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A march of middle-class miserabilists
‘Trees don’t rape.’ Daubed in a red scrawl on a green placard, and held aloft by someone marching behind a giant papier mâché hare (under the banner ‘Hare today, gone tomorrow…’), this protest slogan captured the tenor of Saturday’s march in central London against climate change chaos.

It summed up the anti-human bent to the whole thing. The sledgehammer-subtle implication of a slogan like ‘trees don’t rape’ is that humans do; unlike trees, we rape, both literally (women) and metaphorically (nature). It also encapsulated the marchers’ childlike, Disney-esque love for all things natural: celebrating an insensate object like a tree because it ‘doesn’t rape’ is enough to make those annoying anthropomorphists of the animal rights lobby look almost progressive by comparison. And it captured the kneejerk moralism driving the demonstration. This was no political march backed up by scientific facts, but an outburst of shrill middle-class disgust with the greedy masses and their bad habits. ...

...What united them all, however, was a petty authoritarianism. Strip away the dashes of colour, the dancing, the hymn-singing (seriously) and the big bright animals (there was a papier mâché rhinoceros as well as a hare), and this was in essence a demo demanding less debate and more stringent measures outlining what people can do and consume. I’ve been on a lot of marches in my time – some good, some bad, some loud, some lame – but this was the first demo I’ve seen that effectively called on the authorities to punish us; not that they should leave us alone or give us more jobs, rights, welfare, whatever, but that they should actively intervene in our lives and stop us from driving too much, holidaying too much, eating too much and living it up too much. It was summed up in the chant: ‘What do we want?’ ‘Carbon taxes!’ ‘When do we want them?’ ‘Now!’ That was said with real passion, believe it or not. My favourite placard of the day had a picture of Tony Blair and the words: ‘Action to match the rhetoric! Yearly enforceable emissions reductions targets of three per cent at least! Nothing less will do!’ Strewth....