about 1.3°C. and further carbon dioxide would have practically no effect. Reducing the present supply by half would reduce the temperature by essentially the same amount”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37855/37855-h/37855-h.htm#Page_257
Thankyou for accommodating me for this time. I shall now place you in the section reserved for extreme climate-change-denier sites. Your views seem tom accept without questioning.
Goodbye.
With respect, the facts have changed since then
Goodbye
@ JohnM
Whilst I don’t expect you to answer this, I felt it worth responding.
I’ve done a very quick ‘back of the envelope’ calculation for CO2 “thickness” in the atmosphere and whilst I haven’t calibrated for pressure variations
280ppm CO2 returns a column of ~130m CO2
400ppm CO2 returns a column of ~192m CO2
We have seen the global temperature rise since CO2 concentrations were 280ppm (pre-industrial revolution), but according to the text you referenced, we should not have seen any increase in temperature.
I know I have made use of very crass calculations, but I think the message should be clear.
I am also concerned that you have decided to take the message from a work published in the 1940s over the 98% consensus amongst modern scientists that increasing atmospheric CO2 will cause further warming. I would also posit that you have very little room to be calling others extreme climate-change deniers.
[…] Cross-posted from Tax Research UK […]
“…the police say that this was a mistake. ..”
Bloody right it was a mistake !
Any pretence of even handed policing is now completely blown. I think I may just have been radicalised.
” You may hear people speaking in strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution.”
If we listen to parliamentary debates we might hear some of that. But not nearly enough. Our Prime Minister himself has been known to speak in strong and emotive terms about airport expansion, but managed to worm out of voting on the issue. Better have him under lock and key for a start. Obviously an extremist.
It was serious mistake to compose this affront to a decent society let alone allow it to be printed and circulated.
Margaret Thatcher used the police as her stormtroopers during the miners strike. It now has become standard practice it seems to divert the police, and security services from their proper duties protecting the public and use them as a tool of political compliance.
This is verging on ‘thought policing’ and an open attack on freedom of speech and expression which might offend the very wealthy by questioning their right to pillage our common estate at will.
Out….rageous.
May we all become extremists in what does have to become a fight against climate change. So very evident as bush fires rage in Australia. I grew up there and, yes, bush fires are a fact of life but not this early into the summer season and not taking hold in such a way they are
ravaging areas the size of England!
It cannot be business as usual! Anyone who thinks this, has their heads in the sand.
How we live on this planet has to change. Our over consumption and throwaway society stop. Cutting out using plastic packaging, cups, bottles, straws, and toothbrushes. Eating less meat. Turning the heating down in our homes will not be enough.
And immigration. We ain’t seen anything yet. As lands become more and more arid and inhospitable to live. Droughts cause starvation. It will drive peoples north.
I won’t go on. I’m writing here to most who are aware of the urgency.
Thank you for your work in proposing a Green New Deal, Richard, and being an extremist. I am proud to stand with you in this. Although, I have no voice as an individual. Together may we create this change.
Clean production (renewables, re-usables, recyclables bio-degradables etc.) is lot better idea than cutting out consumption. Its also a lot easier to achieve.
I agree, Marco, this needs to happen, however, frankly, the blythe way most people throw things out, because they are not the latest fashion and still working… wind up in the rubbish! Not even given to charity shops is phenomenal.
Or, products become obsolete – this being built into the product. Fifteen years ago it was worthwhile to get things repaired. Now? Where are the repair shops? Na… Let’s go buy a new ‘whatever’.
I come from a generation whose parents were pre WWII – saving for a fridge and a sofa was a big deal in the 1950s and 60s. My mum’s hoover was still perfectly good after 50 years, when she died. The sofa good with several covers being made over the years.
I live in an area where there is an itinerant population. Short term lets. Once people move on. So much is just thrown away. Do you know perfectly good duvets are thrown away? Washed, clean. No charity will take them! Not a homeless charity, even. They cannot be recycled. Mattresses regularly thrown. So… Resources to make these goods; and dispose of.
A waste.
Good point, Rosie
Durability, repairability and getting rid of planned obsolescence is an important factor. Currently the IT and electronics industry are the kings of planned obsolescence, They are full of superfluous upgrades that offer little or no improvement and are deliberately made hard to avoid.
Marco Fante, so agree!
Have you heard of/participated in the Restart Project? It’s great 🙂 https://therestartproject.org/
To throw into the discussion is the suggestion that the Treason Act will be re-visited.