For me: brilliant. I admire these people. Braver than me. Someone’s got to do it. And I like Harrods to be disturbed from their cosy, rich, protected environment to be forced to instantly and suddenly face the reality of the animal cruelty of factory farming and wildlife destruction.
Note: I’ll add some more words later. Just need to have breakfast right now! ✔️😎.
Info about these modern protest groups
Here are some more words. Animal Rebellion which I had not heard of the until Harrods milk incident seek a plant-based future. Members appear to be vegans. They don’t have a mission statement on their website as far as I can tell. They want to “unleash playful disruption”. I quite like that description and I guess you might just about describe the spilling of milk over the floor of the Harrods’ food department floor as playful unless of course you are the manager of that department when you’ve got to mop it all up. Or, if a customer slips up and breaks their arm and then sues Harrods for negligence!
They seem to be along the lines of two other Rebellion groups which come to mind, one of which has been in the news recently, Just Stop Oil, which is an environmental protest group engaged in high-profile demonstrations since launching in February of this year. Their name says it all. They want to stop governments digging oil out of the ground and burning it because it creates carbon dioxide leading to global warming.
Another one which I think started off this series of movements is Extinction Rebellion, another global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force governments to take action to protect the climate change and alter their policies to prevent biodiversity loss and ecological collapse.
They all do things which upset people to varying degrees. Blocking roads to ambulances and other public service vehicles probably works against them because people hate that. Some high-profile commentators have criticised them for preventing ambulances getting to hospitals. And stopping people getting to work when their work might be useful in terms of stopping global warming is counterproductive.
However, in general, I support all these groups because the only way to change deeply entrenched methods and cultures is to kick up the dust so much that people can’t ignore you and begin to think about what the conventional way of life is doing to damaging the planet, nature, wildlife and all the things that we take for granted but which are disappearing.
In a recent post I mentioned that the study found that wildlife populations have plummeted by 69% in 50 years because of human activity and in effect carelessness because we’ve known about global warming for about 50 years or more actually and we know that our activities destroy wildlife because we destroy their habitat. I’m referring mainly to deforestation.
The mantra of Liz Truss, who is shortly to lose her job as the Prime Minister of the UK, is economic growth. Economic growth is an enemy of wildlife conservation. It has to be. Economic growth means more installations, more roads, more mining, less forests, less nature and the exploitation of animals which is already at a high and flourishing being worth billions of pounds annually.
UK government wants to restrict non-violent demonstrations
The government plans to introduce a law called Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Part 3). If this becomes law, it will restrict or curb non-violent protests. It is a response to the above-mentioned protest groups who want to force the government to take meaningful steps to curb global warming. And they tend to do outrageous things like spray paint buildings, but I believe that the spray paint can be washed off with water. Or they stick themselves to the road and so on.
The point is though that in what some people regard to be the home of democracy i.e. the UK, this right-wing government wants to stop lawful protest. It smacks of a police state. The Joint Committee on Human Rights are deeply concerned about this development and they say that it is inconsistent with human rights.
The legislation is probably illegal as it clashes with human rights laws. They want several clauses in the bill to be removed. For example, there’s a clause in the bill which creates an offence of “intentionally and recklessly causing public nuisance”.
Protests are about causing public nuisance! That’s their purpose. It is to catch the eye to motivate complacent people to make a change. To achieve that you have to be a nuisance. So that clause alone must be illegal. It is very broadly drafted. It risks criminalising some parts of a peaceful protest. It might lead to a custodial sentence.
How this government had that clause drafted is beyond me. They obviously agreed it otherwise they wouldn’t have had it drafted. And therefore this government is beyond the pale. The Prime Minister who has to go is a danger to animals I’ve said and now this government is a danger to lawful protest which is trying to get a complacent government to take meaningful steps to curb global warming in the interests of people living three generations from now in the future. Shame on them.
William MacAskill persuades billionaires to give away 10% of their income to end factory farming
Farming to feed rising human population will destroy wildlife
