COMMENT: Last week, the first defendants to be found guilty of the new statutory offence of ‘conspiracy to cause public nuisance’ were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court. Five members of Just Stop Oil, including Roger Hallam, the protest movement’s principal architect, stood to hear the judge’s sentencing remarks. HHJ Christopher Hehir’s conclusions were forthright. He acknowledged the fact that they were acting not for personal gain, but out of the fervent belief that their actions were necessary for the survival of the planet and the human race. But he also observed that intentions, no matter how pure, cannot transform a wrong into a right. In their pursuit of a green agenda, the five had become radicalised. They were so fixated on the long-term future of the planet that they were unable to consider the harm they were doing in the here and now.
For this protest, the five sought to bring gridlock to south-east England. By having protesters hang themselves from gantries across the M25, they conspired to bring London’s orbital motorway to a standstill. From there, the intent was to plug the rest of Britain’s motorway network, stopping the traffic from draining away into London and the south-east. The aim was far more than mere disruption. They hoped for chaos. And had they succeeded in implementing their plans in full, chaos is what would have happened. Emergency vehicles would have been trapped in place, left either unable to get to the scene of emergency or to get people in need of medical care away from them. Lorries carrying just-in-time supply-chain goods would have been pushed off schedule, and food would have been left to rot and expire as air-conditioning units clicked off. The economic harm would have been in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. On a more quotidian scale, flights would have been missed, business meetings delayed, and peoples’ days or weeks ruined.
As they planned their conspiracy, the protesters were well aware of these potential consequences. More than that, they wanted them. To their minds, the short-term harm that would be done to the social and economic fabric of the nation was nothing set against the long-term harm that government inaction was doing to the country and the world. Regardless of whether the more dramatic consequences they envisaged or hoped for would have led to more urgent action on the part of governments, the protesters theorised that the greater the protest, the greater the chance of such action.
Although the protesters were stymied in their efforts to fully immobilise the UK’s road infrastructure after an undercover Sun journalist reported their plans to the Metropolitan police, much of the protest proceeded as planned. Over four days in early November, protesters shimmied up gantries from where they waved flags and hung banners. Police had little choice but to close down sections of the motorway, with policing the protests incurring a cost of over £1,000,000. The knock-on costs of the protests are not insignificant either, coming near to a million pounds, to say nothing of the social costs. One person missed an urgent chemotherapy appointment to treat an aggressive cancer which was unable to be rescheduled for another two months, a driver was left unable to deliver thousands of pounds of food to a hospital, and others missed funerals and flights.
While JSO may consider disruption like this a necessary cost of business, and aspire to even greater disruption, the people they live in a democracy with may not. Even those who rightly sympathise with JSO are entitled to also care about their lives today, not the lives of a society that exists only in the future. With this in mind, the last government’s attempts to sanction protests like this and to ensure that protesters who plan large-scale disruptive protests (no matter how ‘peaceful’) are not prima facie illegitimate. There may be much to criticise in the Public Order Act, as I have previously written, and there is the potential for it to muzzle citizens, deterring them from speaking out. But this prosecution is not such an example.
Once protest metastasises into harms like this, it goes beyond freedom of speech and enters a morally grey zone. To absolutely condemn the protesters is to ignore the strength of their convictions and the fact that they are based on very real concerns. These are not tin-pot beliefs shared only by the tinfoil-hat brigade, but credible fears backed by science. The world is heating warming unprecedented levels. Dramatic shifts in policy are needed to slow or reverse this if we want to retain our contemporary way of life. Yet letting radicals like Hallam run roughshod over peoples’ lives because he thinks the government should be doing more would be insane. Freedom of speech lets people voice their opinion and try and sway government policy, but it is not without limits. Even the European Convention on Human Rights acknowledges this, letting governments place limits on free speech that are ‘necessary in a democratic society’.
The hyperbolic reaction that has greeted the sentencing of these protesters ignores this. Michael Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, intoned that it was a ‘dark day for peaceful environmental protest’. George Monbiot, the climate campaigner, claimed that ‘four or five years in prison for peaceful protest’ is ‘what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy’. Others have shared a photograph of Cressida Gethin, a cello-playing student at the University of Cambridge, questioning how she is a ‘threat to society’. Obsessing over the superficiality of her appearance and background just exposes the class prejudice of her defenders, who write about how they would prefer to see shoplifters locked up instead of middle-class people who look like them. They ignore her past convictions that show exactly how she is a threat, and close their eyes to her and her compatriots’ determination to take ever more radical action. Instead, they parrot the refrain of ‘five years for peaceful protest’.
To describe these protests as peaceful is a convenient euphemism. It reduces violence to the extremes, blithely assuming that because no one threw a punch or fired a weapon in anger, the methods are safe from criticism. Protests like these are peaceful in the way a siege is peaceful. People are forced into line at the risk of even greater harms being inflicted on them in the future. For the person who missed their chemotherapy appointment, the protest was not peaceful but a potential accelerant of their death. Had the protest as envisaged taken place, the harms would have been on an even greater scale. No one may be snatching a watch from a wrist or holding a knife to a throat, but the harm is still real. Even if it is being inflicted by a nice middle-class girl from Cambridge, not a black youth from a Tower Hamlets sink estate.
Democracies are about people as a collective changing their mind and being governed accordingly. Not about extremists waving flags atop motorways forcing governments to toe the line they have decided upon. All of the conspirators knew what they were getting themselves in for. They knew that what they planned was criminal, and that was the point. To their minds, the scale of the disruption is necessary to emphasise the scale of the danger. If it wasn’t criminal, it would lose its potency. The point is supposed to be that the risk to the planet is so severe that criminal sanctions pale in comparison.
In this, the Southwark five may be right. Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term (and short-term) future, and governments are gazing on insipidly instead of taking direct action. But legitimate and righteous dissatisfaction at government policy does not give protesters a hall pass. At the turn of the 20th century, suffragettes were imprisoned for acting on their beliefs. As their campaign for the vote laid waste to London, we may now look at the Pankhursts and the Wilding-Davisons of that era as heroes, but that is because they accepted the consequences of their actions. Wreaking havoc on civil society does not inure you from punishment, no matter how pure your motivations. This was true in the 1900s, and is just as true today.
Righteous anger at climate policy doesn’t give you a free pass
Righteous anger at climate policy doesn’t give you a free pass
COMMENT: Last week, the first defendants to be found guilty of the new statutory offence of ‘conspiracy to cause public nuisance’ were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court. Five members of Just Stop Oil, including Roger Hallam, the protest movement’s principal architect, stood to hear the judge’s sentencing remarks. HHJ Christopher Hehir’s conclusions were forthright. He acknowledged the fact that they were acting not for personal gain, but out of the fervent belief that their actions were necessary for the survival of the planet and the human race. But he also observed that intentions, no matter how pure, cannot transform a wrong into a right. In their pursuit of a green agenda, the five had become radicalised. They were so fixated on the long-term future of the planet that they were unable to consider the harm they were doing in the here and now.
For this protest, the five sought to bring gridlock to south-east England. By having protesters hang themselves from gantries across the M25, they conspired to bring London’s orbital motorway to a standstill. From there, the intent was to plug the rest of Britain’s motorway network, stopping the traffic from draining away into London and the south-east. The aim was far more than mere disruption. They hoped for chaos. And had they succeeded in implementing their plans in full, chaos is what would have happened. Emergency vehicles would have been trapped in place, left either unable to get to the scene of emergency or to get people in need of medical care away from them. Lorries carrying just-in-time supply-chain goods would have been pushed off schedule, and food would have been left to rot and expire as air-conditioning units clicked off. The economic harm would have been in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. On a more quotidian scale, flights would have been missed, business meetings delayed, and peoples’ days or weeks ruined.
As they planned their conspiracy, the protesters were well aware of these potential consequences. More than that, they wanted them. To their minds, the short-term harm that would be done to the social and economic fabric of the nation was nothing set against the long-term harm that government inaction was doing to the country and the world. Regardless of whether the more dramatic consequences they envisaged or hoped for would have led to more urgent action on the part of governments, the protesters theorised that the greater the protest, the greater the chance of such action.
Although the protesters were stymied in their efforts to fully immobilise the UK’s road infrastructure after an undercover Sun journalist reported their plans to the Metropolitan police, much of the protest proceeded as planned. Over four days in early November, protesters shimmied up gantries from where they waved flags and hung banners. Police had little choice but to close down sections of the motorway, with policing the protests incurring a cost of over £1,000,000. The knock-on costs of the protests are not insignificant either, coming near to a million pounds, to say nothing of the social costs. One person missed an urgent chemotherapy appointment to treat an aggressive cancer which was unable to be rescheduled for another two months, a driver was left unable to deliver thousands of pounds of food to a hospital, and others missed funerals and flights.
While JSO may consider disruption like this a necessary cost of business, and aspire to even greater disruption, the people they live in a democracy with may not. Even those who rightly sympathise with JSO are entitled to also care about their lives today, not the lives of a society that exists only in the future. With this in mind, the last government’s attempts to sanction protests like this and to ensure that protesters who plan large-scale disruptive protests (no matter how ‘peaceful’) are not prima facie illegitimate. There may be much to criticise in the Public Order Act, as I have previously written, and there is the potential for it to muzzle citizens, deterring them from speaking out. But this prosecution is not such an example.
Once protest metastasises into harms like this, it goes beyond freedom of speech and enters a morally grey zone. To absolutely condemn the protesters is to ignore the strength of their convictions and the fact that they are based on very real concerns. These are not tin-pot beliefs shared only by the tinfoil-hat brigade, but credible fears backed by science. The world is heating warming unprecedented levels. Dramatic shifts in policy are needed to slow or reverse this if we want to retain our contemporary way of life. Yet letting radicals like Hallam run roughshod over peoples’ lives because he thinks the government should be doing more would be insane. Freedom of speech lets people voice their opinion and try and sway government policy, but it is not without limits. Even the European Convention on Human Rights acknowledges this, letting governments place limits on free speech that are ‘necessary in a democratic society’.
The hyperbolic reaction that has greeted the sentencing of these protesters ignores this. Michael Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, intoned that it was a ‘dark day for peaceful environmental protest’. George Monbiot, the climate campaigner, claimed that ‘four or five years in prison for peaceful protest’ is ‘what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy’. Others have shared a photograph of Cressida Gethin, a cello-playing student at the University of Cambridge, questioning how she is a ‘threat to society’. Obsessing over the superficiality of her appearance and background just exposes the class prejudice of her defenders, who write about how they would prefer to see shoplifters locked up instead of middle-class people who look like them. They ignore her past convictions that show exactly how she is a threat, and close their eyes to her and her compatriots’ determination to take ever more radical action. Instead, they parrot the refrain of ‘five years for peaceful protest’.
To describe these protests as peaceful is a convenient euphemism. It reduces violence to the extremes, blithely assuming that because no one threw a punch or fired a weapon in anger, the methods are safe from criticism. Protests like these are peaceful in the way a siege is peaceful. People are forced into line at the risk of even greater harms being inflicted on them in the future. For the person who missed their chemotherapy appointment, the protest was not peaceful but a potential accelerant of their death. Had the protest as envisaged taken place, the harms would have been on an even greater scale. No one may be snatching a watch from a wrist or holding a knife to a throat, but the harm is still real. Even if it is being inflicted by a nice middle-class girl from Cambridge, not a black youth from a Tower Hamlets sink estate.
Democracies are about people as a collective changing their mind and being governed accordingly. Not about extremists waving flags atop motorways forcing governments to toe the line they have decided upon. All of the conspirators knew what they were getting themselves in for. They knew that what they planned was criminal, and that was the point. To their minds, the scale of the disruption is necessary to emphasise the scale of the danger. If it wasn’t criminal, it would lose its potency. The point is supposed to be that the risk to the planet is so severe that criminal sanctions pale in comparison.
In this, the Southwark five may be right. Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term (and short-term) future, and governments are gazing on insipidly instead of taking direct action. But legitimate and righteous dissatisfaction at government policy does not give protesters a hall pass. At the turn of the 20th century, suffragettes were imprisoned for acting on their beliefs. As their campaign for the vote laid waste to London, we may now look at the Pankhursts and the Wilding-Davisons of that era as heroes, but that is because they accepted the consequences of their actions. Wreaking havoc on civil society does not inure you from punishment, no matter how pure your motivations. This was true in the 1900s, and is just as true today.
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