After Punitive Sentences of Climate Activists, Labour Must Repeal the Tories’ Draconian Anti-Protest Laws

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In a profoundly disturbing example of draconian judicial overreach in the UK, based on punitive anti-protest laws passed by the recently-departed Conservative government, five climate activists were yesterday given prison sentences of between four and five years for their role in organising climate protests on the M25 in November 2022 via a Zoom call.

Four of the protestors — Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 34, and Cressida Gethin, 22, all members of the campaigning group Just Stop Oil — were given four-year sentences, while Roger Hallam, 57, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, was given a five-year sentence.

Hallam was sentenced even though he insisted that he wasn’t one of the organisers, and was, as he explained in a powerful post after his sentencing, speaking as an advisor, “recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse” if urgent action isn’t taken to address the climate crisis. He also explained his hope that the protests would, as the Guardian described it yesterday, “cause ‘the biggest disruption in British modern history’ in an effort to force the government to meet Just Stop Oil’s core demand, an end to new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.”

The sentences — the longest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent protest — were delivered with evident relish at Southwark Crown Court by Judge Christopher Hehir, who had promised “long, long prison sentences” to the five when they were found guilty last week at a trial that brought the very notion of British justice into disrepute.

Ever since the Tories passed a new law making it an offence —  of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” — to engage in disruptive but non-violent protest, which was legislation aimed directly at the climate protestors who had been causing mild disruption to road traffic since the first Extinction Rebellion protests in October 2018, when seven bridges in central London were occupied, the testing of this law in the courts has involved the accused seeking to explain to juries why they undertook their actions.

Not unreasonably, this has involved them seeking to explain that man-made climate collapse is the greatest threat humanity has ever known, as is demonstrably true, and as is becoming ever more apparent with every passing day.

This of course, can be quite a compelling argument when presented to juries capable of objectively analysing whether or not an unprecedented man-made human apocalypse might provide grounds for the mild disruption of the capitalist status quo, and so, last March, in what can only be described as the politically-motivated suppression of defendants’ right to explain their actions to their juries, one particular judge, Silas Reid, insisted that, in the cases of three Insulate Britain activists who had taken part in a roadblock in the City of London in October 2021, the defendants “were not to mention the climate crisis, fuel poverty or the history of the peaceful civil rights movement to juries”, as the Guardian explained at the time. Judge Reid, it should be noted, was not acting autonomously; rather, he was enforcing advice issued by successive Attorney Generals, compromised, or corrupted by the Tories’ zeal to suppress protest.

As George Monbiot explained in the Guardian today, One attorney general removed the defence of proportionality; another removed the defence of lawful excuse. This means that environmental activists can no longer explain their motives to a jury. They have to be tried as though they were mindless vandals, inconveniencing people for kicks, rather than seeking to prevent, at great cost to themselves, the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced.”

Enboldened by his actions, Judge Reid then unleashed the tsunami of intolerance in his court room onto the streets outside, ordering the arrest, for “contempt of court”, of Trudi Warner, 68, a retired social worker, for holding up a sign outside Inner London Crown Court, “setting out the centuries-old principle that juries can find people not guilty as a matter of conscience”, as the legal group Plan B explained in a press release.

Warner’s case was thrown out in April this year, but, although this was a victory, and although numerous judges have, unlike Judge Reid, acquitted defendants for climate-related protests over the last 16 months, others — like Judge Hehir — have not.

The deeply dystopian trial

During the two-week trial of the M25 Five, Judge Hehir had the defendants arrested when they spoke out about the reasons for their actions, and also arrested eleven protestors outside, holding signs similar to Warner’s.

Although Judge Hehir accepted that each of the defendants should be allowed to briefly state their “political and philosophical beliefs” about the climate crisis, as Damien Gayle explained for the Guardian, he fundamentally “ruled that evidence about the climate change could play no part in their defence.”

As he stated, “The views of any defendant — however sincerely held, and whether or not you agree with them — about man-made climate change, and what should or should not be done about it, are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not each is guilty or not guilty.”

As Gayle described it, the defendants were, however, “able to get the prosecution to agree to a list of ‘facts not in dispute’ relating to the climate crisis, including that climate change represented an ‘existential threat to humanity’, that warming about 1.5°C ‘risks catastrophic and irreversible consequences’, that in the previous 12 months the global temperature had averaged 1.63°C above pre-industrial temperatures, and that in November 2022 the UK government had opened a new round of licensing for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.”

One of the defendants, Daniel Shaw, also had a high-profile supporter who appeared at the court — Michel Forst, the UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, who issued an extraordinary statement as the trial began, stating, “I fail to see how exposing Mr Shaw to a multi-year prison sentence for being on a Zoom call that discussed the organisation of a peaceful environmental protest is either reasonable or proportionate, nor pursues a legitimate public purpose. Rather, I am gravely concerned that a sanction of this magnitude is purely punitive and repressive.”

Despite this, the jury found the defendants guilty, and yesterday, in delivering the outrageously punitive sentences, Judge Hehir, after admitting, as Gayle described it, that there is “a scientific and social consensus that human-made climate breakdown [is] happening and action should be taken to avert it”, and stating, “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns motivating you are, at least to some extent, shared by many”, then discarded all semblance of restraint, telling the defendants, “But the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law. And your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.”

Michael Forst immediately responded to the sentences, stating, “Today is a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

He added, “This sentence should shock the conscience of any member of the public. It should also put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom”, and also stated, “Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”

Challenging the sentences

In all the outpouring of outrage after the sentences were handed down, it is certain that Judge Hehir’s draconian punishment for the five activists will be challenged, with attention particularly focused on Michel Forst’s assertion, in his statement of June 24, that, as a Party to the Aarhus Convention (the UN Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters), which was adopted on June 25, 1998, and to which the UK is a signatory, the British government has a binding obligation under article 3(8) of the Convention to “ensure that persons exercising their rights in conformity with the Convention are not penalized, persecuted or harassed in any way for their involvement”. Forst added that, “As the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee has made clear, this includes persons engaging in peaceful environmental protest.”

Immediately after the sentencing, Chris Packham, who was outside the court to show solidarity, with Dale Vince, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the Green peer Jenny Jones and the Labour MP Clive Lewis, called for an urgent meeting with the new Attorney General, Richard Hermer KC. “Please meet with us urgently”, he urged, adding, “This grotesque miscarriage of justice must be fixed.”

Crucially, however, what needs to be ditched are the two horrendous Acts passed by the Tory government in the draconian hysteria of their last years in office — the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and the Public Order Act 2023, both dreamt up by the vile Priti Patel, when she was home secretary, and, in the latter case, rammed through by her successor, the equally vile Suella Braverman.

I have previously written about aspects of this legislation in my articles The Dangerous Authoritarian Threat Posed by Priti Patel to Our Right to Protest and Dissent, published in March 2021, and Hatred of Dissent: Reviewing Four Decades of Repressive Tory Laws on the 38th Anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, published last June, although the passage of time has confirmed that the new statutory offence of “intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance” may be Patel’s most toxic legacy, as Judge Hehir made clear yesterday, although the Public Order Act is also deeply troubling, containing numerous offences aimed at criminalising protest, which the Lords excised from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, but which Patel then spitefully and immediately reintroduced in the subsequent Public Order Act.

In addition, as George Monbiot also pointed out today, the legislative attack on peaceful protest has also been accompanied by a sharp rise in injunctions preventing protest outside a range of crucial facilities, including oil refineries. As Monbiot described it, “Corporations and public bodies have slapped injunctions on hundreds of people to prevent them from protesting, in some cases forcing them to pay huge amounts of money for the privilege. This outrageous system of private fines for thought crimes has not received nearly enough coverage.”

When it comes to repealing these laws, however, the problem is that there is no indication that any of this necessary work will be undertaken by Keir Starmer’s Labour government, not only because our societies have become increasingly authoritarian over the last 40 years as repressive legislation, once passed, is rarely unpicked, but also because Starmer — and Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary — fundamentally share the contempt Patel and Braverman had for any kind of protest that causes any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.

If you don’t see the problem with this — and far too many people don’t — it is perhaps worth imagining what life would be like if these kinds of draconian measures had existed in the first two decades of the 20th century — if the Suffragettes had been preemptively arrested and imprisoned before they could have engaged in any of the violence they undertook to secure the vote.

What the critics don’t want to recognize is that, while they insist that a society of “law-abiding” citizens and largely unfettered corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want, without any interruption except, perhaps, someone standing with a placard at a safe distance asking them politely to think about what they’re doing, today’s climate protestors have shown themselves to be remarkably restrained through the exercise of resolute non-violence, even though their message is more urgent than any protest movement in history.

The best way to bring disruptive protest to an end is to address its causes, and it really mustn’t be overlooked that Just Stop Oil’s key foundational aim — to get the government to commit to not approving any new oil, gas or coal fields in the UK — undoubtedly played a part in getting the new Labour government to do just that.

If politicians tell you otherwise, and insist that it was solely because they had diligently paid attention to, for example, the reports of the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which has been demanding serious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for years, they’re lying.

In March 2023, the IPCC made clear that, to keep life on earth feasible for humans, no new fossil fuel sources can be opened up. The IPCC’s findings followed a report in May 2021 by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which stated, as the Guardian described it, that “exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year and no new coal-fired power stations can be built if the world is to stay within safe limits of global heating and meet the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.” Although both stories received some media coverage, their apocalyptic messages failed to effect any kind of meaningful change.

The right to protest

In an era of moronic three- or four-word campaigning slogans — “Get Brexit Done”, “Make America Great Again” — I’d say that climate activists’ “Just Stop Oil” message, building on the success of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg in raising climate collapse as the defining issue of all our lifetimes, was more successful than any amount of dry climate reports and newspaper headlines in persuading the new government to stop all new oil and gas developments in the UK, as promised by the Labour Party before the General Election.

The fact that climate activists have, at the same time, enraged so many people isn’t a sign of failure, but a sign that the oil and gas companies are running scared, and have, in desperation, cranked up their well-funded misinformation campaigns to create hysteria amongst consumers via a pliant and corrupt mainstream media, via far-right social media conspiracy theories (think ULEZ and 15-minute cities, for example), and via their poisonous climate change-denying think-tanks in Tufton Street, and their client government ministers, including Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, as well as disgraceful judges like Silas Reid and Christopher Hehir.

Non-violent, mildly disruptive protest is meant to be mildly inconvenient, but crushing it also crushes what distinguishes us from autocratic regimes that tolerate no dissent whatseover. Climate activists may be cowed by recent developments, but even imprisoning them won’t stop a growing tide of dissent as the climate crisis deepens, and all manner of unavoidanble horrors loom into ever closer view — more extreme heat, more droughts, more floods, sea level rises, food shortages, water shortages, and an unprecedented refugee crisis.

All of the above is coming, whether we “believe” it or not, because science doesn’t lie. What we need now is for our particularly gross form of capitalism in the third decade of the 21st century to be dismantled and its energies turned to mitigation instead.

Stopping all new oil and gas extraction is a start, but as more and more people will keep shouting, whether imprisoned or not, we also need to remember that, back in 2015, at the Paris Summit, we all promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, and yet, to date, we have basically done nothing, even as climate collapse has become ever more evident, years, or even decades before it was supposed to. We are at war with the only planet we have, a miracle that we have poisoned to such an extent that the chemical balances we have upset will destroy us.

Once we know this, we can’t forget. And once we know this, we can only resist. Vindictive dinosaur morons like Christopher Hehir need to get out of the way, and not fill Britain’s already overcrowded jails with people who, if we live long enough, will be recognised as heroes.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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