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Ministers and parliamentarians from all parts of the political spectrum have condemned Extinction Rebellion for blocking newspaper delivery across the UK on Saturday.
Four national newspapers, including the Sun and the Daily mail, disappeared from the shelves of some newsstands on Saturday morning after more than 100 environmental protesters attacked Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp-owned printing houses on Friday night.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “A free press is vital to holding government and other powerful institutions accountable on issues critical to the future of our country, including the fight against climate change. It is completely unacceptable to try to limit public access to news in this way.
On Saturday morning, Labor MP Dawn Butler tweeted “Bravo Extinction Rebellion” but subsequently deleted it. The official line of the Labor Party, which it followed, read: “A free press is vital to our democracy. People have the right to read the newspapers they want. Preventing them from being distributed and the printers doing their job is wrong. “
Protesters used trucks and bamboo scaffolding to block roads outside Newsprinters works in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire and Knowsley, near Liverpool, on Friday night. The presses print the Sun, Times, Sun sunday and sunday time, just like him Daily telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, he Daily mail and Sunday mailand the london Evening standard. Signs were posted on the site that read “Release the Truth” and “5 Criminals Control Our News.”
On Saturday morning, police said they had arrested about 72 activists. Around midnight a blockade was cleared in Glasgow with no arrests.
In a statement, Extinction Rebellion said the action was designed to disrupt and expose what it called a failure to adequately report on the climate emergency: “Our free press, society and democracy are under attack, by a failed government that lies to us. constantly … Our leaders have allowed the majority of our media to accumulate in the hands of five people with powerful vested interests and deep connections to the fossil fuel industries. We need a free press but we don’t have it. They have failed us. “
A former tabloid journalist, Steve Tooze, said he had joined the action in Broxbourne to support “a day with far less disinformation, division and hatred.” Tooze, who said he had worked “for each of these newspapers in the last 25 years,” had his arm encased in a concrete pipe. “I feel like, as a former informant, [these newspapers] we have a great deal of guilt for what they feed us today by not telling the public what is really going on, “he said. “If it’s not in the papers, people don’t care about it, and if people don’t care about it, there is no pressure on this government to treat this as the emergency that it is.”
But Ian Murray, chief executive of the Society of Publishers, said the action would be “ridiculous if it weren’t so serious.”
“Everyone has the right to peacefully protest and make their voice heard: after all, that’s what a free press is all about,” he said. “But it is not acceptable that those who want only their voice to be heard try to silence others.”
A spokesperson for Guardian News & Media, the parent company of the ObserverHe said: “We fully support the right to protest, but we do not tolerate any action that restricts the public’s right to access journalism and buy the newspaper of their choice.”
While Extinction Rebellion has largely had the support of David Attenborough, in an article on Saturday he said it was not “sensible policy” for environmental protesters to break the law. Attenborough, Britain’s most celebrated naturalist, praised the younger generation for their passion, but said: “I don’t think it is sensible policy to break the law. If it’s good at all, some of your demands will be met and then you will demand that people comply with those new laws. You can’t have both. “
But his article, which highlighted the climate emergency, may not have been widely read: It was in one of the newspapers that Extinction Rebellion addressed, the Sun.
