The publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is asking if the left-wing climate change movement is “too white and middle-class”.
The broadcaster, which offered no criticisms of the climate change protest movements beyond its lack of diversity in its video report, explored the supposed problem through a Muslim called Fatimah, a co-founder of the “New Green Deal UK” group.
“I feel like once you enter this space, there isn’t a great analysis of, like, who are the different types of people there, what are the barrier, and, like, what are the class dimensions to the people who are in the room,” Fatimah said.
“So I feel like I haven’t been seen and I haven’t felt represented in this space being a woman of colour, being someone from a more working-class background,” she added.
“Even Greenpeace admits there is a problem,” intoned the BBC’s narrator authoritatively, quoting its British executive director as saying it is “absolutely right to criticise the movement for being overly represented by white middle-class people”.
Visiting Doncaster, recently hit by floods which climate activists link to climate change, Fatimah finds working-class white people telling her in no uncertain terms that they do not feel the people they see on television live or understand their lives, with one telling her “you can’t just stand there and chain yourself to summat [something]… because people don’t want that.”
“For me personally, glueing yourself to a Tube train and stopping people from going to work is definitely not something that’s going to be engaging with working-class people,” another tells her.
Speaking to people from ethnic minorities back in London, their relative lack of interest in the climate protest movement is somewhat less clear, with one person claiming that “being a black man” it “just wouldn’t be safe” to get into altercations with police like the white middle-class protesters do — despite the police’s generally weak, hands-off approach to lawlessness on the part of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, for example.
The BBC also linked viewers to an earlier March video report haranguing climate activists for their lack of diversity, suggesting that the lack of it at a rally in Leceister was “alarming” considering the city’s multicultural demographics.
On the subject of the extremist Extinction Rebellion movement, the March report features activist Judy Ling Wong describing it as a “very young movement” but one which “has got to think about their policy about diversity”.
“They’ve got a long way to go,” Wong said. Nevertheless, Extinction Rebellion does seem to have been attracting more minorities to its ranks by morphing from a so-called “climate justice” movement into a hybrid affair which also agitates for various racial grievance causes — for instance demanding reparations at a recent event in the City of London financial hub.
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