Let’s insulate Britain from the idiocy of eco-terrorists

Today’s High Court injunction allowing police to remove protesters blocking Britain’s motorways was long overdue.

Insulate Britain gluing themselves to the M25 for a week has already produced a four-car collision, with victims airlifted to hospital, and delayed a mother’s treatment, leaving her paralysed by a stroke. Despite these events, activists claim they “don’t accept that we put lives at risk”. It’s vital that legal and cultural action is taken to insulate Britons from this dangerous brand of eco-extremism.  

As Dan Wootton’s interview with activist Liam Norton explained, the endangerment of lives to exercise political pressure would classify Insulate Britain as ecological terrorists. The action Insulate Britain wishes to force government to take is ‘to produce within four months a legally binding national plan to fully fund’ the insulation of all Britain’s 29 million homes with taxpayer cash. Essentially, they’re sitting in the motorway, blocking your work commute, so the state can take and spend more of your pay-check. 

Insulate Britain is another in a long line of activist vanity projects engineered to make headlines by founder Roger Hallam. Starting with ‘Stop Killing Londoners’ in 2017, Hallam went on to co-create Extinction Rebellion; before being ousted over his comments concerning the Holocaust. But Hallam’s alarmist and extremist rhetoric preceded this insensitive remark. In, 2019, Hallam said ‘forcing the governments to act’ or ‘bring[ing] them down and create[ing] a democracy fit for purpose’ will require ‘some [to] die in the process’. This ‘democracy’ would, paradoxically, be a ‘socialist project’, with Hallam in the ideological driving seat. 

Hallam’s prior protests demonstrated a similar indifference to human suffering. Hallam was arrested at Heathrow Airport for aiming to fly drones into active airspace and ground commercial flights. His ‘Heathrow Pause’ protests constituted a terror threat, in that drones could cause flights to be grounded or collide and crash. Again, Hallam was willing to risk lives to make headlines.  

All of these movements claim the sole solutions to apocalyptic emergencies are the appointment of Hallam himself to a position of public power which lets him implement whichever solutions he deems necessary. His PhD at Kings College on ‘civil disobedience’ exposes Hallam’s own egoism in comparing himself to MLK and Gandhi. This was also an indictment of modern university radicalism; echoed by Dr. Charlie Gardner of the University of Kent making the same comparison in a lecture, calling himself ‘a hero of our times’, and refusing to disavow Hallam when I challenged him on it. 

As memory serves, neither Gandhi nor MLK needed to put non-protesters’ lives and livelihoods at risk to make their point. Neither civil rights icons started movements to easily cede themselves moral gratification in the court of public opinion. They opposed racial segregation because it was the right thing to do. Comparing your comfortable middle-class existence to Churchill fighting Nazism is the height of hubris. 

This trend of eco-socialist radicalism isn’t slowing. A ‘Global Climate Strike’ is planned for September 24th, with (the already expected) student inactivity done now in the name of fighting ‘the climate crisis’, as well as ‘racism, sexism, ableism, class inequality, and more’. This echoes XR founder Stuart Basden’s article admitting ‘Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate’, and instead aims to end the ‘cruelty and violence’ of ‘European ‘civilisation’’, and the ‘delusion[s]’ of ‘white-supremacy’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘hetero-sexism/heteronormativity’, and ‘class hierarchy’. 

Likewise, Greta Thunberg’s op-ed for Project Syndicate, she stated the climate activist movement exists to ‘dismantle’ the ‘Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression’ which have ‘created and fueled’ impending environmental, ‘human rights’, ‘justice’, and ‘political will’ crises.  As Andrew Neil’s interview with Hallam exposed, climate activists have escalated IPCC report projections to apocalyptic proportions, just to smuggle in woke socialism as the sole viable solution; a solution which conveniently places their hands on the elvers of international power.  

Beware any single-cause interpretation of a complex situation which just so happens to validate the preconceived worldview of political activists. The power to make change, rather than change itself, is likely the goal.

These activists’ unwillingness to lead by example exposes their efforts as an unprincipled, ideologically motivated power-grab. To quote Orwell: ‘Every Englishman is a hypocrite.’ Hallam’s home generates four times the carbon of a regular household. Both Hallam and Norton’s homes are single-glazed and without insulation. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson: insulate your room before you go about insulating the world, bucko. 

I speak with authority on this, having laid out a three-point market-based policy plan in a new paper with the Adam Smith Institute. Insulate Britain activists would likewise better serve the planet by staying home, and redirecting their passion toward researching issues and their solutions, rather than marching like foot-soldiers for socialism on behalf of Hallam’s attempts to inflate his ego. Get off the roads, improve your own homes, and don’t open your mouths until your policies are principled and practical. Being vanguards for environmental authoritarianism isn’t making a world worth saving.