When the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was going through Parliament in 2021, there was huge public concern, expressed in a nationwide Kill the Bill campaign. Labour’s opposition to the Bill was lukewarm at best, as if Labour MPs were not particularly concerned that draconian new powers would be given to the police. Reassurances were given by Ministers that the police would be “measured and proportionate” in their use of these new powers. We saw what that means on Thursday last week (27th March), when more than 20 uniformed officers from the Met smashed in the front door (without even ringing the doorbell) of the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster. They then arrested six young women holding a meeting in one of the rooms they’d hired to discuss concerns about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Climate Emergency. They were detained “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, as defined under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Their home addresses (or those of their parents if they were still living at home) were subsequently raided “to gather further evidence”.
Jonathon Porritt 4th April 2025 read more »
In the morning of Valentine’s Day 2022, Hannah Hunt stood at the gates of Downing Street to announce the start of a new kind of climate campaign, one that would eschew mere protest and instead move into “civil resistance”. Last week, three years and thousands of arrests later, in a neat tie-up exemplary of Just Stop Oil’s (JSO) love of media-savvy stunts, Hunt went to the same spot again – this time to announce the group would be “hanging up the hi-vis”. In the history of UK climate activism, there has been perhaps no more polarising a campaign. Derided as “eco-zealots” in the Daily Mail and condemned as “selfish” by the Sun, which even sent a reporter to testify against them in court, JSO is as likely to be remembered for the chaos it caused as for its victories. The group’s tactics of blocking roads, halting sports events and targeting national treasures enraged politicians, pundits and the public alike. By 2023, polling showed 64% of people disapproved of JSO. Despite the demonisation, the impact of this relatively small group of peaceful protesters is in little doubt. Its campaigners kept the issue of new fossil fuel production on the agenda of even the least environmentally minded news outlets. Indeed in the group’s parting statement, members claimed to have been “one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history”, saying that their key demand for a moratorium on new oil and gas licences was “now government policy”. And perhaps more significantly, JSO proved there was a group of people in the UK prepared to endure public opprobrium – and often prison – to raise the alarm about a crisis that experts warn threatens the future of humanity. So why stop now? For Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University, who has spent years covering Just Stop Oil, the end of the campaign came as no surprise. It followed the same pattern as its forerunners, Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Insulate Britain. “It is in the DNA of these organisations that they do not carry on long term,” Hayes said. “Not least because the people involved, even in the best of worlds, tend to find that they exhaust their energies, that the constant wider social conflict they face is intense and takes its toll.”
Guardian 5th April 2025 read more »
