A hijacking disrupted flights at Stansted yesterday. Fifty posh-kid climate-change protesters, whose spokesperson was called Lily, hijacked the local campaign against the airport's expansion. The “Lily-ban” used it as a media pulpit to sermonise about the evils of man-made global warming.

Of course, not every airport expansion plan must be agreed - even Nimbyish campaigners can have a point. And we should defend the right to protest, even for miserabilist prigs. But the self-righteous zealots of the Lily-ban must be among the least supportable protest movements in history, combining killjoy neo-Puritanism with the anti-democratic elitism of the cavaliers.

Air travel is far from being the biggest cause of carbon emissions. It is singled out because it flies in the face of today's doom-laden prejudices about humanity. Flight is a stark example of human exceptionalism, a man-made wonder that shows how ingenuity and boldness can overcome natural limits - anathema to the eco-activists. Cheap flights from Stansted also symbolise the mass consumerist pleasures despised by green meanies who pray that the recession makes us too poor to travel.

The anti-flying crusaders who leech off local protests about airports act as if they are the saved preaching to sinners. They have previously invaded an airport runway behind a Baptist preacher, who knelt and led them in prayer as if to exorcise the demons of economy air travel.

It is a small tragedy that the idealism of youth should be recruited to this anti-flying circus. The attitude of Stansted protesters was summed up by one who told the BBC that they have to invade airports because: “Our parents' generation has failed us.” Or as any self-pitying adolescent might say: “Now look what you've made me do!” Thousands of travellers were very angry with the Lily-ban yesterday. But what need that matter to them? They have achieved the moral high ground, without the aid of flight, where they claim to be acting “on behalf of” the planet or unborn future generations - ideal constituencies, since they cannot argue back.

Yet the Lily-ban are not alone. After all, they might point out, didn't the climate change minister just call for direct action to support the Government's campaign against global warming? Some idiots even hailed them yesterday as heroic law-breakers alongside Rosa Parks, heroine of the black civil rights struggle. Call me old-fashioned, but so far as I recall, the mass movement against segregated transport that Ms Parks inspired demanded the freedom to travel as they saw fit, not the right to stop others doing so.

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