This piece is derived from a speech he gave on November 3rd at the Battle of Ideas festival in London:

One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a “ponytail weirdo”. Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. “Are you that fucking stupid?”, one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. “No wonder you can’t get jobs …”

But the best moment came during the Battle of Canning Town, during that clash between working people and eco-elitists, when one of the commuters shouted at the protesters: “The world is not coming to an end!” I thought that was brilliant. This woman was just trying to get to her job and yet she found herself having to act as the voice of reason against the new hysteria. And she rose to the occasion wonderfully. She said what many of us know to be true: humankind does not face extinction.

The reason I admire the Battle of Canning Town is that it represented a potential turning point in modern green politics. It was really the first time in a long time that eco-hysteria was subjected to public judgement, to democratic rebuke, to the rational scepticism of the people. For far too long green ideology has been insulated from public challenge and public debate and this has allowed it to become increasingly eccentric and even unhinged. The Battle of Canning Town represented a reasoned, bottom-up pushback against the protected hysteria of modern environmentalism.

This is the thing I find most fascinating about Extinction Rebellion: its very name is a lie. Those two words themselves are untrue. Humankind does not face extinction, and all reasonable people know this. We know that there is nothing in the IPCC reports – which themselves are often over-the-top – to justify XR’s harebrained claims that we have 12 years to save the planet, and if we fail billions of people will die. They’ve just made this up.

As for the second word – “rebellion” – this is a lie, too. Extinction Rebellion is not a rebellion. Rather, its ideology and misanthropy are entirely in keeping with the outlook of mainstream politics and popular culture. From the educational sphere to Hollywood’s output, from the political elite to the worlds of advertising and publishing, the ahistorical, anti-human idea that mankind is destroying the planet and will be punished by Weather of Mass Destruction for having done so is entirely accepted, and increasingly unquestionable, in fact.

As I’ve said in comments on a few posts at other sites, the people who stage “protests” that block access to roads, railway stations, public buildings, and hospitals depend on the reactions of the people being mild, civilized, calm, and peaceful. But the more often these sorts of antics are performed, the thinner that veneer of civilization gets worn. At some point, and sooner than the organizers may realize, the veneer is gone and instead of peaceful commuters you’re disrupting, it’s a mob … and mobs don’t obey civilized rules like “thou shalt not kill”:

Those two were lucky that there was still some restraint being felt by the commuters. But it’s a clear warning sign that may not be attended to:

Extinction Rebellion, though it professes to be anti-Establishment, embodies the left-liberal values of the current Establishment hegemony.

That]s why rarely, if ever, will you hear anyone in government criticising Extinction Rebellion’s ideology, only its methods.

Then again, as one Conservative Brexiteer once told me, you can only fight a war on so many fronts. “Of course I know the whole climate change thing is bollocks,” he said – or words to that effect. “But I can only marshal my forces for one major battle at a time and that battle right now is Brexit.”

That’s how politicians have to think, it’s the nature of politics. Even the great Donald Trump has to play by these rules: look, for example, at how he has chickened out of having a red-team/blue-team scientific debate on global warming.

Happily, though, ordinary people are not constrained by such rules. There comes a point where they simply say to themselves:

“Sod this for a game of soldiers. I really don’t care whether what I’m about to do is wise or expedient or even legal, come to that. I’m just sick to the back teeth of what’s happening to my country. It’s wrong. It feels wrong. And if the system that is supposed to look after the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens will no long protect the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens then I guess I’ll have to take the law into my own hands.”

Which is exactly what happened at Canning Town Station in the East of London this week.

For months, on and off, Extinction Rebellion activists have been playing havoc with the lives of ordinary people who thought the law was supposed to protect them and their livelihoods from the kind of direct action that Extinction Rebellion and its apologists keep reassuring us is peaceful and in our best interests.

Grudging tolerance has gradually given way to a simmering sense of injustice: “How can it be”, ordinary folk have started to wonder, “that these privileged wanktards with their pointless degrees in Environmental Sciences and Advanced Poi are free to build pyramids at Oxford Circus and block Westminster Bridge when if I tried it I’d get myself chucked in jail?”

That simmering sense of injustice is now erupting into acts of rebellion — real rebellion, not Extinction Rebellion’s state-protected faux-rebellion — like the one in Canning Town Station.

Something very similar is happening with people’s feelings about Brexit: “How can it be right that we live in democracy which refuses to honour a popular vote? Surely honouring a popular vote is the most basic requirement. And if it doesn’t do that, then democracy has failed and we need to start looking at other ways of making our feelings known.”