So what we have here is the comfortably off classes – those with sufficient free time to glue themselves to roads on a Wednesday mid-morning – forcing their weird hangups on everyone else. Time and again, when they are criticised for making people’s lives a misery, they offer only patronising lectures. ‘We’re so sorry that we have to disrupt the lives of ordinary people’, said Just Stop Oil’s Eben Lazarus (I know) to Vice last year, but ‘hopefully people will see, further down the line, that the disruption we’re causing is microscopic compared to the disruption that we’re going to face because of the climate crisis’. Translation: we know better, you cretins.

No wonder that so many now respond to these cunning stunts with instant, visceral fury. First there was the Battle of Canning Town in 2019, when east-London commuters pulled two Extinction Rebellion people down from the top of a Tube train. And as police have failed to deal with these protests – they now seem to escort rather than stop these ‘slow marches’ – motorists have increasingly decided to take matters into their own hands. …

Environmentalism has always been class warfare by other means.

[I’ve always suspected that this was essentially a drawbridge movement — an effort by the elites to make sure the hoi polloi stays beneath them in their “proper place.” What else explains the hundreds of private jets converging on some resort location so that the elites can issue communiques about the desperate need of everyone to accept poverty? — Ed]