As the climate crisis escalates, imperialist nations like Britain have intensified their repression of environmental activism. On 18 July, five Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners were jailed for between four and five years for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,’ for ‘coordinating’, through a Zoom call, a plan to disrupt traffic on the M25 in 2022. The sentences are the harshest ever handed down for peaceful protest in Britain. Just Stop Oil demands an end to all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a move Greenpeace and other organisations stress is essential if a global temperature rise of 1.5°C is to be avoided. At the time of the arrests, Britain’s expanding operations in the North Sea were in breach of its obligations under the Paris Agreement. Yet it is not former government ministers or oil company executives facing imprisonment, but those fighting for humanity’s future.
‘Causing a public nuisance’ had long been a common law offence but was enshrined as statutory law with the passing of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCSCA), facilitating its use by the state as a weapon against protesters. If the climate crisis were not so desperate, the phrase ‘public nuisance’ would be laughable when contrasted with the mass death, destruction, and displacement being caused by worldwide increases in heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods, all of which disproportionately affect the global working class. The offence of ‘conspiracy’ means that planning a peaceful action can entail as severe a punishment as carrying out the action itself, regardless of the actual impact or whether the action even goes ahead. The convictions in the JSO case were the result of collusion between the Metropolitan Police and Sun hack Scarlet Howes, who also joined the Zoom call in order to rat out campaigners – this kind of conspiracy is lauded by the ruling class; it is only when the working class organise in their own interests that the act is criminalised.
The judge in the case, Christopher Hehir, deliberately restricted the rights of the activists to defend themselves, and of the jury to draw their own conclusions. Defendants, including Roger Hallam and Daniel Shaw, were removed from the courtroom when they began to explain their actions in the context of the existential danger of climate change; on other occasions, the jury were commanded to leave to prevent their hearing this evidence. Hehir then ordered the arrest of 11 campaigners outside Southwark Crown Court, where the trial was taking place, for holding placards with messages including ‘Jurors have the right to hear the whole truth.’ Hehir’s actions are part of the ongoing erosion of the power of juries. In 2023, the government tried to convict Trudi Warner for holding a placard outside a court, bearing the factual statement, ‘Jurors – you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’ The bourgeoisie has too often found its attempts to exact retribution on protesters confounded by principled juries who return verdicts based on real justice in defiance of judge’s instructions – so-called ‘perverse verdicts’.
As the frequency and severity of environmental disasters increase, it is natural that the movement demanding action is growing. However, public bodies and wealthy corporations such as Shell and Esso (ExxonMobil) are increasingly purchasing private injunctions to deter protests on or near their property. On 26 July, the High Court issued injunctions demanded by National Highways criminalising protest anywhere on the M25, its feeder roads, and routes near the Port of Dover and Luton and Stansted airports. It will remain in effect until next May. Sarah Benn was among 51 people imprisoned in 2022 for protesting outside Kingsbury Oil Terminal in Warwickshire. Benn, a GP who said she was determined to ‘take action to confront the greatest health crisis we face’, spent 32 days in jail and had her medical licence suspended. North Warwickshire Borough Council, who took out the disgraceful injunction, describes the actions of protesters like Benn – whose ‘offence’ consisted of sitting in a road with a group of people in high-vis waistcoats – as ‘dangerous’. Through its fracking activities, Cuadrilla, a major user of injunctions, caused an earthquake in 2019 that shook houses in Blackpool and Preston. Clearly, it is the profit-hungry corporations that pose the danger, not those taking a stand against them. Yet state sanctions have been ratcheted up against protesters. In July 2023, activists Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received prison sentences of three years and two years seven months respectively, for a peaceful protest. In January 2024, United Nations special rapporteur Michael Forst condemned the British government for taking ‘increasingly severe and draconian measures against environmental defenders’, saying that tactics such as injunctions and the censoring of court testimonies had a ‘significant chilling effect on civil society and the exercise of fundamental freedoms’.
The state’s motives for cracking down on environmental protest are multifaceted. On a basic level, the state exists to protect the interests of the ruling class, and fossil fuels and other polluting industries remain highly profitable. Under capitalism, the manner and pace of any transition to supposedly greener technology will be managed in a way that maintains profits, not that meets the urgent needs of the masses. On a deeper level, the state is terrified of the working-class resistance that will only continue to mount as conditions worsen under the current economic system. The environmental movement is already making links with the wider anti-imperialist struggle. For example, the pro-Palestine direct action group, Youth Demand, is a JSO offshoot. Indigenous peoples, such as those in Brazil defending the rainforest from mining and deforestation, have long been at the forefront of the fight against environmental destruction. Traveler communities and climate campaigners alike fall victim to the injunctions imposed by bourgeois property owners. These shared struggles show that environmental collapse, racism, war, and all other blights on working-class life have a common root in imperialism. To arm itself against the anti-imperialist fightback, the ruling class has attempted to outlaw dissent with authoritarian legislation such as the PCSCA and the Public Order Act 2023.
The Labour government has no intention of repealing these anti-democratic laws. On the contrary, on 25 July, ‘Net Zero’ Secretary Ed Miliband attacked Just Stop Oil tactics, claiming that they were ‘disastrous’ and ‘alienating’ people from the battle against climate change. He was reacting to condemnation of the ‘jailing of truth tellers and their silencing in court’ by more than 1,200 artists, athletes and academics.
The Labour government has ditched its commitment to invest £28bn a year in decarbonisation. It plans to militarise Britain’s borders in response to refugees fleeing the effects of environmental breakdown. The Green Party offers no solution as it does not oppose the system of private ownership and production for profit that fuels climate destruction. The bourgeoisie’s electoral system will never provide a route to working-class liberation. Only a revolutionary socialist movement can overthrow imperialism and replace it with a rational, sustainable economy. Consistently recognised by the UN and other international bodies as among the most sustainably developed nations, Cuba offers an example of such an economy, with its 100-year Tarea Vida (Life Task) climate plan putting power into the hands of the people to build their own future. The workers of Cuba won their survival through socialist revolution – now, to save themselves from extinction, the workers of the world must do the same.
Felix Lancashire
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
