In praise of the working-class revolt against Insulate Britain

[Julian]

Every time Insulate Britain takes to the streets, I feel a warm glow. I
find myself feeling moved by the direct action that takes place. I’m not
talking about the eco-muppets themselves, of course, and their
tantrum-like gluing of themselves to motorways and busy London roads.
I’m talking about the working classes who have started to rise up
against these am-dram middle-class apocalypse-mongers.

That’s the direct action we should be cheering. This is the revolt that
should warm the cockles of progressive people everywhere, or just anyone
who believes in reason. The ticked-off HGV drivers, the deliverymen, the
blokes trying to get to their building sites, the angry mums taking kids
to school, the people on their way to visit poorly relatives – all have
started to agitate against the end-is-nigh irritants clogging up the
roads of the nation. And I’m loving it.

This week we were treated to footage of truck drivers dragging
eco-zealots off the road. These are men trying to earn a living, trying
to ensure that the things we all need get delivered on time. At Dartford
Crossing, one HGV driver says he probably lost work as a result of
Insulate Britain’s antics. The father of two was an hour late for an
interview. No wonder he was seen pulling protesters out of the way. To
my mind, this man’s a hero – someone who wants to work, and to work in a
field where there are severe shortages right now, and yet he’s held up
by extreme greens droning on about the end of the world.

The Battle of Dartford Crossing, as I think we should call it, summed up
what is at stake in the unspoken clash between working people and the
often quite posh performative moaners of the green lobby. Here we had
the commonsensical public lined up against the intemperate hotheads of
Extinction Rebellion and its offshoot groups, whose main aim now seems
to be to inconvenience Brits just trying to go about their business.

The Daily Mail captured the clash well. One man ‘ripped Insulate Britain
banners out of protesters’ hands’. Others ‘dragged the protesters off
the road’. The rest ‘honked their horns’. It was like a microcosm of the
stand-off between the reasonable majority and the increasingly
unreasonable activists of the extinction wing of the environmentalist
movement. The former wants to work, wants greater economic growth, wants
to enjoy a richer, more comfortable existence; the latter thinks we
should all don hair shirts and whip ourselves for the hubris and
pollution of our reckless species.

The working-class revolt against Insulate Britain is often noisy and
colourful, but it’s not violent. Who can forget the footage from last
week showing a group of working-class men clearing protesters off a road
so that an ambulance could get through.

‘It’s a f**king ambulance, you stupid prick, get out of the road!’, one
of them cried. I want that on a T-shirt. This is the revolutionary cry
of working people sick and tired of being talked down to and disrupted
by greens who think they know better than us. It’s the call of people
whose moral compasses are still intact, meaning they know that letting
an ambulance go on its way is rather more important than staging yet
another public sob-fest about climate change.

Every time Insulate Britain stages a protest now, there is pushback from
the people. We’ve seen an angry woman berate protesters for preventing
her from visiting her mother. We’ve seen a cafe owner turn down the
money raised by a whip-round among the protesters who were blocking the
road to his workplace: people want to work, not receive insulting
charitable handouts from the virtue-signallers who are preventing them
from working.

The more stunts Insulate Britain carries out, the more the public turns
against it. YouGov found that in mid-September, when Insulate Britain
kicked off its road-blocking campaign, 25 per cent of the public
supported its actions. That has now fallen to 18 per cent. Now, more
than half of the public strongly oppose what Insulate Britain is doing.

This isn’t the first time green agitators have come up against the sense
and anger of working people. Remember the clash in Canning Town station
in October 2019, when early-morning commuters, just trying to get to
work, dragged a pair of XR protesters from the roof of a tube train? Or
think about how irritated the working-class meat-sellers and fishmongers
of Smithfield and Billingsgate markets respectively were when their
workplaces were blocked by XR offshoot Animal Rebellion.

All of these incidents shine a light on the underlying class dynamic of
the green screech of rage. This is a largely well-to-do, well-educated
movement, and its target is increasingly ordinary working people.

The world-ending fantasies of the green movement are a bourgeois luxury
that the vast majority have neither the time nor the inclination to
indulge. It all brings to mind that wonderful gilets jaunes slogan:
‘They talk about the end of the world and we’re talking about the end of
the month.’

‘Whose side are you on?’, leftists love to ask. Okay then, whose side
are you on now? Hard-working people who want to keep their lives and the
society we all live in fit, healthy and functioning, or the
self-indulgent predictors of doom who think publicly performing their
eco-neuroses should take precedence over everything else? I know who I’m
with. I just hope the working-class revolt against Insulate Britain
turns into a larger rebellion against the deathly, regressive cult of
climate-change alarmism. Now that’s a revolt I’d go to the barricades for.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-praise-of-the-working-class-revolt-against-insulate-britain

[Noah Sombrero]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2021 09:36:52 +0100, Julian <julia...@gmail.com>
wrote:

You mean wealthy people care enough about environmental issues to
carry signs and glue themselves to roads? Oh, I don't think so.
Mostly they distinctly don't care about much except for more money.

Protesters should have learned something by now. Small groups don't
accomplish much. Even one time large groups are a waste of time. If
you can't put a million people in the street day after day, forget it.
In the 60's that was possible, and some things did get changed for a
while. These days, people are too tied down with high rents, debts,
and a job that must be tended to day after day to pay for it all. So
no effective protest is possible.
--
Noah Sombrero