As a campaigning organisation, I'm annoyed by how counterproductive Insulate Britain are

This article was first published in The Telegraph on Wednesday 27th October 2021.

It was strangely quiet for a Monday morning when we came out of Liverpool St station and crossed the road to catch the bus to Denmark Hill. The electronic board at the bus stop said no information was available and we finally clicked to the fact that not a bus, a car or a taxi was moving on Bishopsgate and that the blue flashing lights 100 yards to the South were police cars blocking the road.

This journey has become a Monday ritual for myself and my daughter who is receiving experimental treatment for depression at a specialist hospital in South London. It is a long haul from our rural Hertfordshire village, but we have become regulars on the number 42 bus from Liverpool St to Dulwich, which stops outside the Maudsley.

When we reached the roadblock, however, it became obvious that the number 42 was going nowhere thanks to two protesters in high viz orange gilets who had glued themselves to the road so we walked down to London Bridge and found a taxi which took us on the rest of our journey for £16 and just about made the appointment. You might say that was not much of an inconvenience (if a rather illogical environmental protest), but we were very aware of being the lucky ones. What happened to the man in the wheelchair who was waiting at the deserted bus stop outside Liverpool St? And what about those trying to access public services who are not as lucky as us? Anyone who has wrestled with mental health services will know exactly how challenging that is and travelling from North Herts to South London for weekly treatment would be very difficult for many people to afford at the best of times, let alone with a £15 taxi bill on top.

As someone who runs a campaigning organisation, however, what really annoyed me was how selfish and counterproductive the protest was. Not only did it inconvenience people, but the protesters could not even be bothered to make their point to those whose lives they were disrupting. There was no message, no banner and the whole demonstration was designed purely for social media. Indeed, it was only through Twitter that we were able to confirm that it was an Insulate Britain protest.

Twenty years ago I helped put together one of the biggest protests in British history when over 400,000 joined the Countryside Alliance's Liberty and Livelihood March. We led the national media, delivered an unavoidable message to the Government of the day and did so with the minimum possible impact on the rest of the population by marching on a Sunday. Throughout the long and often angry course of the debate over hunting we regularly fought those within our own ranks who wanted to block motorways or bring London to a halt on a weekday, and I can promise you that had we put our minds to it we had the people and the machinery to do so far more effectively than Insulate Britain.

We knew, however, that such actions would have driven public opinion against us in a moment. Insulate Britain's leadership seems to have no such concerns and over the last few months has achieved a quite remarkable feat in making an environmental campaign which should have the support of every person in the country less popular than the fight to save an idiosyncratic rural pastime which was irrelevant to most people, and an anathema to some others. This is an extraordinary achievement, but one that Insulate Britain should not be particularly proud of.