A study has shown that protestors who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations last year were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. Well, there’s a surprise. It turns out some 85 per cent of the London protestors had a degree, a third had a postgraduate qualification and two thirds described themselves as middle-class. Three quarters of those charged with offences lived in the south.
And, if the accents I heard from the protestors as I biked through the throng on my way to work were anything to go on, a high percentage were public school–educated, too. I’d never seen so many Econians — the public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world.
Where their ancestors ran Whitehall, the army and New South Wales, Econians are leading lights in eco-protests, cancel culture, Marxist politics and the trans rights movement. Just like their forebears, they run their new fiefdoms thanks to the advantages of a top education, a mastery of the new language of the ruling class, and an air of confident, cold command that brooks no dissent. And all this is done with a studied diffidence about their public school background.
While their ancestors ran Whitehall and the army, Econians lead eco-protests and cancel culture
Take the new star of the media and the drag queen world, Amrou Al-Kadhi. A filmmaker, performer in the drag troupe Denim and author of Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen, Al-Kadhi went to Eton and Cambridge. But you wouldn’t know that from Al-Kadhi’s own website, which carries the description: ‘Professional unicorn. Queer Iraqi non-binary Brit… selected as a Screen International Star of Tomorrow [with] a comedy series called Nefertiti in early development.’
For Econians, their school and university constitute the background that dare not speak its name — whether it’s King of the Eco-Hacks George Monbiot (Stowe and Oxford); or Jeremy Corbyn’s old righthand man Seumas Milne (Winchester and Oxford); or Corbyn and Milne’s sidekick James Schneider (also Winchester and Oxford).
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