Let’s no platform Phoebe Plummer

Political action vs political acting

Whenever I watch a Phoebe Plummer TV appearance, I think I’m able to imagine what Macbeth felt like being forced to dine with Banquo’s ghost. There’s a ghoulish quality to her pronouncements of the coming climate crunch and total breakdown of society. But it’s not just about what she says as how she says it.

First, she appeared on an interview with JRM on GB News:

GB News @GBNEWS

'Right now people are dying. Children are starving. Families are fleeing their homes, and it's preventable - we have the solutions.' @Jacob_Rees_Mogg clashes with Just Stop Oil Spokesperson Phoebe Plummer on 2050 net zero targets. 🖥 GB News on YouTube bit.ly/3vAYaw0

A couple of days later she was on Politics Live, where she talked about drilling for new oil and gas as an act of genocide before signing off by saying ‘I’m a scared kid, trying to fight for my future.’

Plummer’s media appearances are notable for the amount of emotion she shows in them. She’s visibly distraught throughout, wallowing in the dystopian future everyone but her is creating. It’s hyperbolic in deliverance as well as content - it’s noticeable how much she falls back on to heightened emotional appeals.

This emoting puts those debating Plummer in a difficult position. Arguing against someone is made far more difficult when the other person becomes upset, because it leaves you between the devil and the dep blue sea; either you double down, risking upsetting them and coming across as a Real Bastard, or you back off and cede the debate.

There is of course room for passion and emotion in politics, but Plummer’s is a style of argument that at every opportunity relies on emoting in order to dishonestly leverage someone's natural instinctive kindness into support for your argument.

This is the result of several factors; Ed West has already taken a look at the developing trend of ‘political hypochondria’ , but it’s also the result of the rise in grievance-based politics. In the Dictatorship of Grief, the bigger the grievance the louder the voice. Plummer, by talking up the potentially disastrous impacts of climate change (unless we do exactly what she wants), is able to essentially borrow against future grievance.

But the question is, if Plummer’s style of argument makes it more difficult to engage in a meaningful debate around climate, should she have a meaningful role to play in those debates?

Obviously deplatforming people is wrong (even if we have to deny ourselves a little schadenfreude sometimes) and I’m only performatively suggesting we do it, but like every joke there’s a nugget of truth in there somewhere. Standards of debate in politics matter. Ours have dropped drastically over the last few years and, if we want to raise them again, we should seriously consider whether someone like Phoebe Plummer has a role to play in them.

The problem is that Plummer’s emotional incontinence makes for excellent TV but can’t add anything meaningful to what a serious political system should be treating as an incredibly serious debate. The way we’re reaching for our Net Zero goals is having serious impacts. The legal requirements of Net Zero means we’re shipping carbon-producing activities to outside the UK rather than decarbonising them. Closing down coal-fired power stations is a fine and noble aim, but our failure to replace that power generation means we only just avoided an energy crisis last year – and without new nuclear God only knows how our creaking baseline energy infrastructure is going to cope with increase in demand from the switch to all-electric vehicles in 2030.

Following the green agenda has complex trade-offs. But the dynamics of those trade-offs are changing all the time, both because of the constraints the legal commitment to Net Zero places on policymaking and because there’s an almost ceaseless stream of new tech innovations. With a decent – or at least semi-serious – standard of political debate, discussions around the climate agenda would be an opportunity to reassess how those trade-offs are balanced. But you’re not going to get very far along that road with someone who declares that any form of adaptation equals genocide of her generation - it's like buying a car, taking it to the garage when the service light comes on and having the mechanic refuse to work on it because you didn’t buy it off them.

We can’t create a climate change policy with disregard for the needs of human occupants, because climate change has the potential to be the biggest change to our civilizational infrastructure since the Industrial Revolution. But if Plummer’s emoting prevents us engaging with the meaningful questions of how we best combat change without a decline in living standards, then her main contribution to the debate is lowering the quality. If we want to improve the quality of our nation debate - and we should - we have to deal in political action, not political acting.