Protester, 91, says climate change is worse than Second World War

The UK’s oldest Extinction Rebellion protester has said watching the world’s climate change is worse than living through the Second World War.

John Lynes, 91, has been arrested at least 25 times and was even sentenced to time in HMP Hull for continually cutting the fences of an American army base in the 90s.

He was just 11 when the Second World War broke out and today he says leaders are not reacting to the threat of global warming in an ‘urgent’ enough way.

Mr Lynes, of St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, said: ‘Winston Churchill said “Blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

‘Now our politicians are not saying that at all, they aren’t acting with anything like the sort of urgency that they acted with when it was necessary to go around killing people.

‘During the war, people quite happily accepted rationing, they accepted being without a private car. They accepted going short of all sorts of things, especially things that were imported.

‘You never saw a banana or anything like that. And we do need right now to start making that sort of adjustment on that scale.

‘What faces us now is not just conflict, it’s extinction.’

Mr Lynes has a long history in activism and even claims he was the first person to be arrested for campaigning against the Falklands War in April 1982.

He and a group of colleagues had stood by the Ministry of Defence and poured red dye all down the steps outside.

In the 1990s, he was arrested for refusing to pay a £10 fine for repeatedly cutting the fences of an American army base.

He has also protested against the Afghanistan war and said he would have taken part in the 2002 protests against the war in Iraq but was a human rights observer in Palestine.

Last week, Mr Lynes went viral for photographs of him calming sipping tea while being arrested at a demonstration which tried to shut the Port of Dover.

He said he gets ’emotional’ thinking about the world his children will inherit, adding: ‘For teenagers nowadays, what is their future? You can’t feel confident, you can’t.’

The pensioner said it was ‘easier’ to protest at his age as he could go to prison unlike ‘somebody who has just got married, is trying to pay off the mortgage, look after the kids, maybe even lose their job.’

Mr Lynes is due to appear at Folkestone Magistrates Court on October 23 after he was arrested at the protest in Dover.

He is among 10 people charged with public order offences.

When asked what the solution to global warming is, he said: ‘The solution is in people’s minds, as it was during the war.

‘When people ask themselves what can I do for the war effort, which people were encouraged and obliged to ask, it’s just as important now.

‘You know in your own heart whether you’re consuming more than you need.’