General Chat

What I dont understand is this. Over the last 5 years, the government were giving away free loft and outside wall insulation .This island has been saturated with firms giving it away for free and there is hardly a house here that isnt insulated.
The grants were particularly aimed at older houses that had no insulation.

I am sure this was a national grant scheme and not just in Scotland

All the new builds including this house which was only built in April this year are very eco friendly. Underfloor heating, no radiators and very well insulated and much cheaper to heat as my first quarterly electricity bill shows.

So why are they protesting about something that is actually being addressed or has already been addressed?

The law is far too soft when it comes to demonstrators. Im sure in any other country, they would not have stood for the amount of disruption that these idiot protestors caused.

Florence in the hebrides

Is there really any point in protesting, have any of them won outright and managed to actually stop something from happening or going on, the M4? The Greenham Common? For instance.

So do you have an opinion of your own on the demonstrations?

'Insulate Britain’s use of civil disobedience to fight the climate catastrophe was a catastrophe in itself. Search for the pressure group on YouTube and you see clips of delighted rightwing journalists taking apart its leaders. Sympathisers will say that a right wing that has barely recovered from its climate change denial was always going to lay into the activists. But Insulate Britain did not have to make life so easy for its foes.

The physical courage of demonstrators who walked into the speeding traffic on motorways counted for no more than the urgency of their cause. They targeted ordinary people, who were just trying to get to work or take their sick relatives to hospital, rather than fossil fuel companies and the finance industry that supports them. Their tactical stupidity left them wide open to attack.

Their failure ought to teach us that civil disobedience is not as easy as Prof Erica Chenworth’s “3.5% rule” once made it sound. The rule held that no government could withstand a determined challenge from a tiny minority. As military regimes from Belarus to Burma have shown, dictatorships can withstand challenges from considerably more than 3.5% of the population by setting the army on them. In democracies, leaders of direct action movements cannot just mobilise a required percentage of the population. They have to be smarter than the mainstream politicians they are challenging. They have to use street theatre, argument, wit and controlled anger to convince the watching electorate to rethink its assumptions. Extinction Rebellion was creative and more popular than many Conservatives realised.

Insulate Britain, by contrast, put forward a spokesman, who stormed off a TV show after its hosts accused him of being a hypocrite. (He was demanding the insulation of homes but had failed to insulate his own.) The protest was over and the campaign accepted its inevitable defeat on Friday.'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/16/insulate-britain-might-be-floundering-but-eco-extremism-is-here-to-stay :-|

I don't think they have enough to fill their lives at the moment.

Weird, innit, when most of them could help people feel better by being employed in some of the many job vacancies we currently have - and help people here and now AND/OR dig deep and go for roles where they would be able to make an improvement to people's lives currently and in the future.

They just ain't looking ahead without blinkers, is my opinion.

Florence

In England you can tick the box so that your details are not shown on the publicly available E R version.

The daily mail today has this article

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10084501/Tfl-boss-stepping-role-end-october

It names one of the protesters as a retired Vicar who despite his criminal activities has been allowed to carry on his duties as an ordained minister!!

Florence in the hebrides

Out of curiosity, I looked them up on the ER but strangely in 2007/8 they lived in London and then dont appear after that! I wonder why?

Florence in the hebrides

Yes what a brilliant idea :-D :-D

sham we don't no were they all live we could go and block them from getting out there homes barricade there street doors :-D :-D

i think they all should get asbos

Well this Insulation group are still blooming protesting & causing chaos!!

I read somewhere online today that one of the protesters is married to the Transport for London Boss! She glued herself to the roof of a DLR train no less and was arrested several times.

Surely he should resign..what an embarrassment!

Her husband was a previous leading environmental campaigner for a charity called Living Streets.

Lock all of them up and throw away the key. Why should our police have to waste their time & energy on these useless articles when they have bigger fish to fry like catching murderers and paedophiles etc..

Florence in the hebrides

concrete jackets come to mind but i expect speed humps no use on m25
:-(

They are at it again on the Surrey stretch. There is video of them almost killing themselves and that of a policeman. thank god the lorry managed to stop.

Anyone want to see them arrested for attempt murder or at least ABH??? A woman ended up paralysed after having a stroke because thanks to this lot they couldn’t get the poor woman to hospital on time.

Assault....... if they weren't there protesting / breaking the law then they wouldn't be assaulted is my opinion anyway. And I think technically if they move out of the way to let emergency services through then they aren't blocking the road, I could be wrong though.

The reports have been that a lot were arrested this time.

But a lot of the idiots have glued themselves to the tarmac. Surely the glue and the solvents aren’t doing the environment any good.

One guy has been removed four times :-|

I'm sure I read somewhere that the leaders of the demo have asked the police to lower the speed limit on the M25 :-0 :-S

It’s difficult, I expect, because if someone so much as touches them they’ll not only squeal blue murder, they’ll allege assault and an attempt to breach their human rights.

No thoughts that anyone could charge them with threats of loss of income, breach of the motorists’ human rights or worse if an ambulance is blocked with a seriously injured person on board.

Oh my unbelievable LondonBelle!! Haven't heard any news today so far but hearing this has made my blood boil.

Has the police force gone soft? They have been fined and then released to do it all over again. Yes counter productive as all the fumes from running cars is polluting the atmosphere.
What planet are these numpties on??

Someone said if they actually remove the people by say grabbing an arm and dragging them away, they would sue the police for assault? Well what about other demos then where the police have to forcibly remove the protestors as its the only way to clear them away.

As its been said, if you don't want a fine, then don't commit a crime and blocking the highway is an offence.

A week in prison with all privileges removed might do the trick or would that be against their human rights??

Florence in the hebrides

Well, they are at it again :-|

Surely, this action is counter productive with thousands of cars sat there with their engines running.

I'm surprised that some motorists haven't taken the law into their own hands :-0

Not sure what the punishment should be for this type of crime because a fine doesn't seem adequate :-P