SIR: Of course the Telegraph, Sun and Mail are indignant over the Extinction Rebellion blocking of their activities. But a one-day disruption will not prevent these organs from expressing their toxic point of view for the indefinite future. This is not an attack on press freedom; it is a drawing attention to the abuses of publishing freedom represented by a bought press.

These papers wield enormous power, allowing very rich and unpleasant people to spread gigantic untruths undermining any movement seeking to limit the damage to our planet and our children’s future. They bring down governments. It is largely down to them and the lies they promulgated that we are governed by Barnard Castle Man.

Suddenly Johnson is an apostle for freedom? A government that has been formally censured for blacklisting a group of investigative journalists who were trying to find out things Johnson didn’t want them to know. A government wanting to declare Extinction Rebellion a criminal organisation and misusing the emergency Covid powers to stop public protest. A government that does not want the truth to be told.

The actions of Greta, Youthstrike and Extinction Rebellion have meant that governments now know they can no longer deny reality, but their behaviour belies their seeming acceptance of that reality.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak pours loads of money he hasn’t got (but which our children will have to pay for) into climate-destroying and economically damaging infrastructure schemes. A climate-change denier heads the Environment Department and the Transport Department kids itself that the carbon its policies are generating will disappear through magic thinking.

Decades of respectable campaigning and libraries full of undeniable science can be completely ignored by government and ridiculed by lying press moguls. What is Extinction Rebellion supposed to do in the face of this insanity? What does Steve Brine, who is in favour of road and airport expansion, have to say to justify this continuing disregard for the truth of the Climate Emergency?

And so the planet burns and we are supposed to worry that people lose out on one day’s supply of the Daily Boobs.

Chris Gillham,

Upper High Street,

Winchester