There’s long been something very noticeable about ‘climate protests’, especially the glue-yourselves-to-the-road variety. That’s just how bourgie the protesters are. From their saint, Swedish doom-goblin Greta Thunberg, the hyper-privileged offspring of millionaire luvvies, right down to the ‘striking’ students in their private school blazers and hyphenated surnames.
On the other hand, the people they’re so deliberately inconveniencing are almost uniformly working class.
It’s the same story with protests against mass immigration and illegal immigration: it’s the snobs versus the slobs. After all, it’s not the middle-class suburbs where the boatloads of millions of illegals are dumped. When governments buy up houses and flats to put up illegals at the taxpayer’s expense, they’re not buying them in Mayfair or Islington.
Since Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets council announced that the hotel would be used to house asylum seekers, protesters gather daily. Steel fencing has been erected to guard the entrance. Police officers line up on the edge of the pavement. Protesters attend regularly. They wear British flags, Nike Tech tracksuits, with many in face masks and balaclavas to hide their identities. Some protestors are very glamorous, knowing they might be on TV. Others are in sliders.
Then the ‘counter-protesters’ arrive, tilting their heads and bleating about raaaaycism!
Many are young women. Some have colourful hair and septum piercings, others wear Birkenstocks and keffiyehs. Even local resident Gary Stevenson, trader turned left-wing YouTuber, turns up to gawk at the protesters. I ask him what he thinks of the protest, he says I’ll have to speak to his agent. The police presence is heavy.
Stevenson is a multi-millionaire Oxford graduate who claimed to have been Citibank’s most profitable trader globally. It takes a lot of money to afford to be a socialist, after all. You can bet he’s not rubbing shoulders with many council-flat residents.
Class, not race, is the driving force of division here. Working-class rage is boiling up in the UK. Canary Wharf is in the borough of Tower Hamlets, which has the highest rate of child poverty in the UK. The overall poverty rate is nearly double the average for London. Research shows that social cohesion breaks down in deprived areas. Here, it’s not just breaking down; it’s shattering. The protesters aren’t angry about ethnicity, but economics.
Locals resent the government funding full-board accommodation for asylum seekers while they struggle. As an asylum seeker in Britain, the government covers your basic needs: accommodation, financial support that can add up to nearly £50 a week, healthcare and education. Councils such as Wandsworth have even launched a scheme where asylum seekers can get a 50 per cent discount on Lime and Forest bikes. To add insult to injury, the protestors hear a prime minister repeatedly telling them that things will get worse before they get better. One cleaner who spoke to the Sun said staff at the hotel had been given redundancy letters when it became asylum accommodation. ‘There’s people here that work hard, day in and day out,’ one woman outside the hotel tells me: ‘They can’t afford a place like this. Why are they [asylum seekers] getting it?’
The yobs are well aware of the toffs sneering at them from the high pinnacle of their generational privilege.
The resentment among work-class protesters towards the counter-demonstrators, the main political parties and the country’s senior politicians is on display. ‘My grandad fought for this country and then you’ve got people like that – Daddy’s money,’ one man says, gesturing towards the counter protestors.
Daddy’s money funds an awful lot of activism for these middle-class twits. The same smug tilty-heads who are fixtures at ‘climate’ protests are also the same “dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers”, as Orwell called them, who are flocking seamlessly to ‘pro-Palestine’ activism. Not because they’re particularly knowledgeable about the Middle East (as Douglas Murray has noted, they are instead ‘passionately ignorant’) any more than they are about climate science, but because protesting is what they do.
Support for Palestine Action is merely the latest example of what has been dubbed the ‘omnicause’. Whether they’re demonstrating for Palestine, trans rights or the environment, it’s essentially the same people doing the same thing, but under supposedly different labels. If you drew a Venn diagram of Palestine, eco and trans activists, you would draw a simple circle, because they are basically the same people. They aren’t protestors with a focus; they protest about everything, everywhere.
And Orwell’s warning about “Ignorance is Strength” is instead their guiding star.
Advocates of the omnicause tend to have a shared trait: a deep ignorance of the individual cause they happen to be protesting about. Pick, for example, a random Palestine marcher and ask them what ‘From the River to the Sea’ means – which river, which sea? – and you’ll more than likely be met with a blank stare.
That’s because they don’t actually know much or care about any of the actual issues; rather, they are protesting against society itself.
It’s not even that.
What the protesting is about is almost irrelevant: protesting itself is the cause.
Protesting is exciting. It makes essentially useless people feel important. More even than that, it fills the hollow void at the centre of their lives. People with meaningful lives fill their spare time with meaningful things: spending time with family, helping out in their communities, passively recreating in useful ways such as reading or indulging hobbies.
Protesters, well, protest. It’s all they do. It’s all they have. Look at the rows of happy little faces behind the clenched fists: they’re having the time of their silly little lives. It’s their idea of a weekend outing.
Anything rather than make themselves useful.
