Time for a quick update on climate protest from your correspondent somewhere quite a long way behind the frontline, but still closer than you’ll read in the average news report. Then I’m going to bring it all back home before relating it to the present concerns of this blog around my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
So for starters, I’ve got to say that the British government has played a blinder in containing and derailing climate protest in these isles. If only it had displayed the same level of competence in, like, every single other area of its jurisdiction, the country might be in reasonable shape.
When Extinction Rebellion and then Insulate Britain made waves a couple of years back, with protestors pushing at a ‘fill the jails’ strategy, the powers that be opted not to take the bait and for the most part made sure the jails stayed resolutely empty, so that the protestors scored limited publicity wins. The government claimed it was hamstrung by inadequate legislation (it wasn’t), and that it needed to pass more stringent anti-protest legislation (it did).
The timing of the pandemic and the queen’s death weren’t kind to the movement, and when climate protest faded from the news cycle the government – armed with its shiny new Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill – has struck hard. Punitive prison sentences, over-zealous police clampdowns and, most outrageously in my opinion, the muzzling of defendants in court from mentioning climate change as a motivation for their actions – an abandonment of due process that sets up a very slippery slope indeed. Throw in journalists acting as agents provocateurs and a kind of kneejerk middle-of-the-road political gradualism of the ‘doomism and disruption are no way to get your message across’ kind even from sympathetic commentators, and the narrative descent to climate chaos is sealed.
I’m not uncritically supportive of every climate action I’ve seen, but I’m supportive of the fact that protestors are trying to figure out a better narrative that’s equal to the urgency of the times and that claims public space from the grassroots.
Ah well, at least the Labour Party, which may even get to be in government soon, voted against the police bill and has committed to stop new oil and gas exploration. However, Keir Starmer has also called for tougher sentences for protestors. I have a feeling I know which of these two commitments he’s most likely to honour if he manages to climb the greasy pole to power.
Inevitably, in the face of the harsh new legal regimen social media is abuzz with goons gloating along the lines of ‘serves you right, you self-entitled losers, for stopping ordinary people going about their business’ (expletives omitted). The thought occurs, as I track current temperature and political trends, that soon enough the legislation may also be working admirably well for silencing ordinary people going about their business of trying to secure self-entitlement to a square meal and basic human rights, but anyway.
Closer to home, my dear wife’s involvement in the Insulate Britain protests led to her being named on an injunction taken out by the National Highways Authority against protesting on its roads. She didn’t break the injunction, but the NHA sued all the people named on it for their expenses in serving it, and won in court. Meaning we now have an eye-wateringly large bill running to several thousands of pounds to pay. And also meaning that should any other agency take out a new injunction and copy-and-paste the names, there’s no end to the potential liability. Though that’s probably unlikely.
So that, dear reader, is why I said at the end of my last post that I was in need of the readies and desirous of people to buy my new book. Though, seriously, we’re okay financially, so if you’re minded to donate to a climate change cause please give to one that helps people in greater need than us. If, however, you find my writing worthwhile on its own merits, do please consider locating the ‘Donate’ button here on the new site and leaving a tip.
But let’s step back from personal woes and take a look at the bigger economic picture around the injunction. One reason the bill is so hefty is that the NHA’s lawyers charged for their time at over £300 per hour. I get that they have overheads to pay, but, hey, don’t we all?
My own climate protesting has been less full-on than my wife’s, but even so I’ve spent about ten hours twiddling my thumbs in police cells. If I charged out this important work of imploring the government to secure a liveable planet at an equivalent rate to the NHA’s lawyers, that’s £3,000 I’m owed right there. My wife must have clocked up at least fifty hours of cell-based downtime. Throw in about a week of my time devoted to protesting and six weeks on my wife’s part as a bare minimum, and we’re looking at a total expenses claim of around £90,000. There were some additional incidental expenses (public transport to protests isn’t cheap these days – unlike, y’know, driving) but let’s be generous and keep the claim to a round £90k. Subtract our share of the injunction costs and that should still leave us enough money to build the new barn we need. I’ve sent in the invoice, but the government hasn’t yet responded. Busy time of year for them, I guess.
Anyway, all this seems vaguely relevant to the present theme of this blog around my new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – which is substantially a criticism of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. Monbiot says in Regenesis that extensive livestock farming is “everywhere an economic fantasy” in the sense that nobody makes decent money from it. Which is true enough, although I’d further generalise his remark across the agricultural sector at all scales worldwide and suggest that most farming to produce basic foodstuffs in most places is an economic fantasy. Very few people in the sector make what would be regarded as a good income from it by the standards of the wider economy.
When the modern economy makes the production of the food upon which everybody relies to stay alive an economic fantasy, while remunerating corporate lawyers orders of magnitude more than food producers, it starts to seem like the real economic fantasy is the modern economy itself. It would be interesting to discuss how this state of affairs has come to pass and what kind of future it portends. What real or unreal, fact-based or fantastic, aspects of our world allocate resources respectively to farmers, lawyers and protestors in this way, and what does it tell us about where we’re headed? I have some thoughts about this, but maybe I’ll avoid pre-empting any discussion below by sharing them just now.
What I will say is that modern culture has a lot of theories about why the distribution of work, reward and punishment in our societies is as it is and as it must be. These theories look increasingly implausible, and are probably now on the last, unavoidable part of a crash course with reality. A problem I have with a lot of ecomodernist solutions to present problems, Monbiot’s included, is that they focus too much on why occupations like farming are an economic fantasy and not enough on why occupations like corporate law are. From that mistake, many other errors flow.
