Hard as it may seem to believe, I was a Direct Action Man in my time. In the 1980s I went on many a march, protest, picket line, blockade and occupation – in support of striking miners, nurses and students, against wars, invasions and police brutality, in defence of abortion rights, immigrants and free speech. And I would not apologise for any of it. Anybody with an idealistic bone in his youthful body ought to have taken some direct action, along with the drugs.

However, at the risk of sounding like a grey talking head on the “Grumpy Old Marxists” show, I feel obliged to point out that young eco-protester puppies today don’t know they are born, are degrading the good name of direct action, and would not know a police state if they found one in their muesli.

The news has been full of spokespersons from the Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow comparing their campaign of direct action with noble struggles of the past. One summed up the camp’s aims as being “to show it’s possible and pleasurable to live sustainably” (the joys of the composting toilet), and “to show that non-violent direct action works. Civil disobedience has in the past led to things like black people getting the vote.”

Grow up and get an education. The campaign against Heathrow expansion bears no comparison to those that led to “things like black people getting the vote”. Direct action is neither good nor bad in principle. It is just a tactic, used by all manner of protest movements. What matters most are the political aims and outlook informing the protests.

In the past, direct action was employed by people fighting to defend their own interests – working people struggling for jobs and better pay, women demanding the vote, black people seeking civil rights. The pursuit of self-interest was the driving force for political change. Others such as we on the Left supported their struggles, but we acted in solidarity, not as self-appointed substitutes for the miners or disadvantaged minorities.

Today, by contrast, to take political action in your own interests seems frowned upon as greedy, even sleazy. Instead, the Heathrow protesters insist that they are acting altruistically “on behalf of” others, speaking for the “voiceless” – the poor of the developing world, unborn generations, or simply the planet. A picture from the weekend captures the essence of this direct-action-by-indirect-proxy. It shows a group of white, apparently well-heeled protesters, beneath a banner declaring “We are armed . . . only with peer-reviewed science” (we went armed with political arguments), while they carry huge posters of the supposed victims of climate change on whose behalf they are protesting – mostly impoverished-looking Africans and Asians.

Call me an old cynic, but these protesters look like the ones cynically exploiting the plight of the poor in the developing world, dragging them symbolically in front of the cameras to act as a stage army justifying their march through a field in suburban England. Because, of course, you don’t really give the “voiceless” a voice – you speak and act for them, whether they want you to do so or not.

Exactly how many of the impoverished global masses have been consulted about the Heathrow camp set up on their behalf? Did those whose placards boldly declared “You Fly – They Die” ask the millions of Africans and Asians who are dying to fly? And can we be certain that the hungry-looking people depicted in those posters really agree with one camp spokeswoman that “we have had enough of the prioritisation of economic growth over the future of the planet”?

Once, when I debated these issues with George Monbiot, a leading green writer, he declared that they had to take action for the sake of “the unborn”. I pointed out that this apparently democratic mandate amounted to signing themselves a blank cheque to do as they see fit, since the unborn were hardly in a position to disagree or vote them down from the moral high ground.

The “grassroots” protest movement at Heathrow turns out to be an egotistical posture from self-appointed saviours who imagine that they are floating above the ignorant masses, acting for the planet. It might seem odd that such high-profile protests take place at a time of low-level interest in politics. In fact they are two sides of the same coin. Gestures of disengaged direct action, such as occupying the BAA car park in the middle of the night, are not trying to win an argument with anybody. They are media stunts designed to demonstrate that the protesters are parked on the side of the angels, armed with the (self) righteous sword of “peer-reviewed science” to smite anybody in their path.

This apparent taste for the dictatorship of an expert elite over the great unaware might be rather sinister if we took them seriously. But despite the high-minded declarations, these protesters are only playing at politics. There were not many clown outfits in evidence among the Sunday-best suits on the 1963 March on Washington.

Yet such are the rising levels of self-deluded preciousness among the protesters that some seem to believe they were subjected to historic levels of police oppression, because some officers “acted aggressively”. They might care to look at what happened in the past when protests challenged the Establishment – the direct action did not remain nonviolent for long once the riot police started swinging. By contrast, eco-protests are now so mainstream and respectable that they are treated with kid gloves rather than the old iron fist. The only ones to receive that treatment in recent years were the pro-hunting protesters outside Parliament – they were the “wrong” sort of conservationists.

The last time there was real direct action at Heathrow was exactly two years ago, when the in-flight catering firm Gate Gourmet sacked 670 mostly Asian women workers, and baggage handlers and other ground staff walked out to support them. The activists who now march behind pictures of hard-pressed Asian women were nowhere to be seen. But the logic of their protests is that all such self-interested airport workers should be sacked. Such is the difference between direct action taken in solidarity, and that staged out of sanctimony.

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