Green MP Caroline Lucas has defended environmental protesters who blocked the M25, saying their demands were “reasonable”.
The group Insulate Britain held up the country’s busiest motorway three times last week by setting up road blocks and glueing themselves to the tarmac.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps called them “dangerous and counterproductive”.
However, former Green Party leader Lucas suggested their actions were justified in an “emergency”.
“It is reasonable to take emergency action and that’s what they were doing,” she told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme
The MP for Brighton Pavilion added: “I am saying that in extreme situations it is reasonable to take extreme actions and that is what has driven these protesters to do that.
“Personally I prefer to take action where it is closer to the target of that action, so that might be Downing Street, it might be the Treasury, but I fully understand why protesters have felt driven to do something more dramatic than that because Government has been ignoring all of those kinds of actions for many, many years, we face an existential crisis, an emergency and we need to take emergency action now.”
Home secretary Priti Patel slammed them as “selfish” and described their actions as “guerrilla tactics”.
Insulate Britain wants the government to fund home insulation in social housing. Around 181 activists were arrested last week.
