On the other hand the Turbulence workshop we did there was well attended and interesting.

Seriously I think the issue of class just didn’t fit into the way the climate camp panned out this year, and it’s worth talking about why. Some of it clearly has to do with the choice of site. The great thing about Drax was that it was such an unobvious target, as the most efficient blah-blah-blah. It raised really strange questions for which there were no easy answers (If we have no energy, what will we do?). In short, it just didn’t fit with any wider story.

This year was more or less the opposite. Choosing Heathrow immediately played into the hands of those for whom the issue is primarily about flying rather than the way we live and work. Worse, it enabled the story to be dragged into some horrible lifestyle politics where the most important thing was to educate the masses. [Of course, I’m being a bit harsh here but nothing raises the hackles more than seeing some dumbfuck pretending to radical class politics by claiming that poor people don’t fly. Yeh, right. Poor people wear flat caps, live in holes in the ground, and have rickets. Rant over].

Clearly not everyone involved was a bleeding heart liberal. There were radical elements, and their spin was less about targeting flyers-as-consumers and more about linking up with existing campaigns against airport expansion. But even that seemed like an easy throwback to the 1990s road protest movement, as if something that worked then could simply be resuscitated a decade later.

In any case, the radical perspective seemed to be rapidly sidelined, marginalised by a much wider narrative that dovetails into Labour thinking (i.e. dump the costs of climate of change on to us). And none of this was helped by the science aspect, where the claim that “We are armed only with peer-reviewed science” begged so many questions that I can’t even be bothered to start.

In the end I suspect that if the government had announced, during the week of the camp, an end to subsidising cheap flights, it would have been hailed as a victory. This is what winning means.

Of course I’m writing this from my ultra-leftist armchair, so I’ll reserve judgment til I hear some decent first-hand accounts. And I will happily eat my words.