Injustice Served: A Fossil-Fuelled, Authoritarian Victory
The UK has jailed five climate activists for a collective 21 years for the crime of "conspiring" to protest. It's a triumph for fossil fuel tyranny and the stupidest, cruellest people on the planet.
This is Edition #16 of The Climate Laundry, which will be going on hiatus from this week. I will be messaging my incredible paid subscribers with more details. Thank you all so much.
This week’s jailing of five climate protesters for being on a Zoom call is already being recognised as one of the UK legal system’s gravest miscarriages of justice, and showcases the culmination of successive Conservative government efforts to effectively ban peaceful protest in the country. For the crime of “conspiracy to cause public nuisance”, regarding a plan to block the M25 motorway in England, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster and Daniel Shaw were each handed four years’ jail time, while Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam was sentenced to five years.
In passing sentence, Judge Christopher Hehir told the defendants: “The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”
This is a specious claim, and not a position that can be held by anyone who understands the immediacy of climate change. Hallam and co. do not regard themselves as the sole arbiters of anything, but as informed citizens making the point that, if you consider being held up on the perpetually gridlocked M25 a big deal, perhaps think for the duration of a tailback about the utter mayhem that rapid global warming has in store. As Cressida Gethin herself said in court: “My reasons for taking action were not beliefs or opinions. Earth’s life-support systems are breaking down due to human activities, whether we believe it or not.” Mr Hehir might also have considered the pound sterling cost of climate change to the UK economy, estimated at approximately 1.1% of national GDP right now.
Instead, the judge’s decision sends its own diesel-powered juggernaut of grotesque messages, namely: 1) that even talking about holding a peaceful protest in the UK is now a crime punishable by the sort of jail time usually reserved for violent offences; 2) that government interference has weaponised the criminal justice system on behalf of the fossil fuel industries; 3) that Britain’s gutter media can and will act on behalf of the fossil fuel industries to root out and punish climate protest (a Sun journalist leaked recordings of the Just Stop Oil meeting to the police, which led directly to the arrests); and 4) that reality-incompatible business-as-usual must be maintained at any and all costs.
The historic gravity of the sentencing has not been lost on those who monitor this sort of thing. Following the announcement, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst, wrote: “Today marks 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 … How a sentence of this magnitude can be either reasonable, proportional or serve a legitimate public purpose is beyond comprehension.”
Forst’s incomprehension is understandable: only the smallest of men, for the smallest of reasons, acting on behalf of the worst of people, could justify such whimsical cruelty—for whimsical it is. As observers have noted, Judge Hehir has, in cases of rape, found room in his heart for mercy.
Hehir, meanwhile, has become a sort of wrathful deity of vengeance for Britain’s angriest and most terminally unpleasant individuals, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil and Roger Hallam’s social media accounts being flooded with thousands of prison rape jokes over the last 24 hours (go look them up if you’re so inclined). The celebrations in response to the five’s sentencing, particularly on Twitter, are stomach-turning for what they reveal about my fellow countrypersons: firstly that they don’t know what’s coming; secondly that they don’t care; and thirdly that anyone who does care deserves to be sodomised.
Whether the UK’s new government can intervene on behalf of the defendants is, at this time, unclear. In support of the five jailed, Labour’s Clive Lewis today called for a meeting with the country’s new attorney general, Richard Hermer, stating that “those laws that have allowed this to happen need to be put in the dustbin of history”. In view of the chorus of national and international condemnation of the sentencing, more politicians are stepping forward as I write.
Regardless, the injustice meted out at Southwark Crown Court this week plants a grubby menhir in the name of reactionary atavism, and on behalf of the status quo that is leading directly to global economic and social decline. Once again, we’ve been treated to a stereoscopic snapshot of a nation divided: on the one side, there are those cognizant and concerned for our present and future; who see what we’ve become and where we’re headed, and hope desperately to make anyone with any real power take notice. On the other side are those wedded to a mythic past and a reality that exists only as a fleeting, smog-choked façade; a sort of Potemkin-village Britain, where we all get to drive a Range Rover round the village green for eternity, with Vera Lynn on repeat, for reasons no one really understands.
Where will we be when the music stops?