The Wrong Kind Of News by Les May

I HAVE never taken Extinction Rebellion (XR) very seriously and I increasingly see their performances as a bit of street theatre. In part this is because when I hear people say they have 'demands' it tends to make me think they have a much higher sense of their own importance than I am inclined to assign them; in part it is because I think they give the impression that they have simple answers to complex issues.

So far as I understand their latest stunt, blockading access to printing presses, it is because the papers printed on them are unsympathetic to their views and don't print the sort of news regarding the issue of climate change that they would like to see. My response to this is 'Welcome to the real world'. Try getting anyone in the mainstream media to take seriously alternative viewpoints about, for example, raising of the pension age for women, domestic violence, contact with children following family breakdown, rape and sexual assault, etc.

Annoying though this is, not publishing the things the XR people would like to see is neither censorship nor an attack on freedom of speech. No one is saying 'you cannot say that', they are just saying 'don't expect us to print what you do say'. If XR owned the papers how much news would be published expressing scepticism about human activities being the cause of climate change?

Appendix

In 1972 the Club of Rome published a study called The Limits to Growth (LtG) so the issues which XR are now addressing have been known for nearly half a century. Had this been taken seriously at the time we would not now be facing the same level of climate change. The problem XR needs to address is not how to get governments to sign up to their demands; it is how to persuade all the people who elect those governments that we have to consume less materials and energy, and that unlimited economic growth is a fantasy. The rapid shift to buying goods ordered on-line and the insistence of many people that they must have a continental holiday this year in spite of the Covid 19 pandemic, does not suggest to me that there is any great enthusiasm for reducing consumption. Changing that is where the work needs to be done.

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