Trees, tents and banners on Waterloo Bridge

Notes on Extinction Rebellion

On Sunday the 21st I went with my brother and sister to the Extinction Rebellion protests in London. I was planning on joining them anyway while I waited for my train back to France, where I currently live, and Dylan and Issy have been mobilising as part of the school strike movement and were hoping to see Greta Thunberg. Despite the fact that she arrived after we had to leave, we were very impressed by what we saw in London.

To clarify, I am by no means an authority on these protests or this movement, I am a member insofar as anyone can be by adding your email to their website via the “join the rebellion” button, but beyond a few hours on Sunday I have not been an active participant. I’ve been unable, they launched while I was in France. What I am laying out here is simply my thoughts based on the snapshot I saw of the protests. It is not an evidenced argument nor a deeply researched study, simply what I saw and what I thought about what I saw.

On arriving in London Issy, Dylan and I headed to Parliament Square. Camps blocked three of the roads and (I think) the police had to block the final one as there would have been nowhere for cars to go. The statues of figures that would likely have been sympathetic to the movement, Nelson Mandela, Ghandi etc. bore the XR logo. People had climbed up the trees and were staying there in some form of occupation. They had strung a banner between them saying “May stop profiting from war. Citizen’s assemblies now”. I took a photo and sent it to the TBFB (Take a Break From Brexit) group chat — there is crossover between TBFB and XR, many people on the campaign have at some point or other taken part in XR protests and I thought they would be pleased that we weren’t the only ones calling for citizen’s assemblies. Police were starting to clear the camp nearest to parliament. Some people who had probably been there for days were crying. To be fair to the cops, they were being civil and explaining why they had to do it. They were also doing it very slowly. It looked more like weary traders taking down stalls at the end of a market day than it did police pulling apart a protest camp.

What struck me about the protesters in that part of Parliament Square, which initially troubled me, was the prevailing whiteness of the protesters and the fact that almost everyone looked exactly how one would imagine climate protesters to look. Think dreads, piercings, tie dye, hemp and loose, floral or eastern-inspired clothing. A historic problem with the environmental movement is that it keeps itself alive by establishing its own esoteric culture which keeps the participants committed and active but renders it relatively inaccessible to others preventing a mass-movement from breaking out (see Radicals by Jamie Bartlett). Not to be rude to the people in that camp, but the hippie-look is in my opinion bad optics, were it exclusively populated by those types I think it would struggle, hence my initial disappointment. Perhaps I am misjudging the wider population here and maybe environmental politics is no longer seen as the exclusive preserve of hippies, but I still think it would be better to look more like the wider country in order to attract more people who want to join but are perturbed by the seeming dress code and perceived norms of the climate justice movement. Incidentally I think this is why Greta Thunberg is such a powerful figure. She is wickedly smart, eloquent and well researched, but she looks like people’s daughters, or in the case of the children she strikes with, like them. She isn’t a distant voice reciting facts from the academy.

We crossed the square to a bigger camp. Here there were several POC, and some people who weren’t dressed like they’d just walked out of Woodstock. This camp was definitely trying to make it accessible, and more power to them. They had laid out a series of graphics about which species were going/had gone extinct and a cut out of David Attenborough with an XR logo and the slogan “watch my Our Planet documentary”. I was reminded of the vegan group AV, whose strategy involves the Cube of Truth shock tactic — standing in Guy Fawkes masks holding screens displaying scenes of animal cruelty while unmasked volunteers gently evangelise the benefits of veganism to the onlookers. XR’s tactics were not this in your face, but there was certainly a symbiosis between the harder-edged, generally older members of the movement keeping camps in place by refusing to move, and the softer public facing approach of those explaining what was going on.

A woman was speaking French to two onlookers. When she was done, I asked if she was French, interested to see if she had come from France to take part in the movement. She hadn’t, she was Scottish, but spoke French and had spent a lot of time there. We spoke about the police, who were negotiating behind her. She was in agreement that the police had been relatively gentle, she said that she had seen some people that she thought had been treated too roughly, and quite rightly seemed to regard the Met police with a certain suspicion, but she had spent a lot of time in the Calais Jungle and therefore had experienced the CRS riot squad in France whose preponderance for violence and general thuggery I can attest to. I’ve been trying to work out what the police’s **relatively** soft response means for the movement. The repression the Gilets Jaunes movement suffered in France recently, and that the British student movement suffered in the early 2010s indicated at the time that the establishment were scared and wanted these movements gone. Does this mean that the establishment aren’t worried about XR? We’ve heard Sajid Javid make another pitch for Tory leader calling for the “full force of the law” to be brought down on XR, but this seems to be empty rhetoric designed to curry favour with the increasingly dogmatic and extreme Tory membership. It seems unlikely that the political establishment would be that scared about these protests at this time, with Brexit despite the extension still sucking huge amounts of energy out of politics. The theory circulating among the protesters is that these protests are convenient for the police, who have been feeling the simultaneous pressures of austerity and blistering tabloid headlines about things like knife crime and so, consequently they have been deliberately slow at dealing with them. My guess would also be that Cressida Dick’s relatively recent appointment to Police and Crime Commissioner has something to do with it. A.) The police are no longer necessarily the natural allies of the Conservative party as they too have been exposed to austerity and B.) This younger PCC might be more aware of the optics of violently repressing a peaceful protest movement many of whom are elderly or quite young. It is therefore a testament to XR that their principles of non-violence and no drugs no alcohol seem to have been rigidly upheld. Beyond the obvious disruption deliberately caused by their tactics, they have handed no excuse for repression or delegitimisation.

As I suggested, I’m not sure the political class are taking too much notice currently. I think XR are doing an excellent job of consciousness raising. I think these issues are becoming more salient in people’s minds and that politicians who have ignored these issues might find their disinterest comes back to bite them later, but that does little to promote action now which, as XR say, we desperately need. As I said, I only saw a snapshot of the movement and am not involved in any coordination so I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but when I told the Scottish protester that XR should probably be targeting capital — banks and hedge funds with money in fossil fuels, who are likely to flinch at any bad PR — in order to force divestment, she suggested that that should really be the job of governments. This may not be the wider view of XR but I think they understand that to solve the environmental crisis, a post-capitalism is needed — so why, when you recognise that capitalism is the problem are we not targeting the primary actor in capitalism, the firm? This is not to say they shouldn’t pressure governments — they absolutely should, but I think an expansion is needed. This could also help take bigger protests outside London to raise consciousness further and help shape the views of the electorate across the country. It is hard to organise big rallies outside the capital, but XR groups do exist beyond it — this movement has ambitious goals, so it should use ambitious tactics!

After Parliament Square we went to the occupation at Waterloo bridge. This was by far the most uplifting and most concerning section of protests that we saw (by the time we got to Oxford Circus it had been cleared and we didn’t have time to take part in the legal protests at Marble Arch). When we got there we found that what is normally an ugly, concrete eyesore of a bridge had been transformed. Various camps had been set up along it to block the road, and there were the usual displays of propaganda, regalia and graffiti to add colour to the camps. But, what really struck me was that they had turned the aesthetically drab, environmentally disastrous bridge into a garden bridge. Obviously during the protests it had been pedestrianised — given that was the point, but they also gave people a glimpse of the future that they imagined. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams take apart prefigurative movements in the section on “folk politics” in their book Inventing The Future. While, as Srnicek and Williams suggest, the communism of the camps present in most protest movements involving the occupation of public space — the sharing of resources, the fair division of labour with no hierarchy — probably won’t force tthe end ofcapitalism by creating a vacuum against capitalism but within capitalism; showing people what a pedestrianised central London with nature ingrained into the architecture of the city could be like, seems like a very powerful way to raise consciousness and support for their aims. We walked past a man giving a direct-action seminar to a few people sat in a circle as we made our way towards the crowd at the end of the bridge. I didn’t stop to hear what he was saying, it could have been a load of shit, but this also seemed positive. Political and tactical education is vitally important for sustaining a movement. A big organising model that empowers people with the skills they need to be politically active and effective will allow a movement to snowball just as the initial Sanders campaign did (see George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage).

We got to the main crowd at the end of the bridge just as police had started to clear it. A kindly activist approached us and told us if we wanted to sit down, we could be part of the occupation and show solidarity with the people who had established the blockade. She reassured us that we wouldn’t be arrested if we didn’t want to be (police were explaining which laws were being broken then giving them a chance to move), but that we could help slow down the clearing of the camp. We sat down and joined the occupation and the song that gave the moment a bizarre ritualistic feel as people repeated “Climate Justice now// People will rise like water// we need to turn this system round// in the name of our great granddaughters” over and over again as people, sat on the road as we were, were gradually arrested. What troubled me was not this absurd ritualistic quality, which I think probably unnerved the cops slightly and **maybe** helped drum the message in a bit to them, but that every time someone refused to move, they would be dragged away by the cops to be arrested… and people would cheer. Part and parcel of XR’s strategy is courting arrest which seems to me to be a problem. I would gladly be arrested for something I believe in if I thought my arrest would do something — if it protected something worth fighting for. In the case of this occupation you could make the argument for it, but the cheering and deliberately seeking out arrest is an issue. I’m writing this on the 22nd of April, as the XR protests continue, it is also Stephen Lawrence day — 26 years to the day that 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack, after which the 5 suspects were not charged, prompting the Macpherson report which concluded that “institutional racism, within the terms of its description set out in Paragraph 6.34 above, exists both in the Metropolitan Police Service and in other Police Services and other institutions countrywide”. To court arrest in this environment is to exclude people of colour whose relationship to the police cannot be understood by a white protester. Climate justice must be universal, so in order to include everyone, such issues as the institutional racism of the police must be taken into account. There were POC at the XR protests, but as this Galdem article by Leah Cowan and this thread by Sam Swann show, XR’s strategy of courting arrest is not conducive to sustaining a mass movement reflective of the entire population. I think what XR are doing is great and I will join them again in their work. But they have problems that must be overcome; and quickly. The movement is only in its infancy so when this set of protests are over they must turn inwards and make necessary changes to ensure that they don’t whitewash climate justice and can target both governments and capital effectively. Despite these flaws though it is great to see mass direct action on British streets. Let the rebellion continue.