SENTENCES of up to five years for climate protesters who hadn’t even carried out their planned direct action are a wake-up call.
As our movement gathers to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, condemned to deportation for agreeing a minimum rate of pay, it’s a reminder that the power of the state has always been used against us — against the left, against the unions, against the working class.
State repression is nothing new. We could pick examples in every decade from the Tolpuddle Martyrs in the 1830s to today, not least the police violence against striking miners 40 years ago, remembered at last weekend’s Durham Miners’ Gala.
But we are in a period where it is worsening. Britain is less free today than it was five years ago.
What is the crime for which five Just Stop Oil activists have just been landed with years behind bars? “Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” Part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act of 2022, causing a nuisance to “the public or a section of the public” can land activists with sentences of up to 10 years in prison.
Worse, the trial was one of a growing number where the accused were banned from explaining their actions to the jury.
Judges have great discretion to decide what is and is not relevant for a jury to consider. This is now being used systematically to stop climate activists saying why they block roads or scale buildings or drench banks with paint, a bid to depict reasoned acts of protest as random vandalism or obstruction. Whether or not we agree with a particular action, it is an outrage that juries are being denied knowledge of defendants’ motives.
Where activists defy the bans and speak out, they face further penalties for contempt of court. Indeed, this spring the last government even tried to have a retired social worker jailed for standing outside a court holding a sign reading: “Jurors: you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience,” the sort of prosecution our press would usually associate with foreign dictatorships.
Judges’ rationale is clear enough. Juries, made up of ordinary citizens, cannot be relied upon to share the state’s hostility to all direct action. In May, two Palestine Action activists were acquitted of causing criminal damage to a Leicester arms factory after they explained they were seeking to prevent harm to civilians in Palestine, where British-made components are used by the Israeli military.
Silencing defendants is the courtroom parallel to the wider attack on protest rights by the last government, including the “public nuisance” offence the Just Stop Oil five have been found guilty of and other measures that allow the police to shut down demonstrations before they have even begun, or haul peaceful citizens off marches for carrying placards or wearing imagery they object to.
Both reveal the collapse of ruling-class confidence in the people they rule. Grasping, after the shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn movement, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the system, their only answer is to ban protest and silence dissidents.
We cannot be silenced. The stakes are too high: as the Just Stop Oil cause illustrates, climate change, in the form of erratic weather, increasingly severe droughts and floods and crop failure, is already upon us. British farms saw a 19 per cent income drop in the last year because of mass flooding. The disruption to our lives from upsets to food production and the water supply will outweigh that from halting traffic on a motorway. The five must be freed.
Labour in power has a chance to change course from the crazy authoritarianism of the Tories. It is committed to restoring workers’ strike rights — but it must be made to restore protest rights too. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we must “raise the watchword, liberty,” defying a state that tramples on our freedoms.
