Part IV. “Fuck the Injunction”
It was about this time when I felt like the momentum of the story was beginning to burn out. It started out with that violent sort of acceleration which leaves the engines completely zapped and unable to produce anymore movement. I had almost given up and accepted this as one of those cruel twists of anticlimactic fate like watching a firecracker go off and instead of beholding a swarm of fantastic fiery explosions, you are greeted with a pathetic pop and a small sliver of smoke emerging and disappearing inches above the dud. You realise how badly you’ve been cheated but you don’t really care because the way you were cheated so outrageously bad that the disappointment from it is oddly hilarious. Or at the least as weighty as the enjoyment would’ve been. You just don’t know how to react in situations like that.
But the events which took place in the following few days restored my shaky faith in this saga that is still has some life left in it. No need to unplug the life-support machine just yet.
Insulate Britain quickly realised the glaring hole in the injunction where the only place they’ve been banned from protesting is the M25. It’s not at all as if that’s the only motorway or major road in the area. So, they just casually picked up their act and headed for the Port of Dover for their next protest.
September 24th, just a day after the injunction, they appeared like a cist on the A20 access road which leads to the Port of Dover. 40 of them, they did their usual charade of blocking the road, spilling paint and gluing themselves to the road but also on top of petrol tankers this time. Hey, variety is the spice of life after all. They sure do take some sick pleasure out of gluing themselves to stuff. Imagine the king-hell pandemonium that would’ve broken out had one of those petrol tankers blown up with the protestors still stuck to them. All it would’ve taken was one small leak and a careless hand about to discard a smoking cigarette butt. KABOOM! 40 protestors would turn into 40 million pieces of human viscera scattered over a 40-mile area. A scene too bloody to imagine on print so I’ll just skip right past it.
At the end, 39 protestors were arrested, but will be eventually released because they’re not in contempt of court as the M25 injunction states because of the simple fact that they’re not on the M25.
It’s not difficult to see why the Port of Dover was targeted this time. What with 17% of all British trade worth £122 billion flowing in and out of that port a year, between 400 and 500 trucks tooling in and out of the place every few hours, this is a heaving nexus of trade, which also means a hive of carbon going into smoke which messes with the cool of Insulate Britain greatly.
One person was particularly unhappy with these events and that was Transport Secretary Grant Shapps who sought another injunction from the High Court, keeping these nit-wits off the Port of Dover. Later that day, the injunction was granted and yet another area become a no-go zone for Insulate Britain.
So begins the game of cat-and-mouse between the British government and Insulate Britain. The ministers and politicians want to take tougher action against these hoodrats but they just don’t know what it is they can do. They can’t ban them from protesting or else they’ll have an even bigger and mightier mob on their hands swarming the streets of the capital and demanding the head of the Prime Ministers until they get their freedom to protest back. Strange and bitter images of the French revolution come to mind and I must swallow them with a sip of my tea. Until the court can come up with some creative way of stamping out the practices of Insulate Britain while not angering the bear of public opinion, all they can really do at the moment is grant injunctions keeping them off one area until the protestors move elsewhere and then the courts have to grant another injunction a few hours after the crowd is cleared keeping them out of there, going on till Insulate Britain effectively kick themselves out of London. Then they’ll be the problem of some other city’s jurisdiction, but I have a feeling this possibility won’t come to pass. That pile of injunctions forbidding Insulate Britain to set foot in various parts of London will become so tall that its instability threatens to topple on top of anyone who so much as walks in its radius.
September 27th now. These people are laughing right into the faces of the law as they return for yet another protest on the M25. It seems they were completely serious about their gesture of burning up the copies of that injunction, because it seems that it doesn’t really terrify them at all. These people are either in possession of an iron will, or are completely fucking insane. The latter looks to be the case in my eyes. They descended onto junction 14 of the M25 at 8am like a swarm of crazed hornets who’ve flown through a vaporous cloud of DMT smoke and participated in their usual modus operandi of gluing, spilling, blocking and shouting inane bullshit. This time there was something sinister in their expression which belied a blind faith in some malevolent force beyond their puny comprehensions. They knew they wouldn’t be messed with because their hazardous maker has them under the encompassing shadow of his wing. Their determination was unhuman and unsettling. No longer are these the amateur activists who just finished university and decided to ditch all plans for the future and take part in something “bigger” but ended up in trouble instead. No, they’re messing with some voodoo shit now.
Before we end up taking this cosmic horror any further and my imagination perambulates out of control, let’s move right onto the important stuff. 53 people were arrested. They will be serving time now or will have to cough up an “unlimited fine” whatever that means.
Even our old friend Liam Norton made an appearance at this protest, his first since that contemptible walk-out from Good Morning Britain, and spilled out some useless drivel while under caution, “You can throw as many injunctions at us as you like, but we are not going anywhere. You can raid our savings and confiscate our possessions” says he almost sounding like William Wallace’s “They’ll never take our freedom!” speech. Unfortunately for us, he continues, “You can deny us our liberty and put us behind bars. But that is only shooting the messenger. The truth is that this country is going to hell unless take emergency action and stop putting Carbon into the air.” Liam Norton probably has a lot of proving himself to do since that fool he made of himself last time, which can probably account for his presence and threatening candour here.
This protest on the 27th couldn’t have come at a worse time for the motorists because these clowns pitched up their tent in the midst of a truly uncontrollable crisis. And we can form a pretty good idea from this country’s track record of how crises are handled…
Word out on the street is that we’re completely out of fuel. Petrol stations are encumbered by depressingly long queues of cars which stretch out for hours. This entire story has been plagued by the symptom of traffic jam. Every which way I look, there’s a car waiting to get somewhere but can’t. Some fuel stations have imposed a £30 limit on the fuel they can buy just to conserve some for others, while many more have just outright turned drivers away because they haven’t a single drop left in their reserves? How the fuck did we get to this? Where did we go wrong? The easy answer for that is when we started existing, but what I’m in search of is the complicated answer.
Anyone who’s found themselves zapping down the M25 or any another major road in London, may have noticed something peculiar. The cars are still there, people are still driving around like maniacs bent upon vehicular manslaughter, the trees are still waving in the wind as the motorists pass by, but something is missing. Not a lot of HGVs around. Yes sir, that’s a Heavy Goods Vehicle, and in today’s economy, those are very important. These beasts of burden have almost virtually vanished from the roads. Is there a consecutive string of public holidays for HGV drivers that I wasn’t aware of? Those people who sit behind the giant steering wheels of these goliaths sure wish that was the case, because they’ve been burned over and over again. Exploited by their fat-cat multinational bosses from every which way, their wages have dropped, their working conditions have deteriorated and with the hauling industry totally crippled – financially speaking, and also with some drivers falling prey to the illness – their sub-human bosses doubled down on this ruthless exploitation. That, and then immigration laws tightening like a noose around the neck because of Brexit was the straw that broke the camel’s back for these drivers. This shit wasn’t even close to worth it anymore, so they hung up their keys and never looked back. A workers vacuum of about 100,000 drivers was left behind in the wake of this shortfall. When enough people to rival the population of a small city decide to quit an industry at around the same time goes to show the ragdoll ways in which these poor drivers were jostled around. No one in their right mind would want to put themselves through driving this gigantic truck, which is a bitch to handle and swerves like a drunkard sinking into a K-hole, any longer under the circumstances.
Yes, that’s all well and good but that does it have to do with fuel? It doesn’t take a genius to work this out themselves that if there’s no heavy goods drivers available to deliver, those goods are going nowhere. And the fuel industry was hit the hardest by this lack of deliveries.
The way this was initially communicated to the public was in such a poorly worded and misrepresenting manner that the people got the completely wrong idea of what the situation actually was. According to what the people were told, there was a shortage of fuel. Imagine being told that a resource like fuel is in its final few measures now, especially a fossil fuel like that which will eventually run out. This stuff is running out?! I’ll be goddamned if I don’t get my hands on some of this stuff before they’re dry! This stuff has value, black gold. You won’t spare a moment before you’re out there with every car you own, empty kerosene tanks piled up in the backseat, driving towards the nearest petrol station to fill up and prepare for the fuel holocaust. What you didn’t anticipate however was that everyone else had the exact same idea. That’s just the way we’re all wired. It’s a one-two punch of panic and greed. Same thing happened with the toilet paper and other essential groceries during the early days of the COVID hell. There’s a little part inside us which is always prepared for the end. When the nature of the universe is such that it inexorably hurtles towards its end, everything within it, whether they’re aware of it or not, are preparing for that along the way. If we’re going to die, we might as well make our last few days here as comfortable as possible. And it’s none of your business if I don’t own a car and still want to buy some fuel to sniff it. I’m a paying customer you fuck-wit! Don’t mess with free enterprise man.
Anyway, people did as people do and panic bought as much fuel as they could cough up the money for, which was good news at first for the petrol stations because they thought they’d still be receiving some deliveries anytime now and business was booming! But pretty quickly the grim nature of their predicament set in like a debilitating illness when no tankers hauled by trucks arrived and the queues of thirsty fuel-parched cars kept lengthening. Some of the shrewder ones tried to enforce a £30 limit for each car, but that went down as well as one can expect when paying customers are told that they can’t buy as much as they came here for, however even that didn’t help because pretty soon under all this demand the petrol stations ran dry and last drop of fuel dripped out of the pumps. People pounced on that last drop as it fell to the ground and began licking the floor, trying to get every relishing bit of it out of the concrete, like thirst crazed people out in the middle of the desert when their minds turn upside down enough that they begin seeing mirages. The picture looks pretty grim here in London. 90% of fuel outlets have run bone dry with the demand rising to a staggering 500% from the previous week of writing this and still no delivery trucks in sight. The queues are still there as people desperately cling onto the hope that a truck will come tooling in any moment now and they’ll be bathing in diesel once the pumps start up again. Petrol station staff have turned hysterical at having to constantly turn people away, meeting reactions that cover all the shades of aggression from motorists.
Facebook and Twitter are exploding with pleading cries from people asking the public if they know of any pumps anywhere they can get some fuel from, following the hope that someone altruistic enough might just give them a tip off and not take it for themselves. Others have taken to more demented extremes, stalking the few HGV drivers on the road who are headed to petrol stations fortunate enough to be ahead in the order for deliveries, following them right to their destination and filling up. There’s something about such a torturous magnitude of desperation which really kills all capacity for thought. Many of these fuel stalkers, as I’ll be calling them from now until their affliction is at an end, drive around for hours looking for a tanker and then they glue themselves to their trail which goes on for some more time on top of that, burning up more fuel in the process that they’d ever hope to refill out of such a doomed endeavour. Signs of insanity are beginning to manifest in the public, and if this is how the human race composes itself in times of crisis then we have waived all right to call ourselves an intelligent species.
Until this whole mess is sorted, I’ll be taking a shot of any spirit that I can immediately get my hands on every time I see an HGV on the road, because these things have attained the status of myth now.
Meanwhile government officials have handled this crisis a way which looks like a zoological experiment involving pigs and brain damage. The Tories have been wandering around in abject confusion, acting as if those 100,000 lorry drivers disappeared overnight. I wouldn’t be surprised if upon asking some government officials stuck with the story that these drivers have been abducted by aliens… This is the level of hypothesised ineptitude we’re dealing with. And I will seek to turn that hypothesis into a proper statement in the following few sentences. Senior Tory MPs, among them Andrea Leadsom, who also was the former Business Secretary, has been urging people to not blame the government for this. She’s also telling people, in the vein of a street preacher who is babbling pure ridiculous shit, that there’s “plenty of fuel.” I suppose it’s because of this abundance of fuel that doctors and school teachers can’t get to work – having to resort to online consultations and classes for their patients and students respectively – because they can’t fill up their cars. In which case people should also probably shut their mouths when they say that according to the figures this is the worst fuel crisis to hit Britain in 20 years. What on Earth are they talking about when there’s clearly “plenty of fuel”?!
Noticing things on the ground swivelling way out of control like the engines of a Ferris wheel spinning the thing so fast that the carriages are ripped out of the frame through sheer force, members and civil servants of his party implored, nay demanded, Boris Johnson appear on TV and tell the people to stop panic buying. In their words they want him to “get a grip on this crisis” because that’s exactly what our brave and fearless leader is lacking right now.
But we have no reason to fear any longer because Boris has a grand plan to replenish the fuel supplies in the forecourts. His highly effective strategy will bring enough drivers to tackle the shortage and we will be a strong and independent country again. His plan? Oh yes. Listen up everyone because I’ll only say it this one. I’ll grant a free… yes that’s right free three-month working visa to 5000 foreign heavy load drivers who would want this job. I mean why wouldn’t they want this job? To work for us and help us out of this tricky situation which the universe has put in our path to test our strength and will… Immigration laws? What immigration laws, I’m the PM mate so I can turn back on those laws if I want. The European ministers? Oh, they’ll happily lend us some drivers. We’re this tight. Just you watch, we’ll be out of this mess by the end of the week…
How I pity the Prime Minster’s naivety. There are so many holes in this knee-jerk impulsive plan that it makes a spaghetti strainer shy with inadequacy. First of all, I think the Tories are starting to early signs of Dyscalculia, because these numbers just don’t add up. How are 5000 new drivers supposed to handle the high-tension backload of deliveries that 100,000 were supposed to originally carry? I suppose they’re under the illusion that these new drivers will be worked to the bone for our benefit and then they’ll be discarded like yesterday’s socks. And then there’s the problem of timing. This three-month working visa only covers them up until Christmas. What’s the direction after that? Such a short term “solution” would suggest that no long-term plans have been drafted up yet. But I can imagine Boris Johnson’s beat up face appearing on TV with the long-term plan to fix this fuel crisis. He’ll address the nation and urge everyone to start fucking… yes sex, reproduction, make babies, and put set them on a lifelong path of learning the delivery and haulage trade. By the time they’re of age, we’ll have enough drivers to get the fuels to the stations. At any rate why the fuck would European truck drivers who have secure full-time jobs in their home countries, quit those and then come here for a temporary three-month gig where they’ll be overworked, underappreciated and then when the times up, given the same expendable treatment that the NHS staff were given after the initial thrust of COVID was over. Put your hands together for an applause and then forget about them. European ministers have even said themselves that their lorry drivers refuse to “help the UK out of the shit they created themselves.”
That must be a surprise for anyone in the joke that the Conservative party is. We created this? It wasn’t our fault! As we said time and time again, these drivers were abducted by an unidentified species of alien, they pretty much disappeared overnight I tell you…
What this waste of breath of a plan highlights most of all in the British character is this fair-weatheredness, changing the ways they wanted and forced people to adopt in the first place just to relieve their problems now. This gross double-standard is why we’re mocked and vilified as a country who can’t and won’t ever stand on their own two feet again. The Tories wanted independence and freedom, no longer to be considered a part of the European open market because they thought it would make them appear weak and unable to sustain themselves. Opportunities and freedoms for the next generation were denied out by almost equal vote in the referendum, in favour of the old guard – people who are dead by now and didn’t even live to see the effects of what they were voting for. The government wanted this and they forced it down our throats. We want our own market; we won’t want to be a part of this union anymore; we can make it all by ourselves out there. The temper tantrum Britain threw on the world stage was so disgraceful and painful to watch that countries just turned their heads but then eventually decided to yield to our beggings. We got what we wanted now. We’re the UK. We can do it ourselves now just like we did in the days of the empire! But now that we find ourselves in the styx, those same hypocritical bastard politicians who voted in favour of leaving the EU because they didn’t want immigrants in our pure and blessed land, are the ones who are in favour of the motion to let immigrants in just to help us. At least they’re sticking to their true character and kicking them out immediately afterwards once the job is done. No point in letting them nurse any false hopes that they’d get to stay here.
We’re ran by a ward of pathological fascist hypocrites who need to be locked up and lobotomised for their own good.
Goddamn did I really go there? Lobotomy? Treason? Another unbridled tangent that served no purpose to the main skeleton of the story? Maybe I’m the one in true need to psychological treatment. If I get to have any say in the matter, I’ll take shock treatment.
Wheeling back around to Insulate Britain, or at least trying to wheel with the very limited amount of fuel going round, their protests have been the interventions of something portentous and horrid. With enough panic and dismembering confusion in the air already, these protestors couldn’t have picked a worse time to show their ugly faces and throw a wrench into people’s plan. Holding up yet more traffic, shooting more carbon into the air and not to mention all the fuel that’s burning into useless energy as they stand idle in this carnival of a traffic jam.
It was on September 29th that I got up, made myself a cup of tea and started my day with some deafening loud music. Dropping my girlfriend off to the train station so she could get to work, I picked up a copy of the Metro, the Evening Standard and the Times as is my ritual. Returning home to have a casual perusal of the nonsense going in outside the relative insanity of my four walls, I was greeted by the same horrid news in all three newspapers that day. I read the small article and I felt my brain stem sink into my spinal column and felt such an overwhelming surge of disappointment and grief that I turned my music off to get a hold of myself before I smashed a glass on the wall and swallowed it. A violent migraine seized my head the moment those ugly sentences embedded themselves into my head. The 53 people arrested on the protest which took place on the 27th had just been released from custody. No prison sentence, no fine to mention of, no ramifications for their actions despite their act of contempt against court. Just a slap on the wrist and they were sent along their way. The day the M25 injunction was granted, the ministers were speaking like America during the Cold War, high and mighty and vowing to retaliate with the full extent of the law against those who go against it. They wouldn’t settle for anyone pissing on their turf and they made a point of it by constantly saying how any dissenters would be punished if they protested on the M25 again. But when the time came to actually act, the authorities turned into a bunch of jelly-legged cowards. They had all the power at their disposal to teach these punks a lesson, but instead they just chose to do nothing. Up until this point the scales were tipping towards the authorities because they have the means to lay down the law and enforce it, even though the whole chase between the establishment and Insulate Britain began to look like a tiring game of cat and mouse, they were still the ones ahead. But now the tables have turned completely and Insulate Britain are walking away with the confidence that they can do this again and get away with it. What the fuck are they going to do? Arrest us? The courts have successfully made a mockery of themselves and undermined their own power by dismantling their intimidation tactic, it’s a simple as that. And this is the sort of this which is difficult to recover from because when the ones in charge show the first signs of weakness, all trust and fear in them begins to break down. But they’ve been undermining and discrediting themselves and each other for centuries now, which can account for the complete absence of any trust or respect between the people and the government. They got pissed on by the Insulate Britain and they asked for more…
Which they got the very next day on September 30th, the last day of this strange and dizzying month, when Insulate Britain appeared yet again with the determination of a tumour on the M25 and blocked of Junction 30 at 7:30am. At this point their actions and MO is becoming as predictable as the level of stupidity that comes out of the minds of anyone running this country so I need not mention what they got up to that morning in the middle of the road. 11 people arrested the first time round, and then a second group of 16 protestors appeared later during the day at 1pm and blocked the same junction and were swiftly arrested bringing the total for that day up to 27. But really, for how long will they be held? Will they just be released the very next day with a stern word? Unless they have secret plans to double down on the punishment, they’ll deal out to the people who repeatedly show themselves at these protests, but I don’t think the authorities have that level of evil creativity nor the backbone in them. The Crime Commissioner for Surrey Police, Lisa Townsend, stated that legal proceedings against the protestors are already underway. Doors are being knocked and some are being served with papers to appear in court. However, something about the lightness in these statements makes me think that nothing actionable is really going down. She went on say that they can’t charge the protestors for minor offences or else the charge will be discontinued. It seems what the police really need is for the protestors to slip up and commit some serious felony crime to meet the threshold of criminal prosecution. Something real dirty like aggravated assault or first-degree murder. What eludes me though is that they have these protestors completely against the wall with the injunction. They can cart them off to prison right now and throw them in the murkiest, most claustrophobic cell, if they start prosecuting them right now, which is something they’re not doing for some inexplicable reason…
It’s really a shame. I would absolutely love to applaud the persistent actions of Insulate Britain. They come back again and again with a steely resolve to stick a finger in the face of the establishment. Unafraid and undeterred by any threat or consequence the politicians say they’ll deal out, they keep coming back to make their lives a living hell. They are the perfect adversary for this wretched government. Only trouble is that their actions are also affecting the people they are standing up for. They’re making everyone’s life a living hell. And they seem so totally oblivious to the side-effects of their protests. They’ve carried on this road blocking act for so long that they can’t shake themselves out of it to pursue an alternative way of protesting. They’ll just keep turning up, like a piercing headache which is definitely brain cancer, and distribute the pain out to everyone. What they don’t realise is that they’re doing more damage to the innocent bystanders around them than they are to the system. And in spite of their fearlessness, it’s for this reason I won’t allow myself to support or applaud their actions.
Same shit, different day. With the first day of October comes yet another protest. Three actually taking place one after the other on different parts of the M25 and M4. Junction 3 of the M4 near Heathrow Airport – yet another one of those fatal attacks near the airport where frustrated drivers are shoved to the brink of insanity as the time ticks down until their flights take off without them -, Junction 1 of the M1 which is actually not too far from me, had I possessed the foresight of their plans I would’ve turned up there demented on a cocktail of drugs and wreaked havoc on their performances with sheer intimidating insanity. Then shortly after a third group boarded off Junction 25 of their favourite place to protest. By the end of the afternoon 39 people were arrested, many of them from the group who were arrested and released post-injunction. A good number of these protestors had been arrested seven consecutive times. Even some of the organisers thought that their people would be breathing prison air by now, but were surprised to see them walk in and out of the jailhouse like a serial pisser with a weak bladder walks in and out of the toilet after a glass of water.
“The government could end this tomorrow one way or another either by making a meaningful statement we can trust … or by sending our members to prison.” Said one of the organisers to the press.
This is all really starting to turn awfully repetitive and terminally boring. I don’t know how much longer I can follow the trail of this story because it’s fallen into the same movements as a paranoid schizophrenic’s brain as it falls into an acid induced thought loop. The prospect of covering another protest each day I wake up, knowing the events and outcomes already before even opening the paper, is filling me with a profound sense of entrapment. Even the newspapers have grown tired of wasting ink on this wretched story, the page coverage of each subsequent protest piece shrinking gradually until it takes up no more than a small paragraph shoved in the corner of the page. I’ll wait for something major to happen but if that train doesn’t pull into the station soon, then I’m abandoning it to its demise. This deadlock between the government and Insulate Britain seems like a wall too high for either one of them to leap over. Either break this stalemate now or just start shooting each other in the streets because this is getting mind-numbingly boring for me….
Tis now October 2nd, and the foul effects of this month have begun to manifest. Octobers have never been a good month for either me or my girlfriend. Only good thing about it that we suffer through this cosmic madness together and rejoice once November rolls over the horizon like the golden marmalade rays of sunshine after a hard night of despair. In regards to the matter which spurred me to chronicle this preternatural saga of lunacy, nothing major has happened today, which in my mind is both a good and bad thing. I was in need of a small break from covering this shit-show, even if it’s just for a day. And with enough things going wrong for me today where I feel on the verge of a violent meltdown, I could afford not to lose my temper anymore over this.
What did happen today was a case of sweet irony! A taste of their dirty medicine… On the day that Insulate Britain decide to take a day off – effectively giving me one too – they’re probably hunkered down in their piss ridden hole someplace, planning their next ridiculous appearance. Meanwhile an Insulate Britain activist put herself up for grilling by an online mob when she complained on Twitter about missing her yoga class when she got stopped and searched by a police officer. What started out as a moment of venting for her, in her empty head, soon turned into feeding frenzy. Poor Miss Phillipa Windsor who announces to the whole world in her Twitter bio that she’s an activist for Insulate Britain had to pluck up the energy to write this tweet…
“Dear @policeconduct
On my way to Bandha class this morning, I was followed, stopped & searched by intimidating police who claimed I was conspiring to obstruct a highway!
They found no #InsulateBritain banners in my car, were unduly rude & I missed the whole class as a result.”
These words put together in this manner, typed out by the arthritic fingers of this middle-aged bat reek of impetuous stupidity and an lack of self-awareness on a magnitude so baffling that its radioactive. Here are some of responses to this tweet.
“What about the way you cause mayhem for others? Lost hospital appointments, wages lost, funerals missed by reckless behaviour?”
“Some will call this irony, others will call this karma”
“No sympathy for you at all”
I suppose the devil didn’t expect to hear that when he rode a tank and held a general’s rank. But that devil had a bit more in the way of style and form than this ageing irrelevant white trash of a woman who thinks she can get away with doing the very thing she’s currently bitching and complaining about online. None of these Insulate Britain activists have a right to be mad at the police. Me and the cops have never seen eye to eye, especially with the recent string of violent attacks against women and the cops wandering around with their feet in their mouths. There was never any respect for them in the first place so I had nothing to lose for them. But on this particular occasion, they’re an instrument who are playing their tune above the din these idiots are creating, though sounding not much better than theirs, I invite it more than their opponents. The enemy of my enemy being my friend sort of scenario.
And these people have paraded themselves around the M25 so often now that they’re as regular as I am in some of the bars around London. Of course, this one was going to get stopped and searched because she got clocked by the police. Apart from their plaster-walled faces and general lack of hygiene which makes them look like they’ve been dragged around in pig manure, there’s a cloud of suspicion which hangs over the way these activists present themselves. They’re always looking so shifty. Even in the way they drive, they do so with the furtive uncertainty of what they’re about to do, even if they have no intentions of doing anything. Identifying them is like shooting sleeping ducks in a barrel. Their entire demeanour gives themselves away and if the authorities don’t have enough dirt on them to send them to the tin-can, then at least they have that element of recognition over them.
For me on the other hand, the momentum of this story is starting to burn out. The state of this piece is beginning to resemble a rocket losing speed during its blast-off and curving back down towards Earth. Like the sullen eyes at mission control who know that it’s all doomed and have to start calling the clean-up crew, all I can do is watch and follow where this giant explosive tube will land. It’ll be no problem finding it because a horrifying explosion will mark its ugly grave from miles away. No need to prolong this misery any longer so all I can hope is that it quickly meets the ground and blows up in a fiery cloud of rocket fuel and debris.
Part V. The Eternal Recurrence. Oh, Mamma Where is my Sweet Relief? The Ticket Out of here…
October 4th. It’s been a fair few days. I disembarked from this story and took a holiday from it, fled the city towards frantic oblivion and tried to put as many miles as possible in between me and this mess. But as every holiday goes, it comes with an expiration date. When my bus arrived at Victoria coach station, the first thing I did was run over to the newspaper racks. In spite of the towering dread of plunging myself back into this sinkhole, my twisted curiosity got the better of me. I just had to know exactly what sort of crude developments had accumulated during my two-day retreat. Flicking through the pages, hoping to catch an ugly glimpse of a high-vis vest, I rummaged through two newspapers and found nothing.
“What?” I thought, “Did these bastards decide to take a holiday same time as me?”
Newspapers rolled under my arm, my girlfriend and I got on the train heading back home. Once my girlfriend got a hold of the newspaper however, and started actually reading through it, did she find one small insignificant story regarding these road-lunatics.
“Your friends are in the paper again.” She said to me while pointing at a truly miniscule box right in the corner of the two-page story in The Metro with no relation to the issue whatsoever. This time they blocked four different pinch-points on the M25 near Hangar Lane, Blackwall Tunnel, Arnos Grove and Wandsworth Bridge. All the paper decided was worth mentioning were the locations and number of arrests (38) and the amount of time it took the police to clear up the roads (4 hours). Seems even the newspapers are as indifferent to this story as I.
Upon returning home, I decided it might be useful to dig a little deeper. See if I could get anything else out of this occurrence than what the papers were letting up. Ye fucking gods! The dimension of this story online was completely different than what ended up in the papers. Hot headed clashed between the motorists and protestors, people taking matters into their own hands and admissions of inhumane acts of dispassion by the group’s leader. This is the stuff I was searching for in the paper. Looks like I’ve got to drag my fingers across this keyboard and continue along the circuit once again. But not today. I’m tired and I have some cleaning up to do and most of all I have a gigantic fucking headache and lots of sleep to catch up on…
Sirens scream through the morning as an ambulance races towards Canterbury hospital. The speed and loud piercing sound of the blaring sirens create an odd synthetic effect together, making the bright sunlight buzz off the lime-green surface of the vehicle as it zips down the road before the clock runs out for the elderly patient in the back. Like a shadow, another car, a dark blue sedan being driven by a woman on the brink of a breakdown, is hot on the ambulance’s tail as it follows it to a similar destination The driver cuts the ambulance through the slip-road which takes him down towards Blackwall tunnel. The traffic starts to thicken like sauce in a bubbling pan, yet the driver remains indefatigable in his speed and precision. He has complete control over this vehicle and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get that patient to the hospital on time. Consternation begins to creep into his mind like rising damp up a wall, he’s read aplenty about the maniacs who’ve been blocking the roads around London. I hope they don’t turn up here… A vain hope which he’ll come to learn later, but not now! He’s in the driver’s seat and that lady in the back will not be seeing death today. The current density of the traffic has forced the driver to shift down a gear and cut back on the acceleration. With every passing minute, his hopes begin to fizzle away until they meet a swift end when he finds himself at a total standstill, almost at the head of a long line of cars with their engines roaring with furious impatience. Just up ahead the driver can make out a gaggle of people in high-vis vests, carrying large red and blue signs and just sitting idly in the middle of the road. Cars were honking all around the ambulance but no one in the immediate vicinity would’ve been able to hear it above the deafening electric death-wail of the ambulance’s siren.
Right behind the paramedic vehicle, the car which was following it earlier is stuck in this static line of heating metal too. Already beside herself with abject worry, this was the very last thing she needed to happen. Because of course she knew exactly what was going on here. Tears begin streaming down her face in large rivulets as the possibility that her mother will die right in the back of that ambulance begins to take shape. And all for what? Just because a bunch of selfish hateful bastards wanted to block off a road?! She can feel the hate rising like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Possessed by pure indignation she opens the door and leaves the car. Her eyes are ablaze with fury, made even more turbulent with the inexorable stream of tears still spilling out of those sockets. Marching in between the lanes towards the blockage upfront, she meets those scoundrels head on. Two protestors, who were made entirely out of folds with their crumpled clothes and wrinkled skin, sat on the road got up and approached the barriers as they noticed this lady storming towards them with all the calamity of a tornado.
“My mother is in the back of that ambulance there, we really need to get her to the hospital. Can you please just let us get past?” She asked in as polite of a tone as she could manage, there was no helping the straight edge in her voice which came from the fear though.
What one of the protestors said, a particularly imbecilic looking fellow with bags under his eyes and hair which resembled a bird’s nest after a firecracker exploded right in the centre of it, sent the poor lady’s composure launching off the handle. “No.”
The anger began rising and reached a catastrophic boil, but knowing that the clock was swiftly winding down for her mother and that she was at the mercy of these self-absorbed tramps, all she could really do was beg. Earnest pleads began shrieking out of her throat at a volume which could’ve torn her larynx, “How can you be so selfish?! She is in the ambulance; she is going to the hospital in Canterbury. Do you think I’m stupid?”
The protestors just stood there like walls, staring at her with the same indifference that paint gives to people who watch it dry, while she continued, “This isn’t ok, this is NOT OK! I will support you but not now! How can you be so selfish? Can you not understand? My mum is 81 and she’s going to hospital!”
Bored motorists in the surrounding cars pulled their phones out and recorded this desperate exchange, videos which ended up all over the internet the following evening, setting in motion events which would lead to the pathetic downfall of this merry band of cretins.
The paramedics in the ambulance had had enough of sitting there and doing nothing. Compelled by the resolve to take matters into their own hands as none had done before in similar situations, they both got out of their cars and stampeded over to the protestors. Their blue gloved hands grabbed the protestors by the shoulders and dragged them right out of the poor lady’s sight who was two degrees too close to a seizure at that point. The other protestors took problem to the proceedings and began to actually protest, that is to the actions of the paramedics.
“Your actions will take the lives of many!” A middle-aged lady with long pig tails falling out of her orange wool beanie, which is a funny detail because she smelt like a pig too, declared.
“And we’ve got a lady in the back of that van who we need to get to hospital right now! She’s dying there, move out of the way and let us through!” Bellowed the paramedic who was sat silently and composed in the passenger side seat but had lost his sangfroid amidst this deplorable scene while he hauled another protestor out of the way by his collar.
Positively intimidated by the wrath of the paramedics, the protestors looked at one another resignedly and shrugged the shoulders in a gesture of one-off defeat right before they began clearing a path out of the road block, wide enough to let the ambulance fit through. Marching back to their van, the paramedics promptly got back in and whisked the lime-green blur towards Canterbury hospital.
Later during that day, Roger Hallam appeared on a podcast called Unbreak the Planet, where he single-handedly pulled apart his whole movement and proved to world that what they’re dealing with is a bunch of psychotic baboons who broke out of London Zoo. The conversation steered towards the protestors letting the ambulance through the blockade, and Hallam’s thin rubbery mask of humanity dropped and exposed the scum-sucking zealot that he is underneath when he not only admonished the protestors for letting the ambulance through but said that had he been there on the scene he wouldn’t have let any ambulance through, even if it was at the expense of a dying patient’s life. The most unsettling thing is the sheer detachment with which he spat out that phlegmatic statement and the cold conviction on his face, the sort that knows there will be no ramifications for saying something so unspeakable in front of a vast audience. What we have on our hands is a jaundiced eco-fascist with ideas far out of his own control and a rabble of wooden-headed followers who would sooner be flattened under the wheels of a Prius than disobey their supreme holy light, or whatever the fuck they call Roger Hallam. It’s safe to call them a cult and historically the best way to deal with a cult is to nail them up on a wall and set them on fire for everyone to remark upon. I’m pretty sure that not even Planet Earth would mind the carbon emissions from their smouldering corpses, so long as it gets rid of them in the end.
It was on October 9th when the last nail in the coffin was hammered. Everything that happened after this was mute. Our esteemed friend Liam Norton appeared once again to twist the knife deeper into the stomach of Insulate Britain, this time on talkRADIO. It’s already a matter seared into the public record that his house isn’t what they’d exactly call insulated, despite the weird hullabaloo they’ve raised over it. Cristo Foufas, the radio presenter wanted Norton’s side of the story, because there must be a perfectly good reason as to why.
As the question worked its way into Norton’s mind, a look of curious mischief wiped over his face and he blurted out, “Because I’m a hypocrite.”
Immediately sensing that what he had on his hands there was a golden goose, unfortunately not the type that lays eggs but one which produces words of its own undoing, Cristo pushed the conversation further so the “eggs” would come spilling out.
“Do you understand why people will think, well this guy doesn’t care about insulation, he only cares about causing disruptions and making a name for himself.”
And then in a baffling moment of treacherous surprise, Liam Norton swung the hammer and said, “Yeah they’re right. I don’t particularly care about insulation.”
The words left his mouth and set me free. I knew that this was the end of the road and I felt an ambivalent mix of relief and loss. But before I could let those feeling take root, I had to make sure that this corpse was truly dead. I don’t want it waking up and turning into an undead inconvenience. So, I waited. Minor things happened here and there; a third injunction passed which warded 14 separate major locations around London from the snide trickster spirits of these protestors, a meeting was held among the protestors where a journalist managed to sneak in and bring information of the truly uneventful things they talked about, but these were nothing more than the involuntary spasms the cadaver twitches with as decomposition begins. Four long and anticipatory days have passed since the last road blocks. Now is as good time as any to lay this monster to rest, bury the coffin deep underground, beneath layers of cement. If the bastard comes back to life, it’ll be too late. Enjoy thrashing and screaming to yourself in that splintery casket of yours, no sound will get through the amount of cement I’ll be putting on top of you.
For years to come, the name Insulate Britain will bring nothing but repulsion and failure to the minds of… no one, because they will have been long forgotten by then. The half-life of information is very short these days, and the radiation twice as toxic. These fuckers were lacking in common sense as much as they were lacking a plan. They set out to whip the government into action, or at the very least get the people talking about the issue of climate change. But all they ended up achieving was the combined odium of a whole nation and more carbon emissions than they saved. No one can blame them for lacking guts however, no matter stupid and dense they were. They squared up to the government and proved they weren’t afraid of any book being thrown at them, although they also proved that they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the effect it would have on other people. They’ll go down in history as sitting embarrassment to the act of protesting; a movement which turned the gun on itself based on how clumsily its leaders composed themselves when the eyes of the nation were upon them – doing a much better job of ruining themselves than their opposition could ever try – and members of the group sleeping with and married to the enemy. It makes one truly wonder if their true intentions this whole time was just to waste our time.
In an unmarked grave somewhere in Hampstead Heath, on a tough patch of ground near the lake, if you stand with the right kind of ears with the perfect conditions of silence, you might hear a faint mumbling issuing from the ground. Don’t try to make out the horribly stupid words which are muffled by the faintness, instead call me on this number (07778******) and I’ll be over as quick as I can with more cement.
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