!!Greenpeace’s latest piece of direct action has involved the attempted closure of the Kingsnorth coal power station in Kent. This was prompted by plans to build a new coal-fired power station on the site. The news brought back memories of my own experience with direct action groups.

I have never been a member of any of these groups myself, but one of my best friends from university was at the centre of the road protest movement in the UK for much of the 1990s. Through him, I met many direct action group members over the years and I even stayed with some on a compound in Oxford for a weekend. It was all very enlightening.

I discovered that most of the protesters were basically nice middle class kids rebelling against mummy and daddy. I did not meet a single person there who I could have described as being working class. Indeed, one man I met who was very active was a member of the aristocracy and he was due to inherit a nice title and a pile in the country sometime in the future. A nice future if you can get it, eh..? It almost means you can do anything you want on a day to day basis and the future doesn’t matter.

So, in short, my experience of direct action protesters is that they are very, very nice people… in fact they are utterly, unbelievably, nauseatingly nice... but I think that their unfettered idealism has no place in a realistic world. They are too nice…

So, back to my friend from university… It all started when we were living together in Leamington Spa – he joined an action group. The focus of the group was road building in general and Twyford Down in particular.

Twyford Down is southeast of Winchester in Hampshire. It is and it is a Site of Special Scientific Interest – an SSSI. As you may well remember, in 1994 a new two-mile stretch of the M3 motorway was completed through the area. The protest escalated in the years before and things got very nasty indeed.

The protesters, including my friend and housemate, ended up being very militant. It wasn’t something that happened overnight, but it was obviously happening and we started to see less and less of him. When we did, he started to express some very strange views and behaved in a peculiar way.

All this resulted in my friend spending two weeks at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Pentonville Prison for his actions. He regarded himself as a “political prisoner.”

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Cloud-cuckoo land

Although I regarded his actions as foolish, I have always been loyal to my friends. I was loyal even when he joined the Donga Tribe and started eating tree bark… (The Dongas were set up at Twyford Down and were a group of travelling professional protesters). I was loyal when he denounced everything that I stood for and insisted I should grown my hair and live in a ditch, like him.

As a result of this loyalty, I actually managed to meet many people involved in direct action protesting – and I feel I got a measure of the type of people that get involved in this sort of thing. They are utterly idealist and they will not accept the reality of the world around them. That’s why they live in communes. That’s why they live separately. For them, reality is not an option.

I have not now seen my friend for around 7 or 8 years. The last I heard of him was in May this year – he was actually the lead story on the US version of Bloomberg news.

He was one of two protesters who broke into RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire before the Iraq war and sabotaged a B52 bomber. The reason the story hit the wires in the US is because they were found “not guilty”, despite admitting to the damage to the aeroplane. The jury found the pair not guilty because they believed their actions would save lives in an unjust war. It was a controversial decision.

So my friend the professional protester has moved on from road building… the next protest that he was involved with was climate change protesting. He was a big supporter of permaculture (which I think is excellent on a small scale by the way – but not a panacea for anything). Now he’s protesting against the war. Once the war is over, I’m sure he will find something else to protest about.

I just hope that one day he gets more realistic about the world. Having ambitions and views for the world we live on is admirable and important, but you can’t live in cloud-cuckoo land.

I did wonder whether my friend was sitting at the top of a chimney stack munching a tree-bark snack when I heard the news this morning. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. However, I am sure that the protesters are not too dissimilar to those I have met over the past 15 years. They will be a bunch of idealistic middle class rebels who have left their pashminas at home.

Greenpeace does not want any coal-fired power stations to be built. It does not want any nuclear power plants to be built either. Alternative technologies will give us unlimited power in the immediate future and will solve all our energy problems in a fluffy bunny way, or so they say.

Frankly, I do not believe that this is a realistic version of what the future will hold. If we put all our eggs in the alternative energy basket we will have no economy left in 10 years time as blackouts take hold. When I lived in Tanzania there were rolling blackouts because it was an energy poor country. It absolutely destroys an economy. Don’t believe that it can’t happen here.

Greenpeace’s policies will take us back to the dark ages. We will all be like the Dongas, living in a ditch and eating tree bark. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the way I want to live. Energy protestors must bring more realism into their life and put blind idealism on the shelf.

After all, if the economy collapses, who will pay for the protester’s dole cheques? Daddy probably… P.S. If you enjoyed this article then sign up for Smart Commodities UK. It’s dedicated to searching out the investment trends that could provide our biggest profit opportunities for the next decade…

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