A split within the radical green movement was inevitable

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions.

And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness the photographs in the newspapers today of Extinction Rebellion campaigners at Westminster adorned in ghoulish fancy-dress and looking like pale vampires. And also true to the stereotype of the wacky semi-religious fanatics, the activists are duly showing signs of divisions in their ranks.