Rock and Roll icon Mick Jagger has lamented Donald Trump as a polarizing and rude figure who is 'tearing apart' America's environmental safeguards - but the US president wasn't the only world leader to be admonished in the singer's extraordinary diatribe Saturday.

The Rolling Stones frontman said America should be setting the environmental standard for the world to follow, but, under the leadership of Trump, Jagger believes environment controls are being decimated.

Jagger, 76, says he is 'absolutely behind' young climate change activists who had earlier occupied the red carpet at the Venice film festival, where the new psychological thriller he's starring in, 'The Burnt Orange Heresy', was debuting.

He then deplored how politics has descended into a circus of name-calling, 'including in my own country this week' - a reference to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson comparing opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to a 'big girl's blouse' and a 'chlorinated chicken'.

Rock and Roll icon Mick Jagger has broken his political silence to accuse President Donald Trump of 'tearing apart' America's environmental safeguards in an extraordinary rant Saturday

The Rolling Stones frontman said America should be setting the environmental standard for the world to follow, but, under the leadership of Trump, Jagger believes environment controls are being decimated

Mick Jagger: An icon of counter-culture in the 1960s Shortly after the Rolling Stones announced themselves to the world with their first number one hit single, It’s All Over Now, in 1964, the band’s irresistible frontman Mick Jagger quickly cemented himself as a counter-culture icon and middle-class rebel. The band’s 1968 track Street Fighting Man typified Jagger’s controversial persona. With the song’s themes feeding of some of the year’s most violent political events and student revolts in Europe and the US, Jagger called for insurrection on the streets of London – prompting the song to be adopted as a revolutionary anthem. ‘This country is so weird,’ he said of the UK in May, 1968. ‘It always does things slightly differently, always more moderately and always very boringly, most of it, the changes are suppressed - the people suppress them.’ Attempting to spearhead a cultural revolution, Jagger took part in the now infamous Grosvenor Street riots in London, marching alongside activist Tariq Ali and a swell of 10,000 other protesters from Oxford Street to the US Embassy, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But as the protest morphed into a violent riot with more than 200 arrests and 86 people injured, Jagger scarpered from the square and into the safety of a nearby home when the street fighting men and women got all too much for the then 24-year-old. The brutal reality of the riot ended Jagger’s short-lived dabble with front-line politics. Throughout much of the 1970s, he instead billed himself as a decadent, drugged-up sex god providing little commentary on sociopolitical issues. Despite his preference to stay out of political debate in the years since, Jagger has never quite lost the revolutionary image that he crafted for himself more than 50 years ago. Advertisement

Jagger also bewailed 'the polarization and incivility in public life', although the one-time bad boy of 1960s rock admitted he was 'not always for civility' himself.

'But when you see it now... in so many countries, including my own this last week, but particularly the US, it's a sea change.

'It is not about manners,' Jagger insisted, saying he was fearful about 'where all this polarization and rudeness and lying is going to lead us.'

More worrying still, said the singer, was that what little environmental safeguards there were were being swept away across the globe.

Jagger blasted Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

'We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the US, where all the environmental controls that were put in place - that were just about adequate - have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out,' he added.

Jagger, who rarely comments on politics, said 'the US should be the world leader in environmental control but now it has decided to go the other way.

'I am so glad that people feel so strongly about that that they want to protest,' he said, referring to young activists from Greta Thunberg's Friday for Future movement who sprayed 'Listen to your children' and 'Make the red carpet green' on the festival's red carpet.

Co-star Donald Sutherland echoed his call to protest, and urged people to take to the streets and vote out Trump, Johnson and Brazil's far-right leader Jair Balsonaro.

'Mick is right, the controls (in the US) under Obama were barely adequate - now they are being torn apart. It's the same in Brazil and they will be torn apart in England after Brexit,' he warned.

'When you are 85 years old and you have children and grandchildren, we will leave them nothing if we do not vote those people out of office in Brazil and in London and in Washington.

'They are ensuring the ruination of the world', something that 'we have all contributed to', Sutherland added.

Jagger, now 76, says he was 'absolutely behind' young climate change activists who had earlier occupied the red carpet at the Venice film festival, where the new psychological thriller he's starring in, 'The Burnt Orange Heresy', was debuting

Jagger deplored how politics has descended into a circus of name-calling, 'including in my own country this week' - a reference to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (above) comparing opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to a 'big girl's blouse' and a 'chlorinated chicken'

Jagger blasted Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. 'We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the US, where all the environmental controls that were put in place - that were just about adequate - have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out,' he added

Co-star Donald Sutherland echoed Jagger's call to protest, and urged people to take to the streets and vote out Trump, Johnson and Brazil's far-right leader Jair Balsonaro

Jagger plays an art collector in a stylish thriller where it 'is never clear who is telling truth'.

'This movie is about fake[ness] and truth speaks to some of that, so it is part of this modern dialogue,' he told reporters.

'We are going through a very strange time. You know you are living in it but you don't know what is going to happen at the end.'

The Venice film festival ends on Saturday, with Roman Polanski's controversy-hit Dreyfus Affair story 'An Officer and a Spy' already bagging the top prize from international critics.

They picked out director Theo Court's 'White on White', about the genocide of native people in Patagonia, for their sidebar prize.

The last two winners of Venice's Golden Lion top prize - 'Roma' and the 'Shape of Water' - have gone on to win best picture at the Oscars.