Just Stop Oil: Impossible to ignore class element of protests like those at snooker in Sheffield - Bill Carmichael

I guessed Tarquin, or possibly Hugo or Rupert, with an outside bet on Atticus.

It turned out I was being way too unimaginative because it eventually emerged the man arrested is a 25-year-old student who goes by the gloriously posh moniker of Edred Ilmari Whittingham, although unsurprisingly he prefers to use the more proletarian-sounding name of Eddie.

Edred fits the profile of an eco protester perfectly. Reportedly brought up in a £600,000 home in a leafy suburb of Cambridge, he is the son of a venture capitalist company director and studies philosophy, politics and economics at Exeter University, according to MailOnline.

OK, it isn’t fair to make fun of someone because of their background and the name they were given as a baby, but there is an important point to be made here.

The eco protesters, whether from Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion, or the many similar offshoots, are almost invariably vastly privileged, incredibly posh and very white.

And they can continue to break the law because their money, social class and family connections insulate them from the consequences of their actions.

Edred told GB News recently: “Employment possibilities are the least of my worries at the moment.” Well exactly!

Can you imagine for a moment black or working class kids getting away with this level of repeated law breaking? Not in a million years.

Remember the softly softly policing of climate protesters who caused chaos by glueing themselves to roads, stopping people from getting to work and ambulances taking seriously ill people to hospital? Instead of clearing the roads and making arrests officers instead did little other than wonder about offering the protesters sips of water.

Would the police have been quite so accommodating if it were a mob of Leeds United fans holding up the traffic? I don’t think so.

And of course the criminal justice system is notoriously soft on climate protesters. Last year for example, District Judge Stephen Leake told Insulate Britain protesters who had blocked the M25 motorway that he had been “inspired” by their actions.

And earlier this year District Judge Graham Wilkinson heaped praise on Just Stop Oil protesters saying they were “good people” with “admirable aims” and it had been a “pleasure throughout” to deal with them. Naturally they got off with a conditional discharge.

This isn’t unusual. In the rare instances where sentences are actually imposed they are always incredibly lenient.

A group of barristers recently went so far as to sign a pledge that they will never prosecute eco activists, thereby completely undermining the independence of the legal profession.

I spent far too much time as a young man studying the works of Karl Marx, and although his materialistic analysis is now unfashionable on the identitarian left, it is impossible to ignore the relevance of social class to all of this.

I suspect that judges and barristers do all they can to protect climate protesters because they are all part of the same privileged, wealthy, middle class elite.

And those with power and money will always go to extraordinary lengths to protect their own tribe. Not everyone is equal before the law.

Further evidence is found in the targets of the eco protests. When they wanted to disrupt transport did they block gas guzzling private jets and chauffeur-driven limousines used by the rich? No, of course not. Instead they glued themselves to buses and trains to stop ordinary people from getting to work, even though that is the greenest form of transport.

And what sporting events are targeted? Have they disrupted the Henley Regatta or a polo match at Hurlingham perhaps? No, it is the Grand National and the snooker. In short, it is working class interests and pursuits that are always the target of this sanctimonious, bourgeois eco mob.

And as long as the police and the courts continue to treat the protesters with kid gloves, they will continue to break the law.

So expect more disruption of public transport and popular sports.