Who radicalised Nan? If the arrests at the Palestine Action demonstrations on the weekend are anything to go by, the world of crank-Left protest is a hell of a lot older than its youthy reputation would have you believe. According to the Metropolitan Police, half of the 532 activists who were arrested in London on Saturday – mostly for expressing support for Palestine Action, now a proscribed organisation – were aged 60 or over. Ninety-seven of those nicked were in their 70s. Fifteen of them were in their 80s. If Britain’s middle-class oldsters keep getting banged up at this rate, Saga Cruises’s revenues will never recover.
Scenes of retired aromatherapists from Totnes being carted off by London’s finest underline what an authoritarian, unsustainable mess the proscription of Palestine Action has created. If found guilty, those alleged to have caused £7m of damage at RAF Brize Norton last month are thoroughly deserving of a long stretch inside. As are the scumbags alleged to have attacked a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill, over a bogus connection to an Israeli arms manufacturer. Because nothing says “right side of history” like smashing in Jews’ windows. But proscribing the organisation, and thus making it a crime under the Terrorism Act even to express solidarity with it, is an outrageous affront to freedom of speech that has only handed these Israelophobic old codgers an opportunity to pose as the heirs to Nelson Mandela.
Nevertheless, there is something striking about the advanced age of many of today’s perma-protesters, and this isn’t unique to Palestine Action. When road-blocking irritants Extinction Rebellion staged two mass civil-disobedience campaigns in London in April and October 2019, activists aged 56 and over made up almost a third of those charged with an offence, according to an academic study. (Less surprising was that the participants were “predominantly middle class”, with 85 per cent of them holding a degree.)
Just Stop Oil also made good use of the elderly, enlisting two octogenarians, who looked like they were straight out of a Werther’s Original advert, to attack the glass case of Magna Carta at the British Library last year. When I was covering those pathetic People’s Vote marches raging against Brexit a few years ago, I was often confronted by well-off older people, fresh from their second home in the south of France, telling me I’d stolen my own future.
What to make of all this? Leftish protest has long been colonised by the middle-class and time-rich, and it doesn’t get more time-rich than being a middle-class retiree. A lot of this is surely seasoned placard-wavers keen to relive the glory days of the Sixties and Seventies, with whatever bats--- cause they have attached themselves to becoming almost secondary. Decades of anti-Israel propaganda seem to have convinced our more credulous pensioners – as it has much of the low-information middle classes – that Israel is committing a long-dreamed-for “genocide” in Gaza, rather than waging war on jihadists who murdered, raped and kidnapped its people on October 7.
Where environmental activism is concerned, there’s also a large dose of generational guilt, fuelled by a simplistic, eco-alarmist discourse that the boomers lived it large, racked up all the carbon emissions, and are now leaving their grand-kids to fight it out in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style dystopia that is supposedly just around the corner.
Older people can often get a bad rap in political debate these days, and often for things that actually reflect well on them – like their support for Brexit or preference for parties who know what a woman is. Those grey-topped Palestine Action or Extinction Rebellion activists are hardly reflective of where most retirees are at politically. Still, they are a useful reminder that age and wisdom do not always go hand-in-hand.
Who radicalised Nan? If the arrests at the Palestine Action demonstrations on the weekend are anything to go by, the world of crank-Left protest is a hell of a lot older than its youthy reputation would have you believe. According to the Metropolitan Police, half of the 532 activists who were arrested in London on Saturday – mostly for expressing support for Palestine Action, now a proscribed organisation – were aged 60 or over. Ninety-seven of those nicked were in their 70s. Fifteen of them were in their 80s. If Britain’s middle-class oldsters keep getting banged up at this rate, Saga Cruises’s revenues will never recover.
Scenes of retired aromatherapists from Totnes being carted off by London’s finest underline what an authoritarian, unsustainable mess the proscription of Palestine Action has created. If found guilty, those alleged to have caused £7m of damage at RAF Brize Norton last month are thoroughly deserving of a long stretch inside. As are the scumbags alleged to have attacked a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill, over a bogus connection to an Israeli arms manufacturer. Because nothing says “right side of history” like smashing in Jews’ windows. But proscribing the organisation, and thus making it a crime under the Terrorism Act even to express solidarity with it, is an outrageous affront to freedom of speech that has only handed these Israelophobic old codgers an opportunity to pose as the heirs to Nelson Mandela.
Nevertheless, there is something striking about the advanced age of many of today’s perma-protesters, and this isn’t unique to Palestine Action. When road-blocking irritants Extinction Rebellion staged two mass civil-disobedience campaigns in London in April and October 2019, activists aged 56 and over made up almost a third of those charged with an offence, according to an academic study. (Less surprising was that the participants were “predominantly middle class”, with 85 per cent of them holding a degree.)
Just Stop Oil also made good use of the elderly, enlisting two octogenarians, who looked like they were straight out of a Werther’s Original advert, to attack the glass case of Magna Carta at the British Library last year. When I was covering those pathetic People’s Vote marches raging against Brexit a few years ago, I was often confronted by well-off older people, fresh from their second home in the south of France, telling me I’d stolen my own future.
What to make of all this? Leftish protest has long been colonised by the middle-class and time-rich, and it doesn’t get more time-rich than being a middle-class retiree. A lot of this is surely seasoned placard-wavers keen to relive the glory days of the Sixties and Seventies, with whatever bats--- cause they have attached themselves to becoming almost secondary. Decades of anti-Israel propaganda seem to have convinced our more credulous pensioners – as it has much of the low-information middle classes – that Israel is committing a long-dreamed-for “genocide” in Gaza, rather than waging war on jihadists who murdered, raped and kidnapped its people on October 7.
Where environmental activism is concerned, there’s also a large dose of generational guilt, fuelled by a simplistic, eco-alarmist discourse that the boomers lived it large, racked up all the carbon emissions, and are now leaving their grand-kids to fight it out in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style dystopia that is supposedly just around the corner.
Older people can often get a bad rap in political debate these days, and often for things that actually reflect well on them – like their support for Brexit or preference for parties who know what a woman is. Those grey-topped Palestine Action or Extinction Rebellion activists are hardly reflective of where most retirees are at politically. Still, they are a useful reminder that age and wisdom do not always go hand-in-hand.