Insulate Britain Invokes WW2 Collateral Damage to Justify Deaths Caused by Protests

Insulate Britain protest, 27 September, 2021
Insulate Britain
Victoria Friedman

The spokesman for Insulate Britain implicitly stated that deaths caused by ambulances forced to wait in traffic because of one of his protests was like allowing soldiers in World War Two to die in order to keep secret from Nazi Germany that the UK had cracked the code for the Enigma machine, per his interpretation of historical events he had seen in the 2014 film The Imitation Game.

Liam Norton, now infamous for his wild and frequent comparisons of his cause to the Second World War, made the comments on talkRADIO on Tuesday, while calling host Julia Hartley-Brewer a “traitor”.

Footage went viral on social media on Monday of members of the public dragging Insulate Britain protesters off of Wandsworth Bridge road, and demanding the eco-extremists let an ambulance through. While at Blackwall Tunnel, a tearful and distraught woman begged protesters to allow her to pass to see her elderly, ill mother in hospital. Craig Scudder of Isulate Britain later told Sky News of the woman’s plight that while it was “devastating”, the eco-extremist group’s “hands were tied”.

Adept at avoiding answering questions, Insulate Britain spokesman Liam Norton side-stepped responding to whether he supported the idea that deaths as a result of his protests were justified for the greater good of the climate, instead saying: “You’re in the process of destroying this country by your facilitating inaction, by criticising the state of the climate et cetera. You’re playing a really dangerous game, Julia. A really dangerous game.”

Asked again to answer the question, Norton replied: “If you allow me the space, it’s quite a difficult moral argument to make. You know Turing in The Imitation Game? They had to allow British soldiers to die because if they’d have stopped every single attack through cracking the Enigma code, the Nazis would have found out that they were cracking the code. So they had to allow people to die.”

Asked a third time if the death of an innocent person was justified, Norton answered: “What I’m saying is, we’re in this awful moral situation that our health service is going to collapse within a few decades… You’re playing a really dangerous game because in five, 10 years’ time, people that are taking your position will be seen as traitors because you’re helping to destroy the future of this country.”

Norton made the remarks after the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR) — of which Insulate Britain is a splinter group — Roger Hallam said that he would still block traffic even if it meant stopping an ambulance with a dying patient getting through, replying when posed the question on The London Economic podcast: “Yes.”

Elaborating, Hallam claimed: “What we’re talking about is the loss of people’s pensions in the next ten years, the loss of people’s incomes, the mass migration of hundreds of millions of people, the indescribable injustice to people of colour in the global south because of the collective selfishness of people in the north.

“We’re talking about the biggest crime in human history imposed by the rich against the global poor.”

This would not be the first time the eco-activist devalued the meaning of the loss of human life, when in 2019 he described the Holocaust as “just another fuckery in human history”.

That same year during a speech to an Amnesty International event, Hallam said that Extinction Rebellion protesters “are not just sending out emails and asking for donations. We are going to force the governments to act, and if they don’t, we’ll bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose. And yes — some may die in the process.”

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