Pearl River      Roger Hallam was in the headline of “Bagehot” column in the conservative UK-based weekly, The Economist.  Really?  The revolution must have arrived on the British Isles.  Likely, the name means little or nothing to most, but he has been the man behind the scenes – and behind the bars – driving some of the biggest headline grabbing protests over the environment in that country for a decade.  Think, Extinction Rebellion, which spread to many countries around the world after street blockings and actions against oil companies, where he was a co-founder.  Or, Stop the Oil, which he also co-founded that encouraged drenching, a Van Gogh painting in tomato soup.  To say that these groups take climate change deadly serious is an understatement.

I’ve had some brief exchanges with Hallam.  One of ACORN’s members in England had written me asking me to send him a copy of my Nuts and Bolts on ACORN’s organizing methodology, because he had expressed interest in read the book while in hoosgow.  I did so by following the circuitous recommended route of what it took to get a book behind the bars, sending to someone assigned to make the delivery.  Eventually, it returned to me, undelivered, to no surprise, and I still have it, inscribed and ready.  Nick Ballard, head organizer of ACORN in England and Wales and I had a lengthy conversation with Hallam, we in Sheffield, he somewhere in London once he was free again.  Also, unsurprisingly, he was less interested in ACORN and the book than rather or not he could get us involved in his next big project, a citizen’s assembly of sorts, that he was trying to launch.

The Economist can’t help begrudgingly admitting to the effectiveness of Hallam, his advocacy, and organizations, saying,

Politicians in Westminster pretend that street politics does not exist and, if it becomes impossible to ignore, that it does not work. Mr. Hallam and friends provide the counter. Extinction Rebellion helped create an atmosphere that pushed a Conservative government into becoming the first G7 country to pledge to reach net-zero by 2050. Just Stop Oil’s goal of banning new oil-and-gas licences in the North Sea is now government policy. Ideas can affect the body politic only if they are already in the bloodstream. A citizens’ assembly is a mad idea, but then so is an upper chamber consisting of party donors and apparatchiks. And here you are reading about it, thanks to apple crumble and custard.

Admittedly, the columnist isn’t really happy about all of this, but his left-handed compliments can’t avoid giving the devil his due, continuing to say that…

British politics has taken a millenarian turn. A movement without a pet civilisational threat seems pointless. For parts of the left the looming threat is a climate apocalypse. For the right it is a Britain overrun by “fighting-age males” from abroad. How can stodgy centrists compete with the end of the world and invasion? Catastrophism sells. Mr Hallam and his ilk realised this earlier than most. “Act Now Because It’s Too Late” was an Extinction Rebellion slogan. In focus groups, voters despair that things can hardly get any worse. The radical becomes rational. And so Britain has become a nation where grannies are happy to risk jail and The Mothers will join a mob.

The Economist is uncomfortable with Hallam’s advocacy of the effectiveness of being willing to go to jail for civil disobedience.  His stint was triggered by a recording of his speech before a group sought to block the M25, a central London highway.  Civil disobedience is in the headlines in the UK now as well because the government labeled the nonprofit activist group, Palestine Action, a terrorist outfit for their advocacy.  Swedish activist, Greta Thornberg, was arrest recently by British police for holding a hand-lettered sign support Palestine Action.  Some 2700 people have been arrested for similar support of this group.

It’s a tactic worth consideration, but it’s also lucky for British progressives that the police there are unarmed.  Protestors around ICE’s brutal tactics in trying to deport immigrants have had vehicles fired on them twenty times, and a mother of three was killed in Minneapolis as she drove away from an ICE officer.

There’s a line in a Jason Isbell song, “Bury Me,” that I keep in mind and might be worth remembering, depending on the situation in protests.

Well, I ain’t no cowboy, but I can ride
And I ain’t no outlaw, but I’ve been inside
And there were men of stone, boys, and there were men of sand
Long nights alone, boys, head in my hands

There’s another way of expressing this as well: “don’t do the crime, unless you can do the time.”  Civil disobedience works, but it’s not a tactic to take lightly, so use it well, and organize it tightly.