Delingpole: Why Is Boris Johnson Allowing Eco-Fascists to Run Riot in Britain?

Activists from the Extinction Rebellion climate action group protest outside the Internati
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James Delingpole

Extinction Rebellion vandals are digging up the lawns outside Cambridge’s grandest college Trinity and have blocked one of the roundabouts near the city centre.

Why aren’t the police arresting them? Why should taxpayers have to pay for the damage done? And what does this say about the future of Britain under a green tyranny where hardcore environmental activists and the Boris Johnson administration appear to have formed an alliance in opposition to the British people?

Here are the scenes in Cambridge today, dodgy anarchists wearing the fashionable Extinction Rebellion hat, digging up Cambridge’s manicured lawns under the rainbow flag.

And here are the same unruly mob closing down one of Cambridge’s thoroughfares, as if it’s entirely up to them who does and doesn’t get to use the public highway.

And here are local people fast losing patience with the apparent reluctance of the authorities — notably Cambridge police — to do the job they are paid for and maintain law and order.

Shockingly, almost unbelievably, instead of clearing away Extinction Rebellion’s makeshift roadblock, the local police have actually chosen to formalise the protest by using their own ’emergency police powers’ to close roads officially. Buses have been diverted. ‘Pedestrians and cyclists will not be affected’, the Cambridge Police Twitter account tells us primly and with, perhaps, a hint of relish at being able to participate in this orgy of environmental virtue-signalling.

None of this should have been allowed to happen. You may say – not unreasonably – that this is God’s punishment against Cambridge for being such a stronghold of entrenched Social Justice Warrior stupidity; you may argue — again quite correctly — that because lots of people in Cambridge share Extinction Rebellion’s environmental concerns and support a lot of its aims this is simply a case of poetic justice, the biter bit; you may say that having appointed a talentless, thick, failed Civil Service apparatchik such as Dame Sally Davies as its next Master, Trinity lost all claim to being a serious academic institution so frankly who cares what happens to its poxy swards?

But the wider and more important issue here surely is that Britain’s energy, environmental – and now, policing – policies have been devolved to the eco-fascist extreme.

Extinction Rebellion is a ‘destabilising and extremist’ organisation; its objective is ‘system change’, which means bringing down Britain’s existing democratic system. If achieved, this would cause ‘rapid economic disaster’.

These are the words of a report, co-written last year by Richard Walton, formerly head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command.

How can it be possible that a government committed to restoring law and order to broken Britain can let be allowing such destabilising extremists to be causing such mayhem with such impunity?

Earlier this year, the government had a brief chance to outlaw Extinction Rebellion, initially by publicly acknowledging it for the menace it is.

It had the perfect chance when Extinction Rebellion (XR) was included by counter-terrorism police on a list of extremist ideologies that should be reported to the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent programme.

But when leftist activists including the Guardian kicked up a massive stink about this supposed injustice, Boris Johnson’s virtue-signalling ministers seized the chance to express outrage that a ‘peaceful’ protest group could be bracketed with terrorists.

Never mind that Extinction Rebellion causes more economic damage to Britain than all its more violent terrorist equivalents put together — policing it in London alone cost more than £37 million last year, more than twice the budget for its Violent Crime Taskforce: we are effectively being asked to accept that because Extinction Rebellion hasn’t tried to kill anyone and because a few upper-middle-class airheads and brainwashed government ministers think their aims are kind of fluffy and cute, they can, therefore, close down the public highway and dig up ancient lawns and generally make a nuisance of themselves at their leisure.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself — always and ever keener to be liked more than he is to take a moral stand on any issue – has helped sow the seeds of future ruin by failing to confront Extinction Rebellion. Instead, he has given them carte blanche with idiot declarations like the one he made last year when he said:

“I deplore their tactics but I basically think that they are right to rebel against the extinctions that are taking place.”

First, what extinctions is he talking about? There have been none recently — certainly none ever caused by ‘climate change’.

Second, what kind of message does it send out to these extremists to tell them that essentially the moral justice of their cause has the endorsement of the Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson’s administration is heading towards green ruination – and it has only itself to blame. These protests in Cambridge are merely a taste of the disruption to come. No one, especially not in the working-class communities of the North and the Midlands, voted Conservative at the last election in order to have their streets blocked, their council tax increased, and their cities defiled by patchouli smelling trustafarians called Cressida and Rupert.

On this issue, as on so many others — from the Huawei deal currently souring Anglo-American relations to the HS2 behemoth about to cut a very, very expensive swathe through some of England’s most beautiful countryside — the urgent question needs to be asked: what do Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ think they are playing at?

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