Policied to Extinction – why the think tanks came after the climate movement

This past weekend Just Stop Oil organised its final event, yet another peaceful march in London. It was their final action of a three year campaign to demand the UK government stop licensing new oil, gas and coal projects. Relentless effort won this campaign. 

The end of JSO has caused some chin scratching in the media. Rather than concentrate on how JSO had achieved their success, liberal media headlines instead asked ‘Who killed Just Stop Oil?’ or who ‘policed’ them ‘to extinction’?

But wait. Liberal media journalists already know who is responsible for creating the conditions that made justified civil disobedience no longer viable; new laws in 2022 and 2023 made effective protest nearly impossible. What they’re not telling people is why.

So today Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and founding member of Absurd Intelligence, is launching her new channel to provide essential analysis for anyone who wants to live in a democracy, because there is a significant gap in our public discourse that needs filling. You can sign up to receive it here:

Clare writes: who created the conditions that have shut down justified protest, that caused the United Nations to identify the UK as “nation of concern for the scale of its political prisoner problem”, is already clear: the think tanks who hide their shady funding, the politicians who soak up their oil-slick reports, and members of the judiciary with ego problems.

Specifically, it was the people at Policy Exchange who wrote the report “Extremism Rebellion” in 2019, who drove the new laws that have criminalised peaceful protest in the UK. These laws have put grandmothers, doctors, teachers and nurses in prison for multiple years for attending zoom calls or sitting in roads. For being scared for the future. Rishi Sunak even thanked Policy Exchange personally for helping draft the new laws.

Policy Exchange could see how successful the climate movement was becoming. They could see it growing into a global movement powered by the love of ordinary citizens to take appropriate, accountable, nonviolent action, when our governments were so blatantly not. The movement was being too successful. So they tried to shut it down. Why?

As Clare explains in her Substack, this is why:

the people at Policy Exchange are cowards who are afraid of love.

Clare’s initial analysis – a defence of real democracy – will run over four days from today to Saturday. What she says is this: the people at Policy Exchange are smart. They could already see that Extinction Rebellion was mainstreaming cultural ideas; being a cultural success. Extinction Rebellion shifted the dial on climate, on awareness, on action. 

But all of this was a threat to the status quo: to oil and gas, the people who represent the interests of oil and gas, and to the wider capitalist system driving us to extinction, to which the people at Policy Exchange are so blindly wedded. So they shifted into top gear to strategically shut down legitimate and justified climate protest as quickly as they could. They tried to warp the climate movement’s warning of “extinction” into their ideological view of “love being extreme”. As Clare writes:

When Policy Exchange wrote their report called “Extremism Rebellion” back in 2019, I knew that their strategists wanted to push our successful, accountable, popular, joyful, family friendly, nonviolent rebellion underground. Because that’s when they can call you a terrorist – all those terrorist families and grannies! – and then they can treat you like one: bang you up in prison.

For the journalists who would only skim the report before writing it up, Policy Exchange used the words “extremist” or “extremism” seven times in its 542 word executive summary.

The Observer piece on Just Stop Oil this past Sunday ended with a reference to our work here at Absurd Intelligence as one part of what’s coming next, “experimenting with events combining arts, media, climate and democracy.” We’re proud to be one of the organisations carrying the flame forward for a real democracy. We intend to have just as much cultural success, mainstreaming other “extreme” ideas such as feeling free to talk to each other where we live, not being frightened to respectfully disagree, and putting the idea of love back into politics.

If you care about democracy and what happens next, please sign up to Clare’s Substack.  

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

It’s been a big week for Absurd Intelligence, as this Wednesday (today!) we launch Speak Up, a new public service speaker agency joining the dots on the issues that matter. Alanna Byrne has led this project with able support from Clive Russell, Daze Aghaji and Nuala Lam, and we could not be more proud of the roster of talent the team have assembled, nor the clarity of purpose for what is needed in amplifying the stories that can cut through on culture, democracy, misinformation, economy and climate. A report on tonight’s launch event will come next week.

• On Sunday Charlie spoke about the ’Opia Crisis (that he explains in this post) at the Barbican, as part of a panel looking at different utopias and heterotopias;

• On Monday, we were privileged to be visited by the brilliant mind that is Martha Newson, to chat to us about her research on rituals, fusion, belonging, CREDS, and more, as we figure out the next stage of our campaigns;
• On Tuesday, Clare, Alex and Charlie attended the launch of The Rift, the new cycle of research from the Sustainability Accelerator at Chatham House, focusing on collapse, uncertainty, and renewal; we were all given a lesson in how to calculate “how many sweets are in the jar” by another brilliant mind, our friend Laurie Laybourn, who runs the Strategic Climate Risk Initiative.