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Have you seen the latest Greenpeace propaganda campaign? Here it is, above: have a glance and see whether you agree with me that the whole business stinks to high heaven.

The second most objectionable part of it is its noisome premise. Volkswagen makes cars not organic tofu ice cream. It is an entirely reasonable position for VW to campaign against CO2 emissions legislation, not least because – as most of us here know – the threat posed by CO2 exists solely in the realm of theory and carbon legislation will do nothing except damage to Europe’s already fragile markets. Yet here is Greenpeace, launching a campaign of vilification against a company which is doing nothing more harmful than looking after the interests of its business model and – as companies are legally obliged to do – its shareholders.
But the most seriously, nauseatingly objectionable part of it is the way – yet again – it has chosen to drag children into its propaganda campaign. Greenpeace has form in this regard. Remember, this spectacular piece of nastiness?

Greenpeace Video

And at Latitude festival a couple of weekends ago, Greenpeace were at it again. This time, they were all over my kids. There were Greenpeace propagandists going round painting splashes of green (geddit?) paint on children’s boots; Greenpeace activists running the Greenpeace adventure playground in the woods; and Greenpeace activists in the Greenpeace tea tent which had licensed – without a hint of embarrassment on the festival organisers’ part – to occupy a spot within the dedicated kids zone play area.

I sense a deliberate policy strategy, don’t you?

The thing that amazes me is that they are allowed to get away with it. Suppose the Muslim Brotherhood applied to run a few stalls and propaganda outlets at a festival; or an evangelical Christian group; or the British National Party. I wouldn’t much fancy their chances – and most definitely not in any of the dedicated children’s areas. Quite rightly it would be argued that children should not be exposed to such brainwashing. So how come, it’s OK with Greenpeace?

Let’s remind ourselves that, ideologically speaking, Greenpeace is about as extreme as any registered charity can possibly be. This is why one of its founders members Patrick Moore chose to leave the organisation. As he recounts in his superb autobiography Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, Greenpeace now has an agenda which is:

“antiscience, antibusiness and downright antihuman.”

Just as I describe in my book Watermelons - that green is the new red – so Moore discovered for himself in the 1980s, when he noticed that whereas environmentalism used to be about saving nature it now had more to do with trying to bring down the capitalist system. Extremists had taken over.

“To this day they use the word industry as if it were a swear word. The same goes for multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalisation and a host of other perfectly useful terms. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilisation and the environment.”

Greenpeace also has an unfortunate habit of playing fast and loose with the facts in order to support its highly tendentious arguments; one of its activists was caught out making some deeply unpleasant threats towards sceptics on a Greenpeace websites; and, perhaps most disgracefully of all, its junk science, misinformation and grey literature has been allowed to cheapen the brand of that supposed “gold standard” of international climate science, the IPCC.

I don’t want my kids heads filled with lies. I don’t want them taught to feel their very existence is a cause for guilt and self-hatred, nor to feel afraid of the mythical creature some men do call ManBearPig, nor to mistrust the very system – free market capitalism – which will one day give them work and a higher standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

In fact I’d feel safer leaving my kids at an Exxon workshop or in the tender clutches of King Herod KiddiSafe (TM) Enterprises than I would anywhere near an organisation as pathologically unpleasant as Greenpeace.