Come on! Hurry up! How long is this gonna take?
This past week, I went to London for spring break. During my stay, many unanticipated interruptions popped up while I was traveling around London, like the one shown above. These disruptions often resulted in blockages for hours, throwing off many tourist’s, and Londoner’s, busy schedules.
It turns out these disruptions weren’t the result of an accidental jam of foot-traffic, but actually a carefully planned event, made possible by a well organized group of climate change activists called the “Extinction Rebellion” who generally resided in London, and were here to cause a big commotion for the issue. The Extinction Rebellion’s main goal, is protesting the British government’s “failure to tackle the causes of climate change,” and rebelling until they do something about it. For a time period reported by some lead activists as two weeks (starting Monday, April 20th), the protesters have rampaged over London, creating “pop-up” blockages on major roadways often to busy tourist attractions.
At one point during my trip, we were on a bus bound for one of London’s numerous tourist attractions, and we happened to arrive at Piccadilly Circus just as the activists decided to settle down and block the whole road. (Piccadilly Circus is one of London’s busiest crossroads, known for its bright e-billboards, sort of like Times Square in New York). If we had arrived just a few minutes earlier, and we would have been past them and slowly but surely on our way. But as fate would have it, approximately 100 or so activists decided to plop down in the road just front of us, soon before our arrival.
And what exactly did the activists do? Well, after the initial action died down (I saw a smoke bomb being set off!) some held signs saying things about our climate change problem, while others simply sat on the road and lounged around chatting and munching on food supplied by supportive Hare Krishna’s (a local food truck that stopped by the square).
The protesters seemed very relaxed and happy, sitting and mingling in the middle of the street, blocking all traffic. As it turns out, this scene was repeated at key tourist and commercial spots across London throughout the week, and by most accounts into next week, and possibly even after that.
What about the British police? Surely they would do something about the disruption. Well, despite more than 400 reported arrests through Thursday, the police didn’t seem in any kind of hurry to prevent future disruptions or clear out the currant blockers. In fact, according to one senior officer, their protocol was to warn the activists twice and then ultimately take action by forcibly removing and arresting them.
The “problem” is that the police have been very relaxed here: we’re talking hours and hours from from the first blocking until the police actually remove anyone. It seems like the first warning doesn’t come right away, and the wait time between that warning, the second warning, and any direct police action is hours, not minutes.
Most of the time, the police stand around chatting and just watching the peaceful, but disruptive scene in front of them. The police strategy seems to be to prevent violence by allowing the disruption to continue. And, obviously, they’d prefer to avoid having to make arrests, because it takes four officers to remove and arrest each protester.
But, you have to wonder whether the police couldn’t have achieved the same peaceful result while acting more quickly, avoiding such prolonged disruption. The cost, which has been reported to have been hundreds of millions of British Pounds, which is significantly more than dollars, and many wasted hours stuck in traffic.
For us (meaning my family and I) the cost was “only” about 90 minutes of precious lost sightseeing time, and an additional £14.90 pounds for the subway tickets to get away. When you multiply that times hundreds of thousands of people and add in other factors (like missed food and other important commercial deliveries), and the Extinction Rebellion has actually been very effective at making an impact. And, despite all the arrests that have been made, the activists seem to be getting stronger and more organized still, perhaps strengthened by replacements or perked up by the constant local and international news coverage of their activities — which seems to be their primary objective.
But when will it end? Well, my family and I have already come and gone, so for us, it’s over. But for London’s residents and future tourists, it is still unknown. Recent announcements by some of the leaders of Extinction Rebellion have implied (and sometimes outright said) that they will “escalate their civil disobedience campaign if the British government doesn’t step up action against climate change.”
We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.
