Chris Packham’s green derangement

Imagine if some teenage scruff in Hull went on TikTok and said leftists should douse themselves in petrol and set it alight. Or if a fiftysomething ‘gammon’ in Cheshire took to Facebook to say Guardian readers should get in a bin of fuel and let their miserable lives go up in flames. Keir Starmer’s government would probably invent a new offence to ensnare the violent-minded riff-raff: incitement to self-immolation, perhaps. The commenting classes would exhaust themselves by fits of pique. Coming hot on the heels of those nasty social-media posts during the recent riots, the invitation to immolate would be held up as proof that the lower orders really have lost the plot.

Well, someone has made a comment like this. Someone has publicly proposed that a certain section of society sacrifice themselves by fire in order that humanity might be saved from their idiocy and wickedness. But don’t worry – it was a nice middle-class man gainfully employed by the UK’s public broadcaster, not some estate-dwelling good-for-nothing up north. So no need to call the cops. No need to froth about the dangers of heated or hateful speech. At ease, op-ed writers. All’s well.

It was Chris Packham, the BBC’s bird-watching oddball beloved of the green-fingered middle classes and posh women called Poppy who think the world’s about to end. At a protest against grouse shooting in Derbyshire – can you think of anything sadder than protesting against grouse shooting? – Packham took to the stage and took aim at people who bank at Barclays. ‘If anyone here is banking with Barclays, then I suggest you stick your head in a bucket of fuel and set fire to it’, he said. Shorter version: kill yourselves. Violently and painfully. The world will be better off.

It’s a bit much, no? Death by fire for your choice of bank? What is it about Barclays that makes Packham have lunatic dreams about its customers burning to death? It’s the usual guff. Barclays invests in ‘fossil fuels, weaponry and poverty’, yada yada, and therefore anyone who banks there is complicit in suffering and death. So perhaps they should suffer and die, too. As penance, a kind of violent atonement for their sin of moral apathy. That Packham thought this is bad enough – that he said it out loud is psychotic. He let slip the thing that weirdo greens normally try to hide – that is, their Old Testament-level loathing for those they’ve judged guilty of harming the planet.

The silence of the scribes in the wake of Packham’s nutty comments is striking. For the record, I don’t want the police to lay one finger on him. What he said was dumb and ugly, sure, but it wasn’t incitement to violence. If any Barclays customer does set fire to his or her own head, that’s on him or her, not Packham. I was pleased to hear the Derbyshire Constabulary say Packham’s words did ‘not reach the threshold for an offence’ in response to a ‘country-sports enthusiast’ who grassed him up. (Just don’t say ‘snitches get stitches’, because that probably will land you in the slammer under Starmer.)

And yet, the double standards are undeniable. We’ve just come out of a fortnight-long moral panic about ‘hate speech’, whether that’s actual inciting commentary or just crude blather about Islam or immigration. Post-riots, Starmer’s government, to the glee of the woke middle class, has declared war on offensive chatter. Yet Packham can publicly riff about a 48million people setting fire to their heads and the speech police suddenly go schtum. Some probably chortled.

I invite you to imagine the media storm that would ensue if Nigel Farage suggested Remoaners should burn themselves alive or if some Very Online scrote said self-immolation is the sensible option for people stupid enough to believe Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse. It would be ceaseless. Here, though, because it was the nice fellow from Springwatch saying it about stony-hearted consumers who care more for the interest on their savings than for the interests of Mother Earth, it’s fine, apparently. It seems horrible speech becomes acceptable if the speech is from a naturalist loved by Radio 4 folk and if its target is allegedly amoral consumers.

Let’s not start another moral panic, but Packham’s words do point to some serious issues in the weirdo green death cult. I know we’re meant to fear the thoughts and words of uneducated brutes, but it’s the thinking of the upper classes that most often leaves me cold. There’s a deep strain of misanthropy in modern eco-campaigning that sometimes crosses the line into outright dreaming of human death. What Packham’s comments really show, I think, is that when you become convinced that humanity is a drain on the planet, you can quite easily start to loathe humanity, or at least those parts of it that behave in what you decree to be a destructive, Gaia-bashing fashion.

Packham is a full-on greenie. He’s a patron of Population Matters, a creepy outfit devoted to shrinking human numbers. He once made a BBC documentary on the world’s supposedly out-of-control population growth, insisting ‘there are just too many of us’, even as the world is heading towards depopulation. He has spoken up for Just Stop Oil, the aristo-twats who love nothing more than inconveniencing working people and fantasising without the benefit of anything resembling evidence that ‘billions will die’ if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.

Other green panickers about human numbers and the human footprint go even further than Packham. Sir David Attenborough has described humanity as ‘a plague on the Earth’. The founder of modern environmentalism, James Lovelock, set the tone for this wacko millenarian movement when he said ‘the human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady’. (He later backtracked on this kind of thinking.) So cranky has the green ideology become that some people even viewed Covid-19 as ‘Mother Nature’s [way] of resisting humanity’s assault on her essential life systems’. A plague come to deal with that other plague: human beings. Charming.

It makes sense, doesn’t it, that a movement convinced that humans are killing the planet would start to fear and even loathe humans? And might even fantasise about some of them going up in flames or getting bumped off by a virus, all to the good of Mother Earth. This is the great hypocrisy of our age – we live under elites that lecture us day in, day out about the dangers of hate, and yet they’ve nurtured a grim, doom-laden ideology that could be described as truly hateful. I don’t know about you, but I’m done with being warned about hatred by people who think there are too many human beings and that some of them should set themselves on fire.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy