To put it mildly, Mick Hume's (August 8th, Thunderer, see below)
patronising assertion that Heathrow climate justice protestors
('eco-prigs') are campaigning against freedom, and for austerity is
wilfully ignorant poppycock.

Does Mr Hume have any idea about how people are living in today's
consumer paradigm? That most barely have time to see their own
children each day, let alone take care of what remains of the
community fabric? That so much of what the average person earns goes
to pay rent, while all over England rich land-holders are subsidised
by the EU and the artifically high priced housing market? That gun
crime is on the rise in the UK as it becomes more and more like the
US? What kind of freedom is that? No wonder people need a holiday to
recover..

And in the meantime, thoughtful eco-activists have long recognised
that the key to ecological sanity, not to mention solutions to the
other modern ailments listed, is not the curtailment of freedom but
rather in their advancement.

Campaigners of all different backgrounds are committed to a
democratic, localist agenda that acknowledges the role that access to
land, for new communities, stewardship and the development of local,
face-to-face democratic & sovereign structures have to play. New
post-capitalist structures sensibly linked to regional, national and
transnational decision-making bodies, ensuring a democratic
alternative to globalisation.

And about austerity, Hume's other point of attack against the
ecological movement. Austerity, freely chosen as it may well be under
a new, democratic paradigm again would mean a more qualitative
freedom, and not less as Hume contends. Freedom, for example from
bondage to the market to which our corporate leaders, like him are so
in thrall, but also to endless desire, to which the cult of
consumerism encourages us, like the infantilising trap it is, as
always there will be people who say 'more'.

Democratic, ecological solutions would mean all sorts of new freedoms:
freedom to be with the kids more, to get up at varied times, to work
on an art project, to go for a walk, have a siesta, work with some of
the people down the road who presently we barely know, and overall to
ensure a better local community. And all because our relationship with
the earth has shifted, paradigmatically.

Hell, by then we might even be free of terrorism and gun crime, both
of which are on the rise today because of the very same licence to
expand endlessly that Mr Hume appears to enjoy so very much.

From The Times
August 8, 2007
What do we want? Less freedom to go on holiday!
Mick Hume: Thunderer

Yes, it was right that the British Airports Authority was denied the
sweeping injunction it sought against eco-activists planning a Camp
for Climate Action near Heathrow. Even prigs must have the right to
protest.

But no, it is not right that the anti-flying protesters are now being
hailed as champions of liberty. Their campaigns are dedicated to
preventing millions who wish to fly from exercising freedom and
choice. Theirs is arguably the most illiberal, elitist protest
movement since the French counter-revolution.

Why protest at the height of the holiday season? Because the idea of
the masses jetting off for no better reason than to have "unnecessary"
fun offends their miserabilist sensibilities. So they will make the
sacrifice of camping at Heathrow in order to "educate" the great
unaware — that is, to tell us that we are greedy, ignorant morons. It
seems they do not need the power of flight in order to look down on us
all from Olympian heights.

The protest group named in the BAA's limited injunction is called
Plane Stupid — by which they mean that we are stupid for boarding
planes, whereas they do the intelligent thing by invading an airport
with a Baptist minister and praying on the runway. For these moral
crusaders, flying for pleasure is a "climate crime", a sin against
nature, and they claim priestlike authority to lecture the majority
"on behalf of" Africa's poor or unborn "future generations".

One Plane Stupid spokesman sneers that "our ability to live on the
earth is at stake, and for what? So people can have a stag do in
Prague." An activist who protested against "binge flying" by blocking
the door to a cheap-flight company announced in messianic tones that
"while G8 leaders have simply spouted hot air, I've shown how one
woman alone can close down climate criminals". For Gaia so loved the
planet, that She superglued Her daughter to the doors of
lastminute.com.

Their contempt for the pleasure-seeking masses echoes earlier attacks
on the tourist industry when the railways and Thomas Cook first took
people from the cities to countryside and seaside. Jim Butcher's book
The Moralisation of Tourism tells us that in 1870 the Rev Francis
Kilvert said: "Of all the noxious animals, the most noxious is a
tourist." Today it seems some would like flying tourists to be treated
as if they were carrying foot-and-mouth.

If we want to live in a free country then they must be free to be
self-righteous ecoprigs. But it is depressing to see young idealists
reduced to supporting a movement that, in the words of one leading
green, campaigns "not for abundance but for austerity . . . not for
more freedom but for less". What do they want? Less freedom! When do
they want it? Now! Strangely, they didn't use that argument in court.

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mick_hume/article2217901.ece