How do you know when protest tactics are working? When governments ban them. The oppressive laws introduced by the previous government – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 – are a tick list of effective political engagement. Everything from locking on and digging tunnels to actions on roads, at airports, oil refineries or newspapers, even marching down a street, has been criminalised. Why? Because these methods work. If they didn’t, the government wouldn’t have bothered.
The Conservatives justified their draconian measures with the claim that they prevented “disruption to the public”. But had they cared about disruption, they would have done all they could to prevent climate breakdown. Nothing is more disruptive than the flickering and eventual collapse of Earth systems. If you believe a few people sitting in the street is a major impediment to traffic, take a look at what a sea surge, a flash flood, a windstorm or a rail-buckling, road-melting, bridge-jamming heat event can do to transport infrastructure.
The government and prosecutors made great play of the inconvenience caused by the closure of the Dartford Crossing when protesters climbed on to it in 2022. The court imposed massive and cruel penalties. But the crossing is frequently closed by high winds, a problem expected to become much worse as a result of the issue the protesters were seeking to highlight. No government minister appears before the cameras at such moments, thundering about the diversion of ambulances, commuters and parents on the school run, and demanding that the chief executives of oil companies are locked up.
Instead, the previous government went out of its way to exacerbate disruption, licensing new oil and gas drilling and an entirely pointless coalmine; blocking onshore wind power; subsidising at great expense people’s fossil fuel bills, rather than spending a fraction of that money to help us insulate and improve our homes.
As we approach the Earth systems horizon, governments and corporations have gone to ever more extreme lengths to prevent us from doing anything about it. The Tory government sought to bypass the House of Commons to insert extra measures into the first oppressive bill. When that failed, it inserted them into the second bill. It then used “Henry VIII powers” to extend the measures without proper parliamentary scrutiny. 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 thoughtcrimes has not received nearly enough coverage. Far from preventing such abuses, the previous government reinforced them with new injunction powers of its own: you can now be punished twice for the same political crime.
But perhaps the most pernicious innovation was to shut down crucial legal defences. 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. Some protesters have sought to explain themselves regardless, and have as a result been imprisoned for contempt of court.
On Thursday five Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to record prison terms for peaceful protest in the UK. Four of them received four years and one received five years for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”: they had been involved in planning to close the M25. These are sentences of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt. Before they were handed down, the UN’s special rapporteur Michel Forst pointed out that the terms of the prosecution, in one defendant’s case merely for appearing on a Zoom call, were “shockingly disproportionate”.
Four of the defendants were rearrested in court for continuing to explain their motives after the judge had instructed them to stop. He told the jury that the issue of climate breakdown was “entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not each is guilty or not guilty”. Let’s pretend our existential predicament had no bearing on their actions.
Outside the court, 11 more people were arrested for holding signs stating that jurors have a right to exercise their conscience, an ancient principle in English law. Earlier this year, the Tory solicitor-general, a government minister, applied to have another activist, Trudi Warner, prosecuted for holding such a sign. But the application was dismissed on the grounds that she had committed no crime.
The new government now seeks to address one grim Tory legacy, our bursting prisons, by releasing prisoners – including violent offenders – early. At the same time it fails to address or even mention another and even worse inheritance: the jailing of entirely peaceful people seeking to prevent existential disaster. Perhaps the prisons can be emptied of violent criminals so they can be refilled with environmentalists.
And yet the Labour party committed, before the election, to Just Stop Oil’s core demand: an end to new gas and oil exploitation. There was once a solid political consensus around “maximising economic recovery” of the UK’s oil and gas. I believe Just Stop Oil played a crucial role in changing this.
Before the election, Ed Miliband, now the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, recited the usual mantras: Just Stop Oil’s tactics were “alienating people” and not helping its cause. But were it not for the alienating protest movements of the past 20 years, I doubt his job would exist.
Labour once recognised that protest is the wellspring of democracy, from which has flowed all our fundamental rights: the right of women to own their lives and make their own decisions, the right to vote, to choose any religion or none, to express our sexuality as we please, to speak freely, to fair wages and working conditions, even to weekends.
Effective protest is an ecosystem. It needs a moderate flank and a radical flank. It needs a wide range of skillsets and degrees of commitment. But, as hundreds of years of practice shows, the visible, noisy, disruptive, outrageous element, however much it is lambasted, is essential to its success. If we are to establish the right to a habitable planet, it is unlikely to happen in the absence of “alienating” actions.
As well as repealing the Tory laws, the new government should establish a positive right in law to protest peacefully. It might claim to abhor us. But it needs us.
