When police are withdrawn from a situation where extremists are hindering members of the public or worse where the police haven’t even been properly deployed, it creates a bad situation. It causes an increased lack of trust and respect for the police (which is pretty low as it is) but also encourages people to take the law into their own hands and foments vigilantism.
This is what we’ve managed to get in Britain by policing the eco-terrorists of Insulate Britain so softly that it is giving the distinct impression that the police are on the side of the eco-terrorists. Such policing or as I should more correctly say, non-policing, pisses people off and it’s right that it does piss people off. For weeks and weeks this bunch of self-righteous and truculent Tarquins have stopped law abiding and tax paying Britons from getting to work, getting to interviews, attending hospital appointments, being present at funerals and other family occasions. The response from the police and the courts and even the government has been risible to say the least. The ‘Tarquins’ as I refer to the Insulate Britain protestors because of their invariably middle and upper class backgrounds, are being arrested and then released, free to carry on disrupting people for their utter bollocks cause. They are also ignoring court injunctions not to protest and acting as if nothing can touch them.
About a week ago we started to see Britons showing that the self-righteous tossers of Insulate Britain are not immune to pushback. Some Britons have decided that if the State in the form of the police and the courts will not deal with these eco-terrorists, then they will. At first the response from the public was pretty mild, travellers got out of their cars and tried to reason with the Tarquins before the members of the public realised that reason wasn’t going to work as a tactic when they were dealing with the unreasonable in the form of Insulate Britain. Then it progressed to pulling the Tarquins bodily from the road at Insulate Britain protests where the police were conspicuous by their absence. Now there’s been an escalation with frustrated travellers and others who are pissed off with these self entitled protestors if Insulate Britain deciding that they will hit back harder.
The ante has in some way been upped by the latest incident where ink was thrown over some of the Tarquins which has obviously pissed them off. Yet despite this these wealthy and generally middle and upper class obsessives still believe that they are being ‘forced’ into behaving no different from any annoying criminal because of their belief that there is a ‘climate crisis’.
Watch the video below of the gentleman and see not a reasonable person out to protest, but a one track minded arrogant obsessive who doesn’t care that he’s stopping people from earning a living or seeing sick loved ones or finding a job or being with their families at important occasions.
Source: News for All
I have zero sympathy for him, my give a fuck meter is reading in the negative and the needle refuses to budge any higher. My sympathies are with those who people like this have inconvenienced, who have lost jobs and money and who may not have been able to be with loved ones in their last moments on earth because of the actions of these Tarquins.
But this incident also makes me worry. It’s a sign of the vigilantism that I’ve often warned about becoming more active and socially acceptable. It is also a sign, one more visible than usual and visible to more people, that our police forces have become bent. They have not become bent financially although I would never say that there are no police who are on the take, but that they have become bent politically, picking and choosing, often on the basis of what the Left agree or disagree with, what protests they facilitate with charm and which they break up with batons. To have a situation where there is both vigilantism and a police force that is so obviously bent politically is to see the seeds of something bad and something that is an ill omen for the future.
Indeed so I am only surprised we have not seen the rise of people turning to self help on a much bigger scale.
Vigilantism has always gone on but at a very small scale. It’s been on a small enough scale that a) the police can deal with the vigilantes b) the vigilantism is intra-communal ie within minority groups for example Travellers/Gypsies and therefore outside of the general population. I’d also add a third factor why vigilantism has not been as prominent as much as it probably could be and that is fear of state censure for doing so by members of the general population. Also vigilantism is often done ‘in the shadows’ so to speak, a nightime smashed window of an alleged nonce here the beating of a teenage yob by a group of adult men there. What’s different about the current crop of those engaging in acts of vigilantism against the ‘Tarquins’ is that it’s not an intra-communal thing among members of an ethnic group, it’s ordinary ostensibly law abiding people and secondly it is not in the shadows, it’s being done in full view of the cameras by people who are so pissed off that they don’t care who sees them dealing with the eco-terrorists. It’s interesting to note that some of the film I’ve seen of the ink incident shows no police whatsoever, on a major road into London on a day when the eco-terrorists had said they’d be causing disruption. The lack of police and court action against the eco-terrorists and the failure to have police deal with the eco-terrorists when they turn up, is emboldening the vigilantes.
I don’t want to see vigilantism I really do not. It’s another form of mob and if you really want to see how bad mobs can get then a read up of what happened during the Gordon Riots is pretty illuminating. ‘King Mob’ makes for a terrible leader he really does.
I agree with your reservations about vigilantism and the terrible concequences that can result. But, in this case, I would really love to see these people given the kicking that they so thoroughly deserve. It is now completely beyond dispute that the police and the courts have utterly failed to uphold the law. They have failed in their duty, failed to do the job that the public are paying them to do. In such circumstances I would suggest that citizens have a duty to deal with the problem in any way necessary.
If the police will not do their job, due to politicised ‘woke’ crap, etc., it’s inevitable others will. If I was in the middle of an urgent journey, e.g., taking an ill relative to hospital, I doubt I could avoid using violence to get past the blockade. But I’m not at all violent normally – it just shows how wrong these protesters are, with their misdirected actions causing extreme emotional responses.
FFS: the causal relationship between blocking roads and insulating houses is difficult to determine.
I have some sympathy with the group’s aims, whatever the truth about CO2 and AGW, but think:
(a) blocking roads is an insane and counter-productive strategy.
(b) it’s not the state’s job to fund private house insulation improvements.
(c) they should target appropriately: e.g. financial institutions not giving home insulation grants – that would be sensible and connected to their aims.
“…whatever the truth about CO2 and AGW…”
The truth is that the hypothesis that increased atmospheric CO2 causes significant warming has been falsified. It started out as a plausible explanation for observed warming of the climate but, after an additional thirty years of observation, it has been disproved. Anyone still claiming that it is true is either lying or mistaken.
There needs to be a thorough re-evaluation of the data to see what is valid, what is corrupted by bad methodology and also what is falsified. Metanalysis of data has been instrumental in finally killing the delusion that Ivermectin cures covid so why should not this technique be used elsewhere?
£900k in three days that IB have cost Britons. Very little sympathy for them in the Guido comments. Protest is a human right but not ongoing serious disruption like this. See https://order-order.com/2021/10/28/insulate-britain-cost-economy-900000-in-just-three-days/
This is an interesting story ” Snouts in the Trough”
My climate book is ‘inflammatory’ and led to violence
By David Craig, on October 28th, 2021
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Thursday/Friday blog
Some readers may find this little story interesting as it illustrates how intolerant the supposedly tolerant, morally-superior, virtue-signalling progressives are and the oppressive stranglehold they have on free speech.
A difficult birth
In March 2021, I decided to write a new book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – questioning the ever more strident and influential Greta-worshipping, climate catastrophist cult. The first problem was that my literary agent told me to not waste my time as he said no UK publisher would dare publish the book as they would be too afraid of being attacked by the Twitter, Facebook and other social media lynch mobs.
But I went ahead and wrote the book anyway. I then forked out the £1,000 or so to produce and publish the book myself in June 2021.
THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS takes all the main claims of the deranged climate catastrophists and demolishes each one. From supposedly melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more wildfires, more flooding, the ‘97% of scientists’ claim and soon-to-be-extinct polar bears, THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS shows that none of these are true.
Attention-seeking
It has been difficult to get any media attention for my book.
While some mainstream media will dare question the cost and the consequences of Britain trying to achieve net zero while China enthusiastically builds hundreds more coal-fired power stations, nobody in the media (not even the supposedly ‘anti-woke’ GB News) will dare ask whether human activities actually are responsible for changes in our climate in the first place.
As I was unable to get any printed, social or broadcast media to show any interest in my book, I had to take matters into my own hands yet again. To have a bit of fun, I commissioned a large poster advertising THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS:
I then hired an advan (advertising van) to drive around the centre of Manchester for two days on 4th and 5th October during the Tory Party conference:
My intention was to use the same advan for two days during Boris’s and Carrie’s November Glasgow Cop26 bletherfest and then again for two days in London once Parliament returned in mid-November. But when I tried to book the same van to advertise THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, the advan company refused to take the booking as their driver in Manchester had been heckled, insulted, threatened and even assaulted by global warming fanatics.
Here is the message I received from the advan company:
Thank you for your email.
After due consideration, unfortunately we will not be able to fulfil future bookings for your book as the content of the banner message is just too inflammatory.
This resulted in our driver being both verbally abused throughout the course of the Manchester operation and then physically assaulted by a member of the public. An incident attended by the police and for which I understand a man was arrested.
If you can find another contractor who is prepared to undertake the work, we would be happy to arrange for the banners to be delivered to them.
I can understand that it would be ‘inflammatory’ if I were produce a poster insulting people because of their skin colour or even because they wore women’s clothing while still having a healthy, well-functioning penis.
But apparently in our perverse. progressive, politically-correct world, it is now considered ‘inflammatory’ to dare suggest that the Earth’s climate is controlled by things like the Earth’s varying orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles), the Earth’s tilt, levels of solar activity and such cyclical phenomena as El Nino, La Nina, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the Madden-Julian Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole.
It is now apparently ‘inflammatory’ to dare question the end-of-time superstitions of the woke, progressive, scientifically-challenged, pig-ignorant, Greta-adoring doomsday cultists.
It seems that free speech in the UK is only allowed for those with the ‘correct’ opinions.
No, look, if there are real issues about whether climate change exists, for example, they should be discussed freely in a spirit of genuine co-operative enquiry with the best evidence available without politicising the issues to bias them into a ‘left/right’ conflict. How we educate ourselves to try to understand our world, and how we pass on what we have learned to the next generation seems the over-riding issue of importance here. We’ll get nowhere otherwise?
I agree that the issues should be discussed openly and with best evidence. The evidence should also be interrogated to see if it is valid or even honest as there are an enormous number of questions surrounding it including missing data and solid data only being available for a short time when compared to the life of earth. The problem is that this issue has got extremely politicised and it’s not just right against left, it’s become class against class. Whilst it’s true that the Left has taken up the climate change issue and run with it possibly because achieving net zero would involve a lot of centralising of power, wealthy rightists have also taken up the issue for their own reasons that also might involve centralising power towards themselves.
I’m seeing a big class divide in all this and I’ve noticed tht there are very few identifiably working class activists involved in Insulate Britain and indeed the Green movement as a whole, that’s not saying that they don’t exist at all, it just seems to be that there are less of them. I attended an anti Brexit meeting a few years back in order to find out what the other side were saying. This meeting had a heavily Green bias with at least 30 to 40% of the attendees being either voters or supporters of the Green Party or green politics. It was like stepping back in time to the early Victorian era when the concerns of the working classes didn’t matter to the elites such was the disdain that these greens held the working classes in. Words like ‘uneducated’ or ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’ were bandied around about the working class. Since then I’ve found that when you scratch a Green, you will often find a Malthusian.
It would be great if these issues could be discussed openly but those who promote Green issues too often do not. They shout ‘denier’ when they are questioned and don’t seem to care if the outcomes of their policies result in starvation or death by freezing.
There’s an air of arrogance around groups like Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion a sense that they are correct and any action that they take for their cause is justified. Personally I think that they get in the way of honest debate.