Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, has been brought to a standstill by at least two industrial-size drones, flying above the perimeter fence in what looks to be a targeted act of economic terrorism. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, tens of thousands of passengers have had their Christmas holiday plans horribly disrupted, and the economic damage will run into the many millions.

What kind of bastards would do such a cruel and heartless thing?

Well the local police appear to be ruling out “terror”. (Which is PC code for “something to do with Islam”.)

#GatwickDrones | We are carrying out a joint search w/ @Gatwick_Airport for the operators of #drones sighted at #Gatwick. Public safety is paramount and we will take all available actions to disrupt this deliberate act. There are no indications to suggest this is terror related. pic.twitter.com/J36d0Xzo2G — Sussex Police (@sussex_police) December 20, 2018

So my guess is that it is the work of eco loons.

It requires a certain kind of psychopathology, after all, to cold-bloodedly set out to ruin the Christmas of tens of thousands of passengers as they try to escape the rain and gloom of Britain for a spot of winter sun or to visit loved ones living abroad.

You could only do such a thing, I would suggest, if you were a) delinquent and amoral or b) you felt you were justified in your actions by some higher moral cause.

a) is possible but unlikely: these are industrial-sized drones with long-lasting batteries, which have been flown over a period of hours. If it were just bored or drunken kids they would have given up by now.

b) seems far more plausible. And if it’s not Islamists — which seems likely: they prefer causing actual death to mere disruption — then the obvious candidates are environmental terrorists.

Eco loons hate airports. It’s an ideological thing. Airports = carbon footprints. Carbon footprints = bad, m’kay?

One possible candidate is the campaign group Plane Stupid. Their heyday was the late Noughties, when they grabbed a certain amount of attention with a 2009 video of polar bears dropping out of the sky and splatting on the pavement — just like happens if too many people go on holiday.

In the 2000s, they were responsible for a string of disruptive protests at airports around the United Kingdom.

In 2015, at Heathrow Airport, they caused 22 flights to be cancelled when they cut through the perimeter fence and lay on the runway.

Another contender is the British branch of Black Lives Matter. Quite what race-baiting political activism has to do with “climate change” is not exactly clear. But it was Black Lives Matter activists who were responsible for the previous major airport protest in Britain when in 2016 they closed down the runway of London City Airport.

Really, though, the name of the umbrella group which may be responsible for this act of economic terrorism is irrelevant. Whether they’re protesting against badger culls or capitalism, air travel or fox hunting, #MeToo or fracking, it’s usually the same ragbag of mostly white, middle-class, ‘uni’-educated protestors involved.

As I reported at the time, that Black Lives Matter protest featured not a single actual black person. There were, however, lots of spoilt trustafarians sponging off their rich white mummies and daddies and with bright futures ahead of them. That last bit was probably what impressed the judge when the case came to trial and they all got off with non-custodial sentences. One of them was even heard boasting afterwards “Go, white privilege!”

Then there’s the most recent eco-activist group to disrupt London — Extinction Rebellion. According to the BBC, this is made up of “a network of activists including former members of groups ranging from Earth First! environmentalists to the anti-corporate Occupy movement.” (See what I mean? These people are interchangeable.)

Their manifesto is the usual Watermelon mix of socialism and half-baked greenery.

They want the Government to “tell the truth about the climate” and “enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025.” In other words, they want the end of Western Industrial Civilisation.

This, essentially, was the main discovery of my book Watermelons. I set out to discover what it is, exactly, that motivates so many disparate groups to campaign against a problem — catastrophic man-made global warming — for which there is so little real world evidence.

And the answer — certainly in the case of the more hardcore green activists — is that it’s not so much about what they’re for as about what they’re against.

Scratch beneath the surface of their soap-dodging skin and what you find is that they don’t really give a damn about the environment: if they did, they wouldn’t be supporting bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes; they’d be supporting fracking and nuclear, both of which have a much smaller footprint relative to the energy they produce.

What they’re really against is Western Industrial Civilisation — and the people who live in it. Like all Malthusians, they are misanthropes. They don’t like people (of whom they think there are too many) and if these people can’t be executed — as they’d probably prefer — then at least they should be denied their freedoms and bossed around by experts from globalist institutions like the European Union and the United Nations.

Targeting a busy airport at Christmas is a perfect expression of this misanthropy, which hides its poisonous malignity behind a mask of caring, environmental righteousness.

I hope when they finally catch the bastards the judge throws away the key. Pour encourager les autres…