On a day of bad chants, Greta Thunberg probably had the worst. “You can stick your climate crisis up your arse,” she sang out, to the delight of her young supporters, who apparently like their political message delivered in the simplest terms.
“Inside Cop there are politicians pretending to take our future seriously,” Thunberg told the gathering in Cessnock’s Festival Park. “We say no more blah-blah-blah, no more exploitation of people, nature and the planet. No more whatever the f*** they’re doing inside there.”
Half an hour later, with a second Thunberg speech in the offing, a new chant went up, in another attempt to rattle the cages of uncaring politicians: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, climate change has got to go!” sang the crowd.
But though she is the face of the international protest movement, by late afternoon the attention Thunberg was drawing seemed to irritate organisers.
The young Scottish MC for the youth movement Fridays for Future harangued reporters at a “press conference” for not listening to the speeches of other international activists. “Listen!” she yelled. “Pay attention to Adriana from Mexico! You need to know her story.” But Adriana, like the delegates from Argentina, Mexico, Uganda and the Philippines who had come to share their “lived experience”, knew that every camera was trained on the knot of security guards who had formed a human shield around the 18-year-old Swede, as they did wherever she went in the city.
Advertisement
This was the day climate protest chaos descended in full on Glasgow, with the only real surprise the cold, clear, autumn weather.
By late afternoon three demonstrations were taking place: by Fridays for Future, near the BBC Scotland studio; by Greenpeace, whose activists were floating up the Clyde on their famous boat, Rainbow Warrior; and at Kelvingrove museum, where Extinction Rebellion and others were prevented by a vast police presence from disrupting a dinner for heads of state.
Glasgow suddenly seems a very different place, though the hundreds of climate change activists are only part of its new look. A strike by refuse workers meant there was plenty of rubbish blowing around the feet of the old school catastrophists who were out in force during the day. At central station, New Testaments were being handed out, proclaiming the Word: “Everything God created is good. Take care of the environment.”
Inside the railway station, delegates and activists from all over the world arrived on the hour, every hour. Many delightedly took selfies under an official looking “Welcome to Cop26” sign.
“Displaced Dora” was there to greet them too, a colourful if forlorn figure, built by the green campaigners Veronika Liebscher and Richard Leat, at their home in Irvine, Ayrshire. “People have been very responsive to Dora,” Liebscher, 57, said. “But then people in Scotland are very welcoming to refugees.”
Advertisement
Olivia Hatch, 48, had come from Stratford-upon-Avon to join the protest outside the Kelvingrove dinner. “Polls show people are ready for radical action on climate change,” she said. “Government has to take people with them.”
Elsewhere the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended a reception for the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative and finalists and winners from William’s Earthshot Prize.
At the Clydeside Distillery, the duchess laughed as she offered William a tub of dead larvae which is used as livestock feed, an offer he was happy to decline.
The went on to join Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall at the Cop26 reception at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where Boris Johnson praised the royal family and Prince Charles in particular for his leadership over climate change.
