{"id":73694,"date":"2021-10-28T07:47:42","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T06:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/?p=73694"},"modified":"2021-10-29T05:06:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T04:06:13","slug":"in-praise-of-insulate-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2021\/10\/28\/in-praise-of-insulate-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"In praise of Insulate Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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[Insulate Britain activists] the Guardian spoke to had all been involved in Extinction Rebellion<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> but some felt it had lost its way. \u201cI\u2019ve been on all these XR things; I\u2019d go out every day and get arrested,\u201d Chris Parish, 69, from Tower Hamlets said. \u201cBut it\u2019s sort of somehow at the moment been subsumed by the system \u2026 It\u2019s like a carnival. I don\u2019t want to criticise it, but I feel like something more needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Guardian, October 17<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In a post last month, giving my reasons for welcoming the rise of China<\/strong><\/a>, I set out my take – I say irrefutable – on the state the world is in and why. I followed with this:<\/p>\n

The West’s three broad strands of resistance \u2013 social democracy, \u2018vanguard\u2019 revolutionary sects, grass roots activism pace<\/em>\u00a0Occupy, XR etc \u2013 all have useful features but, each for its own reasons, zero chance of success of the kind and magnitude needed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Re that third strand, I see the strengths of direct action as its panache<\/em>, the sheer courage of so many of its practitioners, and its refreshing lack of proceduralism and intellectual dogma.<\/p>\n

And its weaknesses? I’d place lack of class perspective, without which capital accumulation’s irreducible incompatibility<\/strong><\/a> with eco-sanity cannot be grasped, at top of my list. Related is an irritated intolerance, after a period of initial exuberance, of political debate – not that Labour or ‘vanguard’ sects are in any position to lecture on this front – in the name of forging rainbow coalitions which, by their very heterogeneity, must dissolve in the face of concerted effort by a ruling class skilled in the arts of sowing division.<\/p>\n

Chris Parish – quoted in the Guardian passage above (and as it happens a pal from my spiritual cult days, though we haven’t communicated in quite a while, and never on this subject) – gets to the heart of the matter:<\/p>\n

[XR has] been subsumed by the system \u2026 It\u2019s like a carnival. I don\u2019t want to criticise it, but I feel like something more needs to be done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Won’t that also be true of Insulate Britain? Perhaps, but I detect some key differences between it and the big ‘rainbow coalitions’ – from CND through to XR – of my lifetime:<\/p>\n