Bring back water cannon?

That was one columnist’s advice on how to handle the 30,000 Extinction Rebellion fanatics who have shut Central London down for two days – and promise to do so for a fortnight.

All progressive people responded to that recommendation with spittle-sputtering indignation. I share their wrath unreservedly: live rounds would work much better.

Oh well, since unlike, say, China, Britain is civilised, machine-gunning those zealots will have to remain a cherished fantasy. Fair enough, indiscriminate firing at crowds of unarmed protesters would be an overreaction.

However, we run the risk of throwing away the baby of reaction with the bathwater of overreaction. For let’s make no mistake about it: Britain is under an existential threat. Unless we respond forcefully, the country won’t remain civilised for long.

Goethe once wrote that: “Only he is worthy of life and liberty who fights for them every day.” By that standard, we aren’t worthy.

The police made a mere 321 arrests, which didn’t make the situation any better. All the roads and bridges around Westminster were blocked, and patients at St Thomas’ Hospital, across the river from the Houses of Parliament, were stranded.

Ambulances couldn’t get in or out, which put lives at risk. One woman suffering from lung cancer had to wait for more than an hour because a taxi couldn’t reach her. But hey, what’s a life or two compared to the great cause?

The prime minister reacted to the situation with his customary verbal flair, calling the fanatics “the denizens of the heaving hemp-smelling bivouacs that now litter Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park Corner”.

But, rather than proposing a solution, Mr Johnson showed he himself was part of the problem by contrasting the ‘denizens’ to Margaret Thatcher, described as a “true feminist green revolutionary” who took greenhouse gases “seriously long before Greta Thunberg”.

The logical inference is that their cause is noble, but they serve it the wrong way. All the papers reacted in a similar vein, regretting the plight of London and describing the protesters’ demands as overambitious, while dignifying the cause behind those demands with virtue-signalling respect.

They all miss the point: the cause is but a pretext. When a mugger pulls a gun and demands £10, he realistically expects you to give him £10. But if the gunman demands a billion pounds, he’s not out to get your money. He’s out to kill you.

This analogy is accurate. For the ‘denizens’ are agitating for zero carbon emissions and no petrol and diesel cars by 2025. And while we’re at it, all of Britain must go vegan by the same time. They know and we know and they know we know that’s not going to happen.

Hence it’s not what they really want, strategically. Their febrile screams about ‘the planet’ are just a tactic, one among many, but one on which they’ve chosen to concentrate their satanic energies at the moment.

Their real animus isn’t love of nature but hatred of the West in general and Britain in particular. Since they don’t have the minds to understand the complexities of such hated entities, those infernal youths reduce them to one: capitalism, naturally understood in the Marxist sense.

That’s why that poor insane Greta froths at the mouth every time she opens it about the fat cats who profit while ‘the planet’ burns.

“We probably don’t even have a future anymore,” she once screamed. “That future has been sold so that a small number of people can make unimaginable amounts of money.” Get rid of those bloodsuckers, and everything will be hunky-dory, and where have we heard this before?

She and other callow revolutionaries know that without fossil fuels and nuclear energy (their previous, but at the moment secondary, target) ‘capitalism’ will crash, taking Western civilisation down with it. QED.

Should they get their way – and our government’s cowardly, dishonest response suggests they might – the consequences would indeed be unimaginable. The only civilisation that has managed to make decent life available to most people would collapse, burying millions under the rubble.

There would be endless famines, medicines would run out, darkness would descend on our cities, and people would be too hungry, weak and cold to resist the young oppressors, lording it over them with time-proven revolutionary cruelty.

Lacking the energy to survive, the world would have to reduce its population to pre-industrial levels, when all energy was produced by water and wind. Britain’s population in 1800 was 10 million, and that’s what it would be again should those possessed youths get their way. Subtract that number from the current 65 million, and you’ll get the human cost of ‘saving the planet’.

The first batches of victims would fall in the same Third World these pimply ‘denizens’ profess to worship. Those countries already struggle to feed their people or to give them clean water – what’ll happen to them when they have no power stations, tractors or canning factories?

The infernal youths don’t care; such people never do. They’re not out to save anybody or anything – they are out to wreak chaos and destruction, inevitably culminating in mass murder, even if that’s not the original intent.

Rather than spouting nonsense about the “feminist green revolutionary” Margaret Thatcher, Mr Johnson, who prides himself on his knowledge of history, should cast a retrospective eye over every country where gonadic youngsters were given the run of the place.

I’d suggest countries like Russia, China and Cambodia as the most obvious models because all those young Bolsheviks, Red Guards and Khmer Rouge were cut out of exactly the same cloth as this lot.

If we don’t stop them, they’ll ruin everything they hate so much about the West, which is the West. So… well, as I write, the idea of strategically placed machine-guns is becoming more and more attractive. Hypothetically, of course.