By Monica Showalter
The Brits are big on gardens and the beauty of their creations attests to it.
Which is why climate protestors were in for a surprise when, at London’s famous annual Chelsea Flower Show, three of them who jumped into a fancy garden display and began hurling orange powder all over it, got sprayed down with a garden hose by one of the locals.
According to U.K. channel ITV:
An angry onlooker shouted “you morons” at Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters who threw orange paint over a Chelsea Flower Show display minutes before they were sprayed with a hose.
The three women climbed over a rope barrier on Thursday and smothered the RBC Brewin Dolphin Garden, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, an award-winning plantsman, with the paint.
The incident, caught on camera, prompted witnesses to shout abuse at the protesters, with one man heard saying: “Oh no, oh for god’s, you morons – all you’re doing is ruining them, you prats.”
Meanwhile others could be heard shouting for security before a woman grabbed a hose and doused the protesters with water.
Others shouted out in support for the women – with one saying: “I’ll join.”
A video of the Brits in action is here:
It was an appropriate response to a nuisance group that was attempting to destroy the thousands of hours of hard work that went into creating that world-class garden space, and must have been gratifying to the gardener/artist who created it.
After all, it was safe, non-lethal, and what I do when an invading cat comes into my garden to beat up my own cats in order to shoo him away.
It was a fine way of getting rid of these idle clowns who would wreck the work of the industrious creators who made those gardens come to life. As British Nile Gardiner noted, it was a very British response to an increasingly prevalent public nuisance, with one man reportedly shouting “rubbish” to the protestors’ pious intonations. Can’t get more British than that.
As for the protestors who were eventually arrested, they were the same aging losers who have been seen disrupting other events around Europe and the U.S. for attention, most notably at the National Gallery of Art where Edgar Degas’s famed The Little Dancer Aged 14 sculpture was targeted. In this flower-show incident, the youngest one was 35, the oldest was 58. The Degas attackers were middle-aged toddlers, as well.
It also stood in sharp contrast to the mealy-mouthed reactions we have seen from public officials, who have usually delivered slap on the wrists punishments such as exile from the attacked city for a year, (this happened in one case in Florence) to protestors who have targeted Europe’s art galleries.
This response, which was more pointed and direct, was a people’s response to a public nuisance. And we are starting to see it more and more.
AT editor in chief Thomas Lifson has written about another incident today involving a Swedish dance competition similarly interrupted by these climate protestors, which was disrupted by a camera crew with a crane-like device. A few months ago in Germany, security guards left a group of protestors at a fancy auto show glued where they glued themselves onto the floor overnight, and declined to bring them a toilet bucket as they waited it out, leaving them to stew in their own fluids.
In these cases, the punishments fit the crimes. They also represented a more assertive response from the fed-up public that has had enough of this, given that the responses from the authorities can be so weak. That’s a good trend, given that public life is at stake. With more citizens taking these matters into their own hands, the wackos will think twice as they become public figures of fun, getting their comeuppance.