Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Support the strikes!

It’s a worker’s right to withdraw their labour

There are no two groups more different than climate protesters and striking workers. The former are mostly plummy layabouts, posh road-blockers whose chief aim seems to be to inconvenience working people. The latter are working people. Their concern is not with the fantasy eco-apocalypse that so bothers the pretty heads of Extinction Rebellion agitators but rather with how to ensure that wages are good and working conditions are top-notch.

The climate change alarmists live in a land of make-believe, in which an Armageddon of man’s own making is just around the corner and the only way to hold it at bay is by stopping oil, stopping coal, stopping everything basically. Striking workers, by contrast, live in a world of real things: living standards, money, stuff. Indeed, these two groups have utterly opposing class interests. If the End of Days eco-warriors get their way and all fossil-fuel production is ceased, hundreds of thousands of working people would lose their jobs and millions would be out of pocket as the price of energy soared.

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