^ At the weekend,
a video went viral of 21-year-old climate protester Maddie Budd pouring lighter fluid over her arm and, ill-advisedly though I suppose logically, setting light to it. She is then immediately – almost comically – shocked into consciousness by the subsequent pain. The self-immolation video emerged just after Budd had been filmed befouling a memorial to the late NHS fundraiser, Captain Sir Tom Moore, with liquid human excrement.
Maddie is precisely half, it seems, of ‘End UK Private Jets’, the latest mutant variant to sprout from
Extinction Rebellion (XR). She and someone called Kai Bartlett have started setting themselves on fire in various locations to prove that they are either serious about climate change, or mentally ill. Maddie is now
in custody, awaiting sentencing for the defacement of the monument to the nation’s best-loved centenarian pedestrian.
As with similarly madcap eco-protests by Extinction Rebellion and its splinter groups (Bartlett has also self-immolated on behalf of XR-offshoot
Just Stop Oil), it hardly needs to be said that these measures are likely to prove alienating to the vast majority of people. That includes even those who are worried about climate change, and especially anyone who relies on any form of transport more power-assisted than that favoured by Sir Tom. These protests seem actively designed to provoke an angry reaction, a recoil, from anyone not already persuaded that we are going over the eco-precipice as we speak.
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