Rage of the entitled: Eco-toffs use protest to reprimand the masses

Where protest was once about everyday folk rising up against the elites, now we have the affluent agitators lecturing us about our carbon footprint and insisting we learn to live on less.

Edred Whittingham during the ‘most alarming’ snooker incident. Picture: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

As soon as I saw that ecowarrior leap on a table at the World Snooker Championship, I knew he’d be a posh kid from a nice part of town.

The drama unfolded at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England on Monday. Snooker pros Robert Milkins and Joe Perry were halfway through their match. Then out of nowhere a fuming youth emerged, wearing a Just Stop Oil T-shirt and a look of smug self-satisfaction.

The protest during the Cazoo World Snooker Championship at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. Picture: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images

He knelt on the table and sprinkled orange powder everywhere. It’s the most alarming thing that has ever happened at the snooker.

I bet this chap who is so keen to advertise his green virtue was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, I thought to myself.

Here in Britain, noisy greens are often strikingly well-to-do. When Extinction Rebellion clogs the streets of London, you feel like you’ve crashed an aristocratic drinks party.

Everywhere you turn there’s someone yelling “Cut carbon emissions!” in a cutglass accent that would give Queen Camilla a run for her money.

I was right. The Sun had the skinny. The man’s name is Edred Whittingham and he’s the “son of a mega-rich investor”, the paper reported. He’s a “posh yob” who grew up in one of the leafiest parts of Cambridge.

And then came The Sun’s killer headline. The government must crack down harder on these middle-class irritants, it said – we need “TOFF JUSTICE”.

Climate activist Violet Coco, jailed for 15 months after a protest on Sydney Harbour Bridge and later released on appeal. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Swift

We need to talk about these eco-toffs. About why Extinction Rebellion and other radical movements are so stuffed with wealthy kids.

Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green spin on Etonians. They’re the “public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”, he says.

Studies bear out the poshness of Extinction Rebellion. A survey of the 6000 XR supporters who brought London to a standstill in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class (and) highly educated”.

They’re less horny-handed sons of toil than velvet-handed sons of leisure.

The decadent icing on the cake of that 2019 protest was when actor Emma Thompson flew first-class from LA to London to stand with the ecowarriors.

When asked if she thought it might have been a tad more eco-friendly to fly economy, she barked: “I bloody don’t, no!”

Emma Thompson barked angrily when questioned about her stand with ecowarriors. Picture: AFP

Perish the thought of eco-toffs making everyday sacrifices. That’s something only us little people have to do.

We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of activism. It’s the rage of the entitled; a kind of aristocratic anarchism.

It comes dolled up in lefty language but it has nothing in common with protests of old.

Where protest was once about everyday folk rising up against the elites, now we have the elites raining fury on the masses.

In the past, protesters called on their governments to create more jobs and wealth. Today’s aristocratic anarchists do the complete opposite: they lecture the plebs about our carbon footprint and insist we learn to live on less. It’s a patrician finger-wag disguised as radical agitation.

Green protesting seems to have one aim only: to inconvenience working-class people.

So young Edred ruined a day out for snooker’s largely working-class audience. The middle-class protesters who held up the Grand National last weekend were spoiling the fun of working people who love a flutter on that most glorious of horse races.

A large group of bike riders led by Critical Mass took over the city's roads as they rode on to Sydney Harbour Bridge at peak hour on a rainy Friday afternoon in 2011.

Eco-toffs who block roads – everywhere from London to Sydney and Melbourne – knowingly make life harder for people who need to earn a wage.

Last year in London, I saw young lads in paint-spattered workwear pleading with XR road-blockers to let them get home after a long day’s work. The eco-toffs looked the other way. “Don’t these ruffians know we’re saving the planet?” they were probably thinking.

Some say XR would win more support if its protests weren’t so disruptive to people’s lives. This misses the point. Irritating the great unwashed is the aim.

Convinced that hoi polloi have been brainwashed by evil capitalism, the eco-toffs feel the need to teach us a lesson. The world is burning, you morons – that’s the undertone of their arrogant activism.

XR stunts are best understood as an expression of bourgeois loathing for modern society, and aristocratic disdain for its inhabitants.

Greenpeace protesters abseiled off Sydney Harbour Bridge to protest climate change in May 2019. Picture: Richard Dobson

And it isn’t just the eco-movement. The left more broadly has been captured by a new graduate elite. The Corbynista movement here in Britain, built around former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, was a hotbed of privileged pseudo-Marxians.

The “Great Awokening” in the US, following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, was largely spearheaded by “upper middle-class whites”, as one writer put it.

Social democratic parties across the Western world, including Labor in Australia, are falling under the political spell of the professional middle classes.

This new aristocracy uses the instrument of protest to reprimand the masses for their pollution, their racism, their stupidity.

And woe betide any little person who pushes back. They’ll be cancelled in an instant, cast out of respectable society by the affluent agitators.

Hilariously, some of these privileged protesters still use phrases such as class war.

Oh, there’s a class war, for sure. And you guys are on the wrong side of it.