Enough is Enough: XR co-founder filmed calling for 'take down' of civilisation

By Rachael Venables

A co-founder of Extinction Rebellion has been filmed at an event calling for activists to “take down” civilisation as part of the group’s disruptive fight for climate change.

LBC can reveal today, as part of Nick Ferrari’s campaign for police to have greater powers to clamp down on the group, that Simon Bramwell spoke publicly at a meeting hosted by Deep Green Resistance UK, calling for them to adopt more extreme tactics.

Nick Ferrari’s Enough is Enough campaign is calling for changes to be made to the Public Order Act to give the police power to ban any protest that will cause serious public disorder. At present this power is limited to just protest marches.

Mr Bramwell spoke at a meeting by a group named By Any Means Necessary?, which was advertised on Facebook.

The talk was advertised online with a slogan asking whether nonviolent action was the most “effective tactic for bringing about climate change.”

Simon Bramwell making the controversial comments about Extinction Rebellion. Picture: YouTube / Deep Green Resistance

“As the climate crisis worsens daily and governments worldwide fail to take meaningful action, it has never been more imperative to discuss all tactics available for resistance. Time is running out and those in power are not listening to mounting calls for radical change,” the event’s advert states.

Mr Bramwell was filmed at the event saying: “Extinction Rebellion is the spirit of our age. It contains absolutely every dichotomy and absolutely every flaw and beauty that our present society encapsulates. It is white-supremacist, it is racist. It is also very very beautiful and there is incredible people doing incredible work within the organisation. It is also deeply deeply patriarchal and people like Roger Hallam completely and utterly 100 percent exemplify that patriarchy"

“It becomes clear to me that what we need to do more than anything else is to kill the myths that have got us here.

“And to transform the myths that have got us here and this is no easy task. And it is up to all of us, en masse along with doing things like shutting down fossil fuel industries, direct sabotage, mass civil disobedience, we must also transform the myths that have got us here, the myths that we are in fact civilised.

“We are facing the hardest of times at the moment. Our civilisation is displaying every sign of collapse and because we have become so separated from nature, as that collapse occurs that pent up animal in us is gonna be released in utter savagery.

“And it is part of our duty in my opinion that we've also got to not only take down civilisation but shepherd ourselves and incoming generations back into a state of wilding as it were, into like a feral consciousness that is also one of the biggest tasks remaining to us.

"We are not going to be able to convince civilisation to 'lose' as it were.

"We can't convince people that we are going to have to do without food. We can't convince people that they're going to have to do without more flights.

"We can't convince people that they are going to maybe *have to see their child die* because we don't simply have the machinery and technology to keep them alive any longer.

"So we have to offer them something else along as these trajectories of civil disobedience and direct sabotage of civilisation..."

Mr Bramwell was a key figure in the formation of Extinction Rebellion, whose actions brought London grinding to a halt when they blockaded five bridges across the Thames in November 2018. Their actions frustrated the efforts of police who were forced to arrest people, process them and release them, only to have them return to the protest site hours later. E

xtinction Rebellion said in a statement: "Extinction Rebellion is a broad church of people - including lawyers, doctors, electricians, nurses, farmers and teachers - who have come together to ask our government to act to avert the worst effects of climate change.

"Simon’s views as expressed in this video do not represent the position of Extinction Rebellion as a whole."

Additional reporting by Iggy Ostanin, LBC's Investigative Reporter