London: The UK is eager to show off its environmental credentials an important UN summit in the coming days but for the moment, is having trouble dealing with mounting protests at home from climate activists.
Direct action group Extinction Rebellion has brought cities to a standstill and vowed to do the same at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow later this month.
In recent weeks, a previously unheard-of offshoot, Insulate Britain, has also caused gridlock on motorways and main roads, sparking scores of arrests and a court injunction.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday called the protesters a “confounded nuisance” and welcomed moves for “new powers to insulate them snugly in prison where they belong”.
The government is keen to lead the way on reducing carbon emissions and ensure new binding targets to cut global warming are met at the summit.
But it also takes its cues from a largely right-wing British press that is increasingly hostile towards the activists and calls them an “eco-mob” and “enviro-idiots”.
Both Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain have been accused of putting lives in danger with their tactics, which have included protesters gluing themselves to the tarmac and sitting in front of rush-hour traffic.
On Monday, footage showed one desperate driver begging to be let through a protest in south London so she could follow an ambulance carrying her mother to hospital.
When Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam was asked whether he would block an ambulance carrying a dying patient, his reply was simply: “Yes.”
“We are heartbroken by all of this. We’re not going out there to stop ambulances getting through,” said Tim Speers of Insulate Britain.
Speers, 36, from Cornwall, in southwest England, bears little resemblance to the media caricature of an environmentalist — a bearded, woolly hatted “crusty” as Johnson has called them.
Clean-shaven, fast-talking and a former professional poker player, Speers said he left his old life behind to fight climate change through civil disobedience.
“As soon as they come out with a meaningful statement that they will get on with their job, they will meet their own targets, I will get off the road,” he said.
“I cannot sit by while this government completely fails the citizens it is obliged to protect.”
Britain has seen many environmental protests in the past, like the ones over infrastructure projects such as a road bypass near Newbury, western England, in the 1990s.
Daniel Hooper, nicknamed “Swampy”, was one of the activists who tried to block construction by tunnelling under that site, and he re-emerged earlier this year on another protest in London. AFP
