By Phillip Anthony McCoan Thornhill
My phone is ringing. Obviously I shouldn’t answer my mobile while driving. So I do anyway. Its the media. Its important. “Yes there should be someone there who can talk about the action…”. The media are calling already. That’s good news. In principle. But nothing can dispel the dark shadow of dread that is looming over me.
I am driving up to London with an enormous rolled up banner in the back of an astra-van. It says TRUMP CLIMATE GENOCIDE. Its 100 metres long and 6 metres deep and the plan is to hang it from the Embankment, the Thames riverside wall opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. I have been desperately trying to assemble a team to do this all week. Its not a simple task to carry one hundred metres of banner half a kilometre and organise its hanging from the other side of a row of riverside lamposts so it displays correctly. Two people have dropped out. At this point I know for sure, of only three people that have said they will be there. Hardly enough. But the police have been notified, the press release has gone out. There’s no choice but to keep going. And hope.
I am in good time to occupy my pre-booked space in an underground ‘Novotel’ car park. Its just minutes away from the spot at the southern end of the Thames riverside walk (alongside the Covid Memorial Wall) where I can unload the banner from the van. Early, I’m sitting in a little cafe that overlooks the Thames. I had finally got to speak to “Extinction Rebellion” the Friday before this Monday: it was unnervingly like a job interview: over Zoom before a panel of people I didn’t know. Extinction Rebellion (‘XR’), the latest and greatest manifestation of the UK Climate Movement seemed to have morphed into a sprawling bureaucracy. But they said they would put out a ‘call out’. They said somebody would be in touch but nobody had been. Now I’m fiddling with my phone. John – one of ‘the three’ and a friend from many years back – has organised a ‘WhatsUp Group’ for us: is that going to help ?
Time to return to the Novotel. Assorted barriers and tickets and talking with the man at the reception desk. A very short drive around a roundabout of cones and then a turn into too little space between me and a brick wall, so that I have to reverse worryingly into the road before completing the turn into a larger paved space, off the road. But Sheila is there. Sheila was always there. She had been a soldier at the (metaphorical) barricades for ever. If this is a dismal flop at least I will not be alone. The banner, two sections of it, are unloaded. Back to Novotel and return swiftly by foot: to Sheila and the banner but where was anybody else? That was a whole load of banner for two of the not-the-strongest/fittest-people on the planet, to attempt to carry. Some phone calls: Claire is there, at the other end of the Riverside Walk to meet people (if people there might be) and direct them, as reinforcements, towards us.
Then this guy with a camera turns up: he is an XR photographer. A glimmer of hope: almost a creeping sense of relief. Something is happening with XR. somebody put some kind of a word out. Then there is someone else besides Claire, on the phone: a ‘Caroline’. On Westminster bridge. Maybe this will happen. The photographer is hijacked into abandoning his profession to help carry the banner. Me, Sheila and the photographer with one section of banner. I’m desperate to get things moving but this is a struggle. Round about then ‘Ben’ – who I didn’t know at that point – arrives. Then John: characteristically late enough not to appear indecently keen but somehow always ‘there’. Yes, this is really happening. But will we be too late for the media ? I had said setting up at 12 – it was probably already half past – and ready by one. Now ‘Caroline’ has arrived. And as it turned out the media – or some of them – were already there, filming us as we arrived at the at the far end of the walkway near Westminster bridge, with the first section of banner. Actually the wrong section. Much to-ing and fro-ing with the two sections of banner and un-bundling of the green netting with massive bright orange letters. Then the throwing of the rope around the lampposts as I lunged from the stone parapet over the Thames to catch it. Hauling, stretching, and tying onto the helpful dolphin-fin protrusions of the fancy wrought iron lampposts. Everything in the wrong order but it worked out in the end. There was another guy from Extinction Rebellion. Claire was working like a titan. At last, word from Westminster Bridge that it looked OK. I could hardly believe it.
And then they wanted someone to interview. I rushed off to grab the chance. There were more interviews after that. Even as I sat on the stone parapet above the murky waters of the Thames. Claire was interviewed, too. Somebody said there was ITN, Associated Press and Reuters - I think amongst others. In my head at this moment this was unbelievable success. I was steadily floating upwards on a cloud of euphoria – just within my own internal space, as it were - even as I gabbled freely away or attempted (and failed actually) to make last-minute adjustments to the monstrous banner, where the two sections joined.
We were late to finish setting up the banner but it didn’t matter. And soon we would have to take it down. I’d told the police three o’clock, and anyway the tide was rising. Further to that soon there would be no-one to pull it up because people wanted to go home. In the event most of our little band decided to go for a cafe break to come back and take it down (or ‘up’) after 15 minutes or so. I told the police they were coming back and they seemed mildly surprised by this voluntary sharing of information. They had been hanging around, just watching, although one of them, of course had had to ask me a bunch of questions I had already answered on the online form I had filled in to notify them. After 15 minutes had stretched to nearly 30, folks returned and the banner was pulled up, not without me releasing the wrong rope at the wrong moment to send a part of it for a swim in the rapidly rising waters of the Thames: thus rendering it extra-heavy for the portage back to the pick-up point. Then it was left to me and Sheila again - until I was alone with the banner in the van again: ultimately to drive it up to rainy Wales where where I tried but failed to dry it out before putting it into soggy storage.
All of this had come about, of course, because of that November 5th electoral cataclysm. And the deep gulf of depression it had sucked me into. I had to do something, anything. To sublimate that depression into action. So a few days after the devastating result I had emailed Claire (Claire co-ordinates the small campaigning group that in a former manifestation I once did): a Skype call and a plan was hatched. Next thing I was on a marshrutka to the border and soon, a coach to London. Foremost in my mind was that banner. It had a history, although by now I had nearly thrown it away. But mainly by chance I hadn’t and now I knew it was – tragically – all too relevant again. It was a long stressful business to retrieve the banner from its storage in Wales with a freshly bought vehicle and then to find a place to repair it, finally gaining access to the XR ‘Arts Factory’ where it took a solid week of ten hour days (and another three or so for travel) to render it usable again.
All the while making plans with Claire. But here my burgeoning ambitions were progressively withering away. The idea that there were some small roads near the US embassy, down at Vauxhall which it would be easy to get permission to march down with the banner ran up against the reality of very busy (and smelly) arterial highways, while getting permission to use a drone to photograph it (held horizontally by marchers) in this sensitive locality looked equally unlikely. I was next evolving a grandiose plan to march with it from Trafalgar Square through Westminster and Parliament Square to the US embassy at Vauxhall, acquiring photos and films of it set against classic British landmarks to send to the US media. I still think that would have been a damn good plan but I did not pull the levers in the campaigning world I once could and, between us, myself and Claire were not able to muster the kind of support that might persuade the police to let us use those critical roads. As I was reluctantly being forced to settle on a static demo at the US embassy it was looking like I would not be able to use that banner (I had spent days if not weeks retrieving and repairing) at all.
The demonstration we had always planned for the 11th, the Saturday that was about a week before the Inauguration, to get separation from other anti-Trump events to allow a clear focus on climate and to get ahead of the news cycle, ideally supplying images for the media in the reporting around the inauguration as it happened - and thereafter. This would be especially important if the demo itself was not so impressive. In the event the demo, when I returned to the UK for it, having spent the Christmas break in Lviv, was considerably more respectable than my friend John had thought it would be : I knew what he meant because I have been at many a demo trying to make the best of a motley company of a score or so, while here were, I don’t know, all told about a hundred. And actually we did get pictures into the media to be used subsequently in articles on the theme of the (speak not his name) new president and climate. We have yet to see whether they will appear throughout the coming months.
I had been talking things through with Claire the days before while busying myself buying props like a blow-up globe and making placards. Even though it was pretty tempting to just lapse into restful ‘mission accomplished’ mode after the demo I could not completely forget about the banner. Previously during Trump’s 2018 visit we had hung it from the Embankment, opposite the Houses of Parliament although that time we got rather mediocre media attention due to being overshadowed by, for instance, the famous giant balloon-blimp of a baby-Trump that was flown above Westminster. It seemed a pretty straightforward thing, now, to simply do that – drop the banner from the Thames Embankment - again. Actually on Inauguration Day, itself. But I had been quite focused on the demo on the 11th and had even forgot to make call-out for people to help at that event (although by the time I got to speak most people had left, anyway). Hence I spent a week desperately trying to assemble a team: Claire’s call out only yielded John, someone at my hostel who seemed like he might help changed his plans and Pete dropped out at the last moment leaving only Sheila out of those I had appealed to. And having not thought to do it before our demo I did not get to speak to the XR people till the Friday just before our planned banner drop on the Monday.
Hence my elation at the success we seemed to have snatched from the jaws of humiliating failure. But it was more than just a gratifying ‘win’ to chalk up to my campaigning record: a minor revival of a career I had essentially terminated some years ago. The 20th January 2025 (perhaps in reality by virtue of standing in for 5th November 2024) marked for me a horrifically portentous turning point: it seemed to me – as no doubt to no small number of others – to have the potential to stand out in History in a grotesquely dark way. The day the world lost its last chance to mobilise against climate-ecological catastrophe, the day that a self-confessed fascist dictator took over the world’s largest democracy: well we can all argue the details but you know the kind of thing. That being the case it was especially important to me that on THAT DAY I was doing something, whatever I could, to resist the dark tide of catastrophe. That those bright orange letters of the banner should stand out – in whatever marginal way - against the personification of ignorance and evil that embodied the current human crystalisation of that dark tide.
Of course the fight, the struggle, goes on – as it should and has to. There is never nothing to lose. And on infinitely more important levels than a bunch of people struggling with a banner on the side of the Thames. Yet the response to this event of uniquely dark portentousness at those higher levels seems to me to have been so far underwhelming. In the UK there is a much more extensive movement campaigning for action to stem the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate than in my campaigning heyday more than a decade ago – especially as congregating under the label of ‘Extinction Rebellion’. The deepened level of conviction (there’s a dark pun there, somewhere) cannot be doubted but this manifestation of the movement does not – it seems too me - engage very closely, or in any clearly targeted way, with the political process, or simply with the manifestly consequential events of national and especially global politics. When I arrived in the UK in November there was a march organised by a ‘Climate Coalition’ to mark the annual international Climate Conference but it was presented as a march for the Climate and for Gaza: something that undermined the integrity of both issues in my mind. And renders the whole thing as likely to be perceived by the people we should be trying to reach as just some kind of ‘lefty bandwagon’, a perception confirmed for me, at least, by the snippets of speeches I heard reeking of the rarified arrogance a left-wing intelligencia, self-contained in its own detached thought-bubble. And further to the point, the demo was not even that big: we held bigger ones midway through the COP (Climate Talks), fifteen or twenty years ago. We also held a bigger demo to mark the re-election of the climate villain of those times, George W Bush, than anything that was organised to mark that of the Malevolent Ignoramus of today. I have read that ‘Just Stop Oil’ – acting in its own style - spray-painted the US embassy orange: good, but not impressive.
But far more relevant of course is the overall reaction in the United States itself. Rachel Maddow, the popular left-wing cable host on MSNBC, says progressives are not organising a big march or protest this time around because they are being "strategic". They are not being strategic, it seems to me: they are being pathetic. Remember the march on Washington from the Civil Rights era : yet that was only about the civil rights of one section of the population: now, make no mistake, everybody’s rights are threatened. Congressman Jamie Raskin has said that the Democrats could mount a demonstration of five million but that they will not do so because of the potential for the released insurrectionists to create trouble or for Donald Trump to use the military against them. That is simply to admit that he is effectively being intimidated by Trump. That is effectively to capitulate in advance. What is needed is action not the empty rhetoric of Congressman Raskin. I am sure he is a nice guy but at this juncture Democrats (/democrats/ progressives/sane people) need folk made of sterner stuff.
These are fascists in power and they will act like fascists. If you try to resist them bit by bit they will crush you bit by bit. My message to the sane and decent people in America would be to be proactive, not just reactive. Plan big. Act big. Be surprising not predictable. Seize the initiative. Don’t think that politics will work as usual. Don’t think you can change everything back after the next election. There may never be another fair election in America. The bad guys know that they are in a race against time to corrupt the system before the next election (the mid-terms and/or the one after in 2028) sufficiently to “win” it and overcome the inevitable backlash against them. (Don’t be blinded by all the gas-lighting craziness on Greenland, Gaza, tariffs or whatever). They have got off to a flying start while the good guys are merely reacting - in predictable ways always (at least) one step behind.
Organise that five-million march ! While you still can. Revive your flagging morale. Show your strength. In numbers and in the depth of your resolve. A march for ‘Justice, Democracy and a Livable Planet’. Do it for real. Be peaceful. Be disciplined. Make it clear who is creating any trouble. And if Trump tries to use the military then it will be crystal clear to those to whom it is not already, that Trump stands for dictatorship and the rule of force. That clarity will work in your favour: its the bad guys who are continuously obscuring the truth. Do it, please, for yourselves and the rest of us around the world.
The author is a prominent climate activist. As with all Lviv Herald articles, the opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Lviv Herald which encourages opinion pieces from across the political spectrum.