The Extinction Rebellion protests come at a crucial moment for humanity – can’t the police see that?

Why is Cressida Dick calling for a bill to crack down on our rights to peacefully protest, asks Donnachadh McCarthy, but is not calling for legislation to stop those destroying our climate?

An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace (REUTERS)

Cities and states across the US are taking oil and gas companies to court for aggravating the climate crisis and allegedly covering up what they knew. Which begs the question: Why are the Metropolitan Police not advocating likewise here in the UK, instead of launching a crackdown on the peaceful Extinction Rebellion protests?

The recent IPCC report makes clear that the single largest existential threat to the planet is the climate and ecological emergency. After 30 years of failure by the UK government and the UN Cop26 process to stop the inexorable increase in global carbon emissions, Britain and the planet have now passed destructive irreversible tipping points.

No matter what we do now, sea-levels will continue to rise for generations and wildfires will continue to burn our forests and roast alive our wildlife. And if we do not stop business-as-usual we are in line for a 5C rise in global temperatures and the potential collapse of our civilisation, with unimaginable suffering and deaths.

Out of this despair at the failure of mainstream environmental groups such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth to halt the inexorable rise in carbon emissions arose Extinction Rebellion.

Founded on the principles of peaceful direct action, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the suffragists, it understood that unless climate protectors resorted to non-violent protests that disrupted society, we were doomed to self-destruction.

And so over the last three years they temporarily occupied a small number of major junctions in London, blocked the entrance to News International’s printworks, oil depots, the McDonald’s production site and so on, putting their own freedom at risk to desperately raise the alarm.

They successfully persuaded the government to set a target for net-zero carbon in 2050 and a 78 per cent cut by 2035. But even the government’s own climate advisers say that they are failing across a raft of policy measures to achieve those targets. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that all investments in new fossil fuel projects needed to be immediately halted to have any chance of reaching net-zero in 2050. Yet the UK is opening new oil, gas and coalfields and the country’s banks and major oil corporations are embarking on a decade of massive investments in new fossil fuel projects globally.

Extinction Rebellion is therefore right to return to the streets this week. We need action to back the laudable targets. Their new 2021 immediate demand backing the IEA’s immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel investments by UK banks and government by Cop26 is absolutely the right demand. UK financial institutions are responsible for the equivalent of 1.8 times the UK’s annual net emissions of CO2 and investing another £5tn over the coming decade in new fossil fuels is a suicide note for civilisation as we know it.

Which brings me to Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It was revealed this week that she has wasted an eye-watering £50m on excessive policing of previous peaceful Extinction Rebellion protests since 2019.

The Met issued a statement that they plan to again waste more money over the coming week, pulling officers away from tackling knife crime and domestic abuse to target the peaceful climate protesters.

You would think having had her force accused of being institutionally corrupt by an official inquiry into a botched murder investigation that Dick would be focusing resources on the real threats to London - such as the devastating impact of the climate crisis on the capital and the world.

Why is Dick calling for a bill to crack down on our rights to peacefully protest, but is not calling for legislation to stop those destroying our climate? The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill calls for sentences of up to 10 years for peaceful protestors being “seriously annoying” without any definition of this subjective phrase.

It is an authoritarian attack on our liberal democracy. It is exactly the sort of anti-democratic measure being introduced in the newly repressed Hong Kong. It is chilling to think of how these powers could be abused.

Tackling the root causes of the protest, the failure of our media, government, banks and oil corporations to act on climate is what a responsible Metropolitan Police commissioner should be calling for.

The XR protests come at a crucial moment for humanity. We are just months away from the vital Cop26 summit. The future is dependent on their message being heard by our government, who are chairing the conference.

As a former member of Extinction Rebellion’s political circle, I feel it is also time for an inquiry into the mismanagement of resources and priorities by the Met, not for yet more resources to be squandered by yet another massive pointless “crackdown”.

Cressida Dick is not fit for purpose in the middle of this existential climate crisis for London and the world.