Extinction Rebellion (ER, also abbreviated as XR) is an organized, global protest movement that is regularly active in the United Kingdom. Its stated aim is, briefly, to compel government action to fight the consequences of climate change, often using severely disruptive protest measures.

ER has engaged in repeated, intense protests in London over the last two years, including blocking bridges across the Thames in 2018 and occupying prominent sites in London in April 2019. In October 2019, widely unpopular but relatively small-scale public transport interference was tried for a day, along with further occupations.

Around two weeks ago — and in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis — many ER protesters used vehicles and bamboo structures (and themselves) to block the distribution of certain leading UK newspapers. The Telegraph, The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Times had failed, it was said, to report on climate change in accordance with ER precepts. The Independent carried a statement from ER saying “the right wing media (in the UK) is a barrier to the truth”.

Many in the UK media and the government saw this as a step too far. Prime Minister Boris Johnson described this latest blockading as “completely unacceptable”. Home Secretary Priti Patel said it was “an attack on our free press and democracy”, while other ministers described the protesters as “idiotic” and “an intolerant minority”, according to The Independent. The police were also criticized for failing to act swiftly enough. The police argued they were trying to protect the rights of all involved — including protesters’ rights — but the protesters failed to cooperate. Patel is said to have told the police that they should “get stuck in”, according to The Telegraph.

But where is all this wisdom and certainty about the value of patience and tolerance in the UK today, when faced with a marginal taste of what Hong Kong went through in 2019? No longer visibly evident, I’m afraid

Several papers noted that the UK government is now considering a range of radical responses to what it feels are deeply unacceptable protest tactics. The Telegraph reported that a crackdown on ER was planned, which could include viewing ER as an organized crime group under the Serious Crime Act of 2015. This would allow Britain’s equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, to police ER. Under the SCA, if three or more people agree to act together in a prohibited way, those convicted can be jailed for up to five years. There has even been brief discussion about classifying ER as a terrorist organization.

The Sunday Times and The Telegraph, meanwhile, claimed that the Johnson government may add new “anti-subversion” powers to the Public Order Act to help protect “critical UK infrastructure and tenets of democracy”. These provisions would, among other things, make it a criminal offense to prevent members of Parliament from going to vote.

This is interesting when we bear in mind how Hong Kong’s appalling political violence began with mob intimidation to stop the Legislative Council from sitting on June 12 last year. This was preceded by violent opposition tactics inside LegCo to prevent debate on the extradition bill, and followed by the storming and severe damage of the LegCo building on July 1.

Leading media and public commentators in the UK have offered unceasing advice to Hong Kong and Beijing about: How they must treat heroic protesters with utmost proportionality — terrifying violence notwithstanding; how grimly outdated the riot provisions are in (our British-crafted) Public Order Ordinance; and how the new National Security Law is scarily draconian and should be withdrawn.

The last colonial governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, is perhaps the best known and most tireless of these critics — not least when focused on those riot provisions, which he did nothing to reform during his tenure in Hong Kong. Those provisions pivot, as it happens, on gatherings of three or more people, just like the SCA enacted five years ago in the UK. When one Googles “Chris Patten and Hong Kong protests”, pages of judgmental commentary materialize. But you search in vain for any Patten links publicly censuring control measures aimed at ER in the UK — including these latest proposed drastic measures.

Frankly, by any realistic measure, what the UK has faced from ER and like-minded groups is a shadow of what the HKSAR has endured for months on end, from early June 2019. During that period, we were, of course, told countless times by politically pious UK commentators and politicians that Hong Kong should meet and negotiate respectfully and call off strong police action against these political activists, etc.

But where is all this wisdom and certainty about the value of patience and tolerance in the UK today, when faced with a marginal taste of what Hong Kong went through in 2019? No longer visibly evident, I’m afraid. Rather, the actions of ER appear to have prompted a return of the spirit of St. George — this English legend explains how St. George arrived just in time to slay a highly menacing dragon.

Let’s legislate and enforce and put a full-bodied stop to this assault on good social order is the collective exhortation from the same media and government, which from around a year ago projected such moral righteousness about the basic worthiness inherent in continuous, violent protesting in Hong Kong.

Richard Walton, a former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command in London, recently put it this way: “The actions of ER cross the line from protest into planned criminality and should be treated as such. The police need to get better at gathering intelligence preemptively and intervening to prevent such criminality and upholding the rule of law”. Indeed. As it happens, Walton also provides an indirect but still ringing endorsement of the need for introduction of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, where far greater threats to social stability and national security have had to be faced.

Finally, it is worth noting that fresh legislation has recently been introduced at Westminster aimed, its critics say, at overturning key provisions of a primary Brexit treaty signed with Brussels less than a year ago. This same British government argued earlier this year that the National Security Law has been applied in the HKSAR contrary to the provisions in the Sino-British Joint Declaration. In fact, this claim is bad in law (see “Has government of the United Kingdom read the Basic Law”, China Daily Hong Kong, June 10, 2020). But the audacious selectivity of the UK government governing which aspects of international law it chooses to treat as binding — and which it does not — is now re-displayed. This conveniently varied, acrobatic interpretation of similar law-treaty issues is breathtaking.

The author is a visiting professor in the Law Faculty of the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.