The ‘Autumn Uprising which is drawing to a close in London has been a more mixed experience than last time. There will now be a period of reflection. This is a contribution to that reflection.
The success of April’s ‘Spring Uprising surprised most people, including many of us who were involved. Several things have changed since April. The police were better prepared, and under greater pressure to break any disruptive actions. And for the mainstream media XR blocking roads or buildings was no longer a new story.
The strategy for the Autumn Uprising anticipated some of those changes and seemed to make a lot of sense. Following some local actions over the summer and a divisive internal debate over plans to fly drones at Heathrow, a groundswell amongst our membership concluded that we needed to change tack. We needed to be more careful to minimise disruption to the general public; our principal target is the government, followed by polluting companies and elites who support and profit from those activities. Credit should go to Rupert Read for making a cogent argument for that change at national level.
The internal communications about the Autumn Uprising made clear that we would be doing those three things, starting with the offices of government departments and moving on to City Airport and fossil fuel interests in the City of London. So far so good.
The ultimate aim of our tactics is to compel the government to negotiate on our three main demands. As it turned out, the October dates (agreed internationally) did not really lend themselves to that endgame. Britain has a distracted moribund government shortly to face an election. Raising the profile of the climate and ecological crisis and recruiting more rebels was probably the most we could achieve on this occasion. The harder stuff will have to wait until we get a new government, which will not be long.
The most effective actions were the ones like the occupation of City Airport or this one aimed at BlackRock investments organised by my friend Jo Flanagan. They had carefully thought through their target, their aims, and the best way of achieving them. For example, they dressed in business clothes, to avoid early detection but also because they did not want to look like ‘the other’. The whole thing was carefully choreographed, with a strategy to distribute the video afterwards.
Then we heard that some groups were planning to disrupt the underground during the morning rush hour. It seems that a large majority of XR members recognised a disaster in the making and many of us contacted the national action team to say so. That message was communicated to the affinity groups involved and some decided to pull out. Unfortunately a few people ignored those appeals. How much damage their actions, and these images have done to the movement remains to be seen. This weakness in the self-organising structure of XR has been recognised at national level. In future we should trust the good sense of the majority of our members with a mechanism to decide what will or will not be endorsed as an XR action.
While we learn from our mistakes the window of opportunity to avert a climate catastrophe continues to shrink. As soon as a new government takes office we will need to rachet up the pressure on them. Let’s be honest, none of our actions have caused any serious inconvenience to the government, yet. Unless the new government starts acting to rapidly reduce emissions, that is what we must do next. A loose collection of autonomous small-scale actions has not achieved that aim so far, and is unlikely to do so. Next time we will need will need to focus our efforts and resources on a few vulnerable points. That will require more central planning and coordination.
Personally, I don’t see the point of any more road blocking (except as an accidental by-product of a more focused action) and we should have a national understand that we will never target public transport. Airports may be a legitimate target where the action is clearly aimed at stopping a climate-busting expansion plan. Government departments and activities should be our main targets.
In all future actions, national or local, we should ask ourselves: why are we doing this? What do we believe that it will achieve? Is this the most effective way? If not, then we need to rethink.
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