The spoiled brats of Youth Demand

‘YOUNG PEOPLE ARE RESISTING’, the website of Youth Demand informs us, breathlessly, announcing the arrival of yet another environmentalist road-blocking protest group – except this one protests about Palestine, too. What follows is the usual combination of Israelophobic nonsense and economic illiteracy:

‘The [UK] government is engaging in absolute evil. They are enabling genocide in Palestine by sending money and arms to Israel. They are contributing to the murder of billions to keep the fossil-fuel profits flowing.’

Youth Demand, an apparent spin-off of Just Stop Oil, is currently having an April jamboree, involving a month of direct action to ‘shut down’ London. Here are its demands:

‘Young people are stepping up to resist this nightmare. We are demanding that the government must:

2) Make the rich pay: raise [£1 trillion] by 2030 from the super rich and fossil-fuel elite to pay damages to communities and countries harmed by fossil-fuel burning.’

It’s all so agonisingly pathetic. For one thing, we have the supreme naffness of the name. ‘We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say’ was excruciating when the Monkees sang it nearly 60 years ago. People who claim to be the voice of an entire age demographic are always a cause of full-body cringe. This kind of eternal live-action roleplaying of the 1960s is gut-clenching.

What makes Youth Demand particularly nauseating – and hilarious – is its activists’ dizzying levels of entitlement whenever they get their collars felt. These little darlings are clearly shocked to the core that the authorities have the temerity to notice them. They view with open-mouthed amazement even the pathetically light touch of British law enforcement in the 2020s. These are Veruca Salt brats who have clearly never been told ‘No’ by their mummies and daddies. ‘I want a trillion pounds and I want it NOW, daddy!’

‘Breaking: four Youth Demand protesters arrested after leaving the road’, the group’s X account tweeted on Monday. ‘Four Youth Demand supporters were arrested for shutting down the A3200 near Waterloo Station for just 10 minutes’, it continued. ‘They were arrested for interfering with key national infrastructure AFTER leaving the road.’

This emphasis on ‘after’ is a gem – as if it’s totally unreasonable to be arrested after you’ve committed an offence. You have to be caught red handed in the very act, apparently, or your human rights have been violated. Whatever next – ‘strangler nicked AFTER fleeing the scene of the crime’?

The tweet also has a video, enabling us to hear from two of the arrestees, who are called Eve and Lottie, because of course they are. ‘This is, like, just a fucking pisstake, to be honest’, Eve tells us, in the inspiring vernacular of the Waitrose radical. ‘Like, we were on the road for 10 minutes.’

Drawing attention to the feebleness of your own ‘shutdown’ of London – for 10 minutes at a time – is surely an admission that your intent is frivolous, that this is just another middle-class rite of passage, like Glasto and gap years. It is saying: ‘We’re not taking this seriously, so why are you?’

In fact, there’s a lot that’s hard to take seriously in Youth Demand’s communications. ‘Palestinians are being slaughtered every single hour at the hands of Keir Starmer’s war machine’, one tweet tells us. The idea that sad, skint Keir Starmer has a war machine of any kind is very sweet, I suppose. Imagine if he tried to build one – it would be four years behind schedule and £7 billion over budget, stuck at the committee stage awaiting a communities-impact assessment.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Youth Demand organisers that the authorities will tend to take an interest in the disruption of public business – though, to be fair, they could be forgiven for not expecting our reduced, ineffectual and PC police force to bother trying to stop them.

They even seem to think they can target people’s homes with impunity. Last year, Youth Demand rocked up at Keir Starmer’s residence. Just the other day, the house of foreign secretary David Lammy became a target. Activists plonked themselves down outside his home with pretend babies in body bags. While it is richly ironic and strangely satisfying to see that ninny Lammy buzzed in the very same childishly hyperbolic way he has conducted himself for decades, swarming at the homes of politicians and public figures crosses a line.

In a statement, Youth Demand said eight activists had been arrested chez Lammy, adding: ‘We’ve tried the marches, petitions and rallies for over a year and a half now. It hasn’t worked.’ A whole year and a half! Gosh, that’s like a whole four bloody terms at uni. Wait until they hear about Nelson Mandela.

I suppose we should be thankful that Youth Demand is made up of such privileged idiots. A genuinely determined and serious revolutionary cell might be a dangerous thing. This rabble of middle-class twerps, less so.

The point of effective direct action is to get people on your side. To make your cause look attractive. This very basic fact doesn’t seem to have so much as crossed anyone at Youth Demand’s mind. It’s almost as if the enterprise is all about them.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.