Let’s not fall for the false divide over fuel protests

A few weeks ago The Labour Party, in I guess what is called a fit of pique, called on Twitter for a ban on people protesting at petrol stations. This was after a group called Just Stop Oil blocked motorists from filling up. This heavy-handed response from Labour is somehow both surprising and completely unsurprising. 

It’s unsurprising because Labour clearly wants the votes of Boomers, who will only give up their car keys from their cold dead hands, over the votes of young people, who think we need to phase out fossil fuels, to, y’know, save the lives of every living thing on the planet.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the fact that we are a divided society. You could be forgiven for imagining the UK is split between people blocking tankers from delivering fuel to petrol stations, and people gladly running over these protestors so that they can get a full tank and then complete the school run. In this lazy comedy sketch, not even good enough for the terrible Spitting Image revival, the protestor is wearing tie-dyed homemade clothes and the motorist is driving an SUV.

An absurd divide

In this analogy, Labour is on the side of the homicidal motorist and determined to push away the planet-loving hippy. This is because … well why? A hatred of protestors who disrupt the lives of ordinary salt-of-the-earth types? A desire to crush the radical left? A need to win the support of working-class, no-nonsense, socially conservative Red Wall voters? A desire to distance the party from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership? (We assume the hippy is a Corbyn loving Remainer and the motorist is a Brexit supporter who used to vote Labour under Tony Blair, but voted Tory in 2019.)

Does it come from a desire to represent decent, hard-working ordinary people who haven’t had a proper pay rise in years, who rely on public services that have been slashed by austerity, and are now having their quality of life eviscerated by the twin dragons of inflation and rising costs of living? These people are too busy trying to feed their families, pay their spiralling household bills and make it to the end of the week without collapsing into depression. These people don’t have the bandwidth to worry about next month, let alone decarbonising by 2050.

Maybe Labour shouldn’t be the party of the hyper-online, comfortably middle-class activist set who have the free time to block petrol stations because someone else is paying for their room and board. Or maybe they should, these actions might be the last chance to stop environmental devastation, and these activists are focusing on the big picture, while the rest of us are worrying about whether we have enough Tesco Clubcard points. Pick a side Labour! Goodie or baddie? Which one is which?

Twitter and elections

This division is, of course, absurd. Not everyone who drives hates the planet or is so focused on their own woes that they don’t care about the world their children will be adults in. Most activists aren’t a caricature of middle-class school student politicos, a latter-day Rick from the Young Ones, come to life to bore us to death. Society isn’t so starkly divided. Only on Twitter and at elections, where we force everyone into one or two camps for one day and use that to decide what will happen for four years.

So why choose one side or the other, Labour? Well, this announcement was made over Twitter where it pays to be single-minded. Twitter is not the place for nuance.

Big and small pictures

The tweet does indicate a preference about the type of voters that Labour wants to win over, and they’re more likely to be motorists than environmentalists. I’m sure Kier Starmer and Labour care about the environment and want to do something to avert the looming climate catastrophe. They also want to help people struggling through the week. People for whom not being able to fill up their car might mean they can’t take their kids to school or go to work. It’s possible to be on both sides.

We should reject the binary of the short-sighted motorist and the class-privileged ignorant activist. It’s good that Labour wants to use politics to improve the lot of the struggling ordinary families, who maybe haven’t read the latest ICCP report but do care about the wider world and the future.

On top of this, sometimes we need activists at a petrol station to remind us all of the bigger issues that will affect us all sooner or later, and these activists need the support of the party from the part of the political spectrum that isn’t in bed with those profiting from making the world worse and destroying the climate. Labour has responsibilities to both ordinary people and activists. It shouldn’t jettison one over the other because of a false binary created by angry discourse.

Being on both sides 

I get it, if for one day, Labour needed to be unnuanced on Twitter to not get monstered by the right-wing press. Although, that will happen anyway, so let’s not compromise too much to avert what’s definitely going to happen.

The rest of the time we need to remember that these discourse battle lines bear no relation to how most people live their lives, and the struggles they face. Struggles that Labour could help with if it gains power. Poverty and cost of living pressures need to be addressed, but so does the environment or it will make everyone’s lives worse.

Labour needs to be on both sides of these false divides. Helping ordinary people and saving the environment should both be crucial priorities for the next Labour government.

"Extinction Rebellion-11" by juliahawkins123 is licensed under CC BY 2.0