Man arrested after climate activists cut UK insurance firms’ fibre optic cables

> “If these powerful companies don’t make public statements that they will stop driving fossil fuel expansion and destroying life on Earth, then we have no choice but to stop them ourselves,” the group’s statement said. “We will not give up until insurance companies take responsible action.”

At least they aren’t gluing themselves to roads I guess, but I’m pretty sure this will have no effect on the company. What they should do is get sleeper agents hired into the company, work their way up to middle management, and subtlety screw with the operations of the company. Mess with formulae in spreadsheets, add some extra 0s in various stored procedures, install keyloggers on unattended laptops…

They need to copy russia and take out even bigger cables, then they won’t be prosecuted

Please please please fuck over more insurance companies. I know my premium will go up but at this point I don’t care, it’s going up anyway. I may as well have it go up and have the knowledge they’re at least getting fucked a little bit.

I wish these climate change activists would continue to go after the “bad man” rather than the average person just trying to put food in their children’s mouths.

If you continued to go after insurance companies I think you’d get the majority of the British public on your side, the main stream media would probably stop reporting on it as they’re all in cahootz, but you can’t stop the message in this day and age.

It’s disgusting all the comments here actively supporting what is clearly an act of sabotage.

Just wait until these lunatics target the critical infrastructure you need, im sure you’ll change your tune then.

Let alone the additional cost to all of us now every insurance company/bank has to mitigate the risk it could happen to them now.

Cheap insurance = bad insurance. So people complaining about insurance companies probably need to check the ‘am I complaining about all insurance companies or just the ones I use’ because yeah, cheap insurance is cheap for a reason. It sucks. They barely make a profit and the profit that they make is by cutting quality of service – and that can be quality of cover / likelihood of payouts or it can be quality of customer service. Both suck.

But that’s just part of the market. The most high profile and obvious one, for sure, but not the only part. A lot of the fundamentals of insurance are built on the common pool – lots of people pay a little bit, and never have a claim, and that covers the big hurts for the people who do have a claim. That’s pretty reasonable in a society. And another common concept is Utmost Good Faith – that the people who work in the industry act not only in good faith with each other and with the customer, but go beyond that, to the top end of having faith and trust in both the customer to be honest about their chance of a claim and how expansive it will be and the underwriter being honest about how much that should cost to insure and how likely they are to pay.

Scoff, you may. But the part of the industry most likely to take that seriously is the bit based in the City of London (capitalised for a reason). Here you will find talent, experience, skill, and honesty. Sure there’s some bad eggs (and I’ve had the displeasure of working with some of them) but the majority – from the juniors to the execs – are pretty damn honest and just want to do a good job.

If you successfully cut a cable in the City (this attack was not successful. I think one or two people had to refresh a page and that about it), you terminate communication and payment of premium and claims between companies and customers. You’re not covered for insurance until you’ve paid, and you don’t get paid for your loss if no one can send you the money.

And you know what? The City of London provides cover for a mind-boggling amount of types of loss. It provides financial protection from horrible life shattering losses like fire or pays out for horrible pain (some of the details of claims I’ve had to look into for personal injury – the types of injury that can require life long care and multi million payments – have given me actual nightmares).

If you cut a cable, you’re not just stopping the payments for ‘oil related’ premiums and claims. You’re stopping the payments of claims to hundreds; thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who are hurting, from things as basic as a car crash to as complicated as a city hit by and earthquake or a region devastated by a drought.

It’s indiscriminate punishment of people in pain, to serve the attention hungry needs to a few small minded wannabe activists.

You want to make a change? Don’t cut cables. Don’t hurt the weak. Engage with the boards and the industry bodies. Speak to BIBA. Speak to LIIBA. Speak to Lloyd’s. Shake their hand and sit around a table and then tell the world what you discussed.

A lot of brokers and insurers kinda actually do want to step away from fossil fuel cover. There’s industry panels and meetings on it. They want to get to clean energy and promote less environmental damage. And will give better premiums and rates to clients with good environmental credentials. But you don’t do it overnight, and you don’t suddenly make hundreds of people in your companies redundant by saying you no longer do the type of insurance they’ve spent 20 years getting really good at doing. And you don’t do it because some idiot narcissist outside your office vandalised a few wires while videoing themselves.

Talk to each other. Treat each other like humans. The people who work in the industry genuinely do care because they are actually the same people as you.

Stop saying them and us. Start saying we.

Fine with this, keep it up! Just don’t block the isle in Waitrose

Those cables could be used for communicating with emergency services and could be used by others within that building.

This is a dangerous thing to do and should not be applauded as some heroic action no matter what justification they supposedly give.

If they cut the wrong set of cables, that could be a hospital, fire station, police, a school or even your home.

Jfc protestors can’t win. Do completely harmless publicity stunts like Stonehenge, get death threats and told to target the “real baddies”. Target the real baddies by doing something that at worst is a mild inconvenience. Get told they deserve jail time. I cannot imagine what Reddit threads would look like discussing the suffragttes or civil rights movement.