Sunak house protest: is all fair in the fight against climate change?

Five Greenpeace activists who were arrested after they scaled the roof of Rishi Sunak’s country home have been released on bail less than 24 hours after the protest.

The climate campaigners used ladders and climbing ropes to reach the roof of the manor house in Kirby Sigston, North Yorkshire. They were taking the action, they said, because Sunak has “opened the door to a new drilling frenzy in the North Sea” while “large parts of our world are literally on fire”.

Alicia Kearns, the Tory MP who chairs the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said the protest was “unacceptable”, and a Tory backbencher went further, telling the Daily Express that he would “shoot them”.

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What did the papers say?

“While shoot-to-kill tactics may seem at the more extreme end of tackling the zealots”, said the paper, the incident has “certainly unnerved a few MPs”.

It has also agitated some media outlets. “This whole fiasco is a symbol of our country’s supine tolerance of a tiny, self-obsessed minority of climate zealots who seem able to disrupt the everyday life of the nation with impunity”, said the Daily Mail.

The actions of the Greenpeace activists are “simply unacceptable”, said The Yorkshire Post. The homes of politicians “should remain a safe place, free from intrusion”, as it “doesn’t just impact elected representatives but also their families”. The paper said that “fair-minded people will take a dim view” of the protest.

But is all fair in the fight against climate change? As the tactics of groups like Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil become more direct and confrontational, there has been criticism of activists’ rhetoric from the newly elected head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction,” said Professor Jim Skea, “that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change.”

The veteran campaigner Swampy, who became notorious during the 1990s for his climate protests, told Good Morning Britain that he “wouldn’t do it that way” when he was asked about some of Just Stop Oil’s disruptive tactics.

The campaigner, whose real name is Daniel Hooper, said that protesters who disrupt traffic or sporting events are “obviously brave and passionate”, but change will come from working with people from “different walks of life”.

However, some argue that less confrontational tactics have already been shown not to work.

Despite “decades of lobbying, petitions, marches and civil disobedience”, planet-heating fossil fuel emissions are at an “all-time high”, and the “window to avert further climate catastrophe is closing”, wrote Cara Buckley for The New York Times.

By staging more dramatic protests, such as throwing tomato soup at a Van Gogh painting, activists “nabbed far more attention than anything they’d undertaken yet”, she added.

“Disruptive political activism, from strikes to boycotts to road occupations, always makes enemies,” wrote Andy Beckett in The Guardian last year. “That’s part of the point: confrontations and controversies mean publicity.”

But criticising the climate activists “detracts from what we should be angry about – failure to tackle the most urgent problems of our age”, he added.

What next?

In the wake of the Greenpeace protest in North Yorkshire there have been questions over how the activists were able to reach the roof of the prime minister’s home.

Suella Braverman must launch an inquiry into the security breach at Sunak’s home, said her predecessor, Priti Patel. “It would be sensible for the home secretary to have a full review as to how this very serious security breach has taken place,” said Patel.

Peter Walker, the former deputy chief constable of North Yorkshire, has called for an investigation into his old force, The Times reported. “This time it happens to be Greenpeace – what if it had been a terrorist organisation?” he asked.

The protest will have been watched “with interest” by “more nefarious actors than Greenpeace”, agreed Ian Acheson for CapX. So, even if the protest is viewed as just a “bunch of tree-huggers playing an elaborate prank”, the “serious point” is that “violent terrorists are on the lookout for any weaknesses” in security, he added.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has called for the authorities to throw the book at the activists. “In America, they would probably have been shot on sight,” it said, and “in China, they would never have been heard of again”.

“These people compare themselves with the Suffragettes”, the paper said, but “they act more like mobsters”. Targeting the families and private homes of elected politicians is “simply unacceptable” and “the criminals responsible should be subjected to the full force of the law”.