The hard choices XR must now make

It may be that the folk in Extinction Rebellion don’t care if they win friends and influence people. Perhaps they believe that a small group of activists can disrupt society so much and for so long that everyone decides to acquiesce to their demands?

The Suffragettes, for example, didn’t mess about. They chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and threw themselves in front of horses in a bid to win women the right to vote. If they’d played nicey-nicey, the male establishment might just have shrugged.

But there’s one important difference between these two movements.

Campaigners for women’s suffrage were addressing a specific and fundamental injustice that could potentially be corrected through legislation. By 1928, women had the same voting rights as men by law. There was a focused goal and after a generation of struggle, it was achieved. That very basic demand was a platform on which later feminists would build. Suffrage on its own, after all, doesn’t deliver equality.

Extinction Rebellion seeks to change the way in which everyone lives their lives.

Legislation might no doubt play a part in this, but it is one small element of the overall equation. Because even though the agenda largely remains unspoken, we are being asked to envisage a world where many of the things we now take for granted would disappear.

Foodstuffs from around the world would no longer be plentiful on the shelves. After all, if we were serious about sustainability, the just-in-time supply chains, packaging and logistics would all have to go. An eco-friendly world would be a self-sufficient one – a prospect which must create a little dissonance for the pro-EU campaigners who fear the clearing of Sainsbury’s shelves through a no-deal Brexit.

Cars would be frowned upon and fossil fuels kept in the ground. With a zero-carbon objective by 2025, we’d be faced with some very dramatic and possibly disorientating changes to our lives.

XR’s radical green philosophy asks us to question the phones and laptops we use, the clothes we wear, the doner kebab we buy. And that week we promised ourselves in Greece? It’s now off limits, unless we’re prepared to spend two days travelling there and two days travelling back.

Of course, the counter argument from XR would be that these are the changes we have to make if human society is to survive on Planet Earth. I am no denier of the science and agree with them that the prognosis is pretty grim. But are they looking for people to make these changes willingly? Or to have the changes imposed upon them?

Do they envisage a world of eco-authoritarianism, where flights are rationed and meat is banned? Or do they want people to voluntarily decide to holiday at home and embrace veganism?

These are not flippant questions. They go to the very heart of the current debate about what XR is as a movement. And I sense that many of the people involved don’t know the answer themselves.

I campaigned in the 1980s against the nuclear threat and was at one point on the National Executive of CND. We too believed we were fighting against an existential threat (one that, incidentally, hasn’t disappeared). People within the movement were prepared at times to disobey the law on moral grounds and to highlight the seriousness of the issue. But no one ever lost sight of the fact that it was fundamentally a campaign to change people’s minds.

At the time, I made countless speeches in schools and colleges and debated against opponents in organisations such as Peace Through NATO. I hoped that these small efforts were part of a plan to gradually shift public opinion. Sure, we may have collectively failed in this quest. But it never crossed our minds that we would somehow force the abandonment of nuclear weapons on to the UK. We assumed that people would eventually agree to it.

And another thing. We were highly focused.

There were, of course, people with ideological agendas who tried to throw us off course. Stalinists wanted CND to be a movement that fostered links with the Eastern Bloc. Trotskyists wanted CND to engage a whole range of unrelated ‘struggles’ and ‘make links’ to other tenuously connected causes. But we always resisted.

In this past week or so, Extinction Rebellion has targeted the City of London and City Airport. These are focused activities. We might dislike the inconvenience, but we understand their point. Unrestricted global capitalism and expanding air travel are a menace to the environment we seek to protect.

But XR activists and affiliates have also turned up at Billingsgate Fish Market. They have focused their attention to MI5 and the BBC. In the latest twist, they tell us they will be targeting the London Underground – an example of environmentally friendly public transport in a world dominated by cars.

If this movement is to have any real success, it needs to make some decisions pretty quickly.

The first is whether it believes in imposition. Is the climate crisis so extreme that it justifies emergency powers to force people to behave in ways they are currently not? If they do believe in that kind of authoritarianism, perhaps they’d be honest enough to spell it out.

But if they don’t, and they think the campaign is actually about winning people over, then they need to stop treating City Airport and London Underground in the same way. Because people just don’t get it. The first target is an unsustainable luxury, while the second is an essential part of life in a sustainable city.

And if they are trying to influence public opinion, the next decision is over structure and organisation. I get the sense of a free-wheeling and decentralised group that allows people to pursue their own pet agendas. If you’re anti-meat, go to Smithfield. If you think the BBC should be a propaganda machine for the environmental movement, go to Portland Place. This needs to be much more coherent if the average person is to understand what the movement is all about.

Finally, they need to tell us something of what their post-capitalist, post-industrial society is going to look like. If it’s a world that people would embrace, why not describe it to us? But if it’s a world they can’t actually yet imagine themselves – or one they know would actually have little appeal – then the mountain they’re climbing is almost certainly insurmountable.