11th October 2024:
Climate Rights International have recently issued a new report, On Thin Ice, which details the increasingly harsh measures being meted out to climate protestors in the west, specifically Germany, the UK, France, Netherlands, Australia and the Unites States. The most recent obvious example has been the sentencing of five Insulate Britain activists in the UK for 4 and 5 years each for attending a Zoom meeting in which plans to do a peaceful blockade of the M25 was discussed. The 5 year sentence was given out to Roger Hallam,
the others getting four years, even though he had only been asked to attend the Zoom call in order to discuss the role of civil disobedience in achieving peaceful change, and wasn’t actually part of organising for the action. In his own words:
"I’ve just been sentenced to 5 years in prison. The longest ever for nonviolent action. The ‘crime’? Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence- based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction. I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse. I was not part of the planning or action itself."
I mean, he has clearly been targeted as part of a state vendetta, as everyone knows he has probably been the most instrumental person in the UK environmental scene over the last 5 years. My heart goes out to them all, these are truly appalling sentences by elements within the system who are, quite frankly, merciless and heartless bastoods intent on committing environmental and human genocide and looking to crush any people or movements that actually threaten to become effective at stopping them.
Another recent one (2023) was Stephen Gingell, father of three and a man I used to know and worked with for a couple of years as part of XR Manchester, who was given a 6 month prison sentence in 2023 for… slow walking on a road in London. This kind of sentencing is not justifiable within any democratic context, and we all know it is totalitarian and not democratic. The On Thin Ice report does a great job in illustrating this by showing how it is in direct contravention with international law, such as the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which has been ratified by 173 countries, or the European Convention on Human Rights, and highlighting the hypocrisy of these democratic countries who are quick to denounce other countries for human rights abuses and crackdowns on political dissent.
The report also goes on to illustrate various cases around the world of democratic countries cracking down on peaceful environmental protest, branding environmental groups as criminal organisations, taking pre-emptive arrests, giving out overblown penalties, banning environmental groups, as well as the widespread use of intimidation and harassment in online spaces and in the media.
One thing the report does not comment on at all however, is the reason why there is such a big crackdown on environmental protest. In fact, it needs to be made clear that the crackdown is not actually against the environmental movement, but almost entirely against certain movements within the environmental movement who have made commonplace the tactic of disrupting the general public by blocking roads.
I recall this tactic – blockading motorways etc - being discussed within direct action climate movements 15 years ago, long before the recent plethora of pop-up movements divorced from any activist roots, but it was dismissed because the movement feared the public backlash it would cause and the resulting crackdown, which it was quite rightly pointed out would likely be self-defeating in the long term. The car lobby is a powerful lobby, and it is not just big powerful oil and car companies, it is your neighbour, and the people you meet on the street. People’s sense of their right to drive is powerful, so powerful in fact that any plan to deal with climate change that does not continue to allow people to drive cars is never considered for one minute by any government anywhere in the world, because they know they would immediately have an uprising on their hands, because of this inherent privilege that people have when it comes to their right to drive cars. (And I say that as someone who has never driven and who runs the website www.car-free-cities.org. I’m certainly not defending car drivers.)
The backlash we are witnessing right now and which this On Thin Ice report is commenting on, is a direct backlash against groups such as XR, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil for the repeated use of road blockades to disrupt the general public. Almost all of the crackdowns and heavy sentences have been handed out to those within these groups, or groups like them, and almost always for blocking roads.
I spent some time within XR Manchester warning people about the widespread use of this tactic, and trying to get people to think twice. It’s going to cause a massive backlash, I would say, it will be self defeating in the long run, I would add, it will ultimately hamper the whole movement, etc. Sadly, no-one ever listened. I’m no Roger Hallam, I’m just someone who has been involved in grassroots campaigning and direct action movements for nearly 20 years. My voice was never respected within XR or the other diaspora of pop up movements and that remains the case, and not just my voice, but the voice of all other environmental movements and activists who came before these recent movements and who could have given them the same warning about the widespread deployment of road blocking as a tactic. I mean, its isolated use is fine, but the widespread use maintained over a prolonged period, that is always going to cause a big backlash, and that is what we are experiencing.
Consider a couple of prominent quotes to illustrate the point.
Commenting on the harsh sentencing given out to Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker for causing road stoppages, Rishi Sunak said:
It’s entirely right that selfish protesters intent on causing misery to the hard-working majority face tough sentences. It’s what the public expects and it’s what we’ve delivered.
The premier of New South Wales, Dominic Perrottet, commenting on the harsh 15 month sentence given to Deanna “Violet” Coco for blocking one lane of traffic said:
If protesters want to put our way of life at risk, then they should have the book throw at them and that’s pleasing to see.
Or consider the Berlin Interior Minister Iris Spranger, who stated in an interview that it was “unfortunate” that car drivers were unable to use violence against protesters.
These protestors are good people who are being treated as though they were international terrorists who threaten the very fabric of society, and the reason is because they do threaten the fabric of society – the right to drive. These leaders can say these things because they know they will have widespread support within the general population who perceive their right to drive as sacrosanct, and who are angry and thuggish and want to see a crackdown on the environmental protestors who are attacking that perceived right and making them look bad.
Personally, I have and still don’t think that blocking roads like this is a wise or sound tactic to use, and I find it sad that Climate Rights International have produced this report yet not discussed this issue at all, because this is a vitally important issue. You don’t have to block roads in order to do an effective protest or direct action on the climate, there are lots more legitimate targets out there that won’t produce such a massive backlash, and this needs to be more widely discussed as people who are anxious and worried about climate change are being encouraged by groups like XR or JSO (groups without any experienced activist roots) to go out and block roads as a way to 'save the climate', with no regard being given to the massive backlash that is crashing down upon them.
I repeat: you do not need to block roads to take direct action on the climate, there are loads of more sensible and wiser options. If you see a bull in a field blocking your way, you don’t jump in and go running at it in order to get it to move. Car drivers are this bull in the field. Blocking roads en masse and disrupting the general public in order to get action on climate change is only going to antagonise the bull. If you make it your tactic to jump in and try and force it out of the way, you will likely get mauled or trampled to death. Similarly, if you try and directly challenge car drivers – the general public – on their right to drive, you will get mauled or trampled to death by the resultant backlash. You have to be smarter, wiser, and choose your targets and your methods so that this does not happen. Sadly, this kind of discourse is simply not permeating these ‘pop up’ movements, divorced
as they are from the wider lineage of environmental action, and it is sad to see that Climate Rights International, though I welcome the report, have failed to address this at all, when it should be giventop billing.
We need to be telling people who are anxious about climate change and who want to do something that there are much better things for them to do than to block roads and get prison sentences. I mean, you don’t see the wider environmental movement doing this, only these 'newbie' movements who lack any roots within the wider grassroots movements and who thus lack access to more experienced and wiser advice and tactics. I’m not for one minute justifying this backlash, or the harsh treatment of climate protestors, but I am pointing out that the tactics they are deploying are unwise and are the direct cause of this backlash, and that there are other much better tactics out there they can deploy
that would be more effective and cause much less of a backlash.
(As an afterthought it is worth noting that some groups can get away with road blockades, but that is because they do not threaten the right to drive. Truckers, farmers, taxi drivers, and so on, often use this tactic and generally don’t get any backlash. But this is because they do not pursue the tactic for years, and also because they do not directly threaten the right to drive. Environmental protestors who deploy the road blocking tactic are perceived as directly attacking the right to drive, and have
also been pursuing this tactic for years, hence the big backlash.)