How do we rehabilitate activism?

The argument against responding rapidly and comprehensively to climate breakdown is and always will be a losing argument. But if you are committed to making a losing argument, the best option available to you is to thoroughly discredit the opposition. 

Over the past seven years a whole new vocabulary has been invented by the right-wing press in the UK to vilify organisers and activists in the climate movement. We have been called eco-loons, shoeless crusties, zealots, and extremists. We’ve been accused of the arch crime of “eating from tupperware”, been followed around in the supermarket, then had stories written about the contents of our shopping trolleys. 

It is often assumed that this character assassination is just what you get if you employ disruptive tactics; that climate activists have done it to themselves by foolishly choosing to block roads, throw soup and break windows. This is a mistake and overlooks the deliberate and well funded project to discredit people who step up and who put their liberty on the line. 

In July 2019, the fossil fuel industry-funded right-wing think tank, Policy Exchange, produced a report titled ‘Extremism Rebellion’. It instructed policy makers not to talk to climate activists; in other words don’t legitimise them as opponents by engaging (Michael Gove had previously met with a group representing Extinction Rebellion in April that year). The report was effectively draft legislation, which the UK government obligingly signed into law in the form of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in 2022 and the Public Order Act in 2023, further paving the way to draw a dividing line between “activists” and everyone else.

Even if some of the language has been creative, this is not a new tactic. The idea of portraying activists as “crazy” or “insane” is a decades-old denier strategy. It started with attacks on Rachel Carson, environmentalist and author of Silent Spring, by pesticide companies in the 1960s. In 1998, Big Oil trade association American Petroleum Institute published an “action plan” aimed at exploiting the “uncertainties” in climate science. The plan, developed by Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company, and representatives from conservative organisations, was to discredit the science by discrediting its supporters. The plan stated: “Victory will be achieved when those promoting the [Kyoto] treaty on the basis of existent science appear to be out of touch with reality.” 

In Extinction Rebellion our actions, by design, were balanced for optimum effectiveness and inclusivity. We weren’t small groups of highly trained activists travelling out to oil refineries in the North Sea, we were people of all ages and backgrounds causing disruption in the centre of the capital city. Low-level civil disobedience like this allowed for broad participation and opened up the potential for a “movement of everyone”. American political scientist Erica Chenoweth has documented how crucial this factor of reflecting the general population is for social movement success. 

The laws introduced since the unprecedented mobilisations in 2019 have been very successful in removing the conditions for such a diverse civil disobedience movement. It’s much harder to organise families within a civil disobedience movement, when they could be arrested for holding a sign or organising a zoom call, or face a prison sentence for sitting in a road. The result, again, is to turn a movement of citizens into a group of “activists”, making them much easier to alienate from the onlooking public. 

The deliberate character assassination and alienation of the people who step up when the moral stakes are high is a form of divide and rule, and everyone in favour of justice and equality should oppose it. 

Worse in the UK? 
It is possible that we, in the UK, are particularly susceptible to turning on the people who function as our democracy’s early warning system. Late last year a veteran pollster explained to me how time and again his work demonstrates that the British public reserve a special dislike for anyone who is politically active, be they politicians or activists. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We live in a country where the majority of our media is in the hands of a small number of billionaires – three UK publishers control 90% of print media and 40% of online reach – with a deeply political, pro-fossil fuel agenda. The Daily Mail for example, owned by Viscount Rothermere, despises anyone who dares stand up for a cause outside of the tabloid’s scope of acceptability, regularly inciting violence towards activists to their more than two million daily readers across paper and online. This is only part of the story, but when media moguls regularly tamper with our democracy and use their papers to skewer the truth for their own political ends, it’s no surprise public opinion swings against activists. 

Another clue lies in the rapid transformation we underwent as a society over the last seven years. We have moved almost instantly from ignorance and soft climate denial to a kind of tacit acceptance of climate collapse. It was fascinating, as well as deeply worrying, to watch how unable we were to stay, for any meaningful length, in a place of time knowing the truth of our predicament without being guaranteed its solution. It’s something that as a society we seem to find almost unbearable. 

It’s a big problem, because if we are to get out of this mess we need to have the strength to try hard in the face of bad odds: the ability to “stay with the trouble” as Donna Haraway wrote. It’s also an ability I saw in huge reserves among the people who made up Extinction Rebellion in the movement’s initial years. It’s small wonder then that some find the people who take action so hard to stomach, they’re a constant reminder of what we’d rather forget. 

What do we do about it? 
Step one is to understand that the pushback on activism is a deliberate, funded strategy which requires an equally considered counter-strategy. This is particularly important for moderate figures in the social change space – those who do the important work of reaching beyond politically engaged or left wing sections of the public. 

Do not accept and repeat the frame of the far right think tanks – further denigrating activists – in an attempt to make the cause appealing to moderate or bipartisan audiences. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen the skewed, often factually-inaccurate narratives of right-wing papers end up on the social media timelines of progressives and social justice advocates, tearing down activists. To do this is to make yourself part of the strategy to defeat meaningful progress. The task is to pull the frame of acceptable debate in the other direction. Solidarity is the only route to real, lasting, long term wins. We don’t have to agree on everything but point scoring off each other wins us nothing on our own terms. 

At the same time, a strong activist identity born of a reactive, defensive position is also unhelpful – sociologists call it ‘over-identification’ – huddling together with people who feel comfortably similar to us. The endeavour on the part of the discrediters is to separate these people who step up from “ordinary” people. Don’t buy it.

Our task is to demonstrate and embody the fact that it is precisely ordinary people who step up. The incredible democratic successes in Taiwan may be, as Audrey Tang argues, partly due to the way in which activists are reframed as demonstrators: demonstrating new possibilities, rather than railing against the status quo. The point is: these are still the same people.

They have all the money, but we have all the people
There are many creative ways to turn the situation around. As friend of this newsletter Brian Eno says, “the other side has all the money, but we have all the people”. As a nation we may have a distaste for politically vocal people but we are not without our heroes.

When the RMT Union spokes person, Mick Lynch, made a mockery of journalists’ lines of questioning over the union’s demand for fair pay for workers, he became a kind of folk hero overnight, capturing hearts and minds. In his use of authentic, no-nonsense straight talk, pointing out the absurdity of the opposing argument, many were able to relate to the injustice across society impacting so many of us, that Mick so brilliantly highlighted. We need more of this, feeding into a massive cultural shift so it becomes obvious that the vast majority of us are on the same side and share the same interests. 

Maybe it is time for more of our cultural idols to be brave and associate themselves with civil disobedience? It’s already happening in small ways. British fashion designer Stella McCartney dressed a group of nine women for court in a case where a jury found them ‘not guilty’ despite causing an alleged half a million pounds in damage to the windows of HSBC headquarters in Canary Wharf. 

In July last year over a thousand cultural icons, including A-listers such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin, put their names to a letter condemning the longest prison sentences in recent history in the UK for peaceful protestors. And what is Feargal Sharkey if not a demonstrator for clean water?

These are all moves in the right direction, but to truly turn the tide it will take a concentration of many moments like these. It will take imagination and audacity, a sure sign that when the moment does come, being a part of making it happen will be fun and freeing.