Why is Roger Hallam talking about Keir Starmer being hanged?

Roger Hallam’s having another normal one, I see. The wildeyed co-founder of loony eco-group Extinction Rebellion – and the alleged brains behind its soup-throwing spin-off, Just Stop Oil – is known for his apocalyptic, attention-seeking statements. (He once made a video, addressed to young people, arguing that unless something is done about climate change soon they will one day have their eyes poked out with hot sticks by marauding rape gangs. Seriously.) Now, Hallam has said that Keir Starmer will be hanged for ‘genocide’ in the near future, because of his apparently insufficiently alarmist response to climate change.

On Saturday, Hallam published a piece on his website entitled, ‘A small matter of treason: Starmer and the “climate”’. Furious with the Labour leader’s decision to drop a proposed £28-billion-a-year climate-investment fund, Hallam argues that the next generation will take ‘him to trial for genocide at some point in the 2030s’. He also compares Starmer to Nazi butcher Adolf Eichmann – one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, who was hanged in Israel in 1962 for crimes against humanity – and implies that Starmer will soon meet a similar end:

‘No doubt Mr Starmer’s top legal team will point out, echoing Adolf Eichmann, that he did not actually do the killing. But it won’t wash any more in 2033 than in 1963 [sic]. It will be a political trial. Starmer, like Eichman [sic], will be guilty before he enters the courtroom. They hanged Eichmann. No one gets to kill Jews, and no one gets to send the next generation to their death either – without consequences.’

In this, Hallam is indulging one of his favourite and most despicable themes – comparing climate change to the Holocaust. He’s previously said Nazi-style barbarism is ‘happening again, on a far greater scale’ due to carbon emissions. Similarly, his latest article suggests that Starmer’s ‘crimes’ will, if anything, eclipse those of Eichmann in the eyes of the next generation, because the supposed eco-apocalypse that awaits us will kill many more people and rage for much longer:

‘This time round though it will be a lot worse because, as anyone with minimal analytic skills will know, the situation now is – well, metaphysically different. With Eichmann the killing was done. The camps were closed. This time round it will go on for fucking ever. Maybe they will hang Starmer forever, whatever that means.’

Hallam can’t stop talking about the Holocaust. In 2019, he told a German newspaper that the Nazis’ slaughter of six million Jews – the gravest crime in history, the concerted attempt to wipe out every Jew on Earth – was ‘just another fuckery in human history’, whatever that means… (He later apologised for those comments, claiming his words had been taken out of context.)

Nor is this the first time Hallam has called for – sorry, predicted – that one of his political opponents will soon meet the rope on account of his ecocidal ‘treason’. In 2021, he put out a video of him conducting a mock trial of climate sceptic and Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson, entitled, ‘Dominic Lawson will be hanged for climate crimes’. Just in case anyone misinterpreted this perfectly normal exercise, Hallam issued a disclaimer at the start:

‘Just as a little spoiler, I’m going to suggest that [Lawson is] going to get hanged, maybe in 20 years. I’m going for that as a sociological prediction, okay? So if the Times is listening – don’t panic, Times! It’s a prediction, not what I want. What I want is… I’m going for lifetime imprisonment, because I’m a Christian, or former Christian, and killing people isn’t really my thing, just for the record.’

Well, if capital punishment, meted out against those who disagree with him, isn’t Hallam’s thing, he sure does talk about it a lot. What’s more, to compare Keir Starmer’s u-turn on green investment to the crimes of Adolf Eichmann is particularly grotesque. It’s the kind of unhinged Holocaust relativism that has become disturbingly common among climate alarmists, desperate to panic people into believing their bullshit and ushering in eco-austerity. The accusation is even more grim in this case, given that Starmer’s wife is Jewish and his kids are being raised with the faith.

But this is the quality of mind we’re dealing with. Roger Hallam is gripped by apocalyptic visions of death and destruction and the sticky end he thinks awaits his enemies. It’s all a reminder that the environmentalist movement he leads has long taken flight of reason and decency. Indeed, next time you see one of those plummy Just Stop Oil activists, glued or chained to something, wailing about how they don’t have a future, just remember that this is the diet they are being fed.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_