Facts Not in Dispute

Last week, five Just Stop Oil activists were convicted of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and sentenced to up to five years in jail for planning to block the M25 in November 2022. The judge, Christopher Hehir, ruled that evidence relating to climate breakdown was ‘irrelevant and inadmissible’ and could not be used in their defence. The activists, representing themselves, ignored the judge’s instructions. They described the devastating impacts of global heating, cited the government’s legal climate commitments and told the jury they were being denied key evidence. Eleven protesters outside the court were arrested for holding signs that said: ‘Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.’ The defendants were found in contempt and removed from the court. It took the jury only a day of deliberation to return a unanimous guilty verdict.

This can be interpreted as a kind of climate denial. Not outright denial of the facts, which in the UK at least is an extreme fringe position, but a refusal of the implications. During the trial, the prosecution read out ‘facts not in dispute’: the climate crisis is ‘an existential threat to humanity’ and global heating of more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic. But those facts weren’t as salient as the traffic jams, disruption to business and cost of police time.

As Tad DeLay writes in Future of Denial, we are all, in a Freudian sense, repressing the reality of a climate changed future. It doesn’t bear thinking about, so we’d rather not. Reckoning with it leads to a daunting unravelling of the logic that structures our world. Under the Sky News announcement of the prison sentences on X, people made such comments as: ‘Common sense prevails’; ‘Great news … throw the keys away’; ‘About time!! Should have given them ten years!’

Sitting in a road is annoying; being late to a job interview is inconvenient; missing a funeral is upsetting. But the mass displacement of people, the failure of crops, the loss of entire species: these are rationalised as ‘externalities’, or ignored, or imagined as a distant prospect that will somehow be averted with capitalist ingenuity. The imprisonment of those who are trying to shake us out of this denial is discombobulating. Describing them as ‘fanatics’, Judge Hehir sentenced Roger Hallam to five years and the other activists to four years each, the longest sentences for peaceful protest in British history. Before last week, the record was held by Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker, who received three-year sentences for scaling the Dartford Crossing bridge and blocking traffic for two days in October 2022.

Trowland and Decker argued that the disruption they caused was proportionate to the urgency of the climate crisis, referring to the immense human suffering already caused. Sentencing them, the judge inverted this logic: ‘You plainly believed you knew better than everyone else and it did not matter if people suffered in consequence so long as it allowed you to impart your message. In short, to hell with everyone else.’ Decker, a German citizen who had previously had leave to remain in the UK, is now on immigration bail. The Home Office tracks him by a GPS ankle tag while he appeals a deportation order that would separate him from his partner and her children.

The punitive response was, in part, the authoritarian death throes of a beleaguered Conservative government. The right-wing media has enthusiastically participated, casting the ‘eco mob’ against the workaday commuter. The Sun was instrumental in last week’s case, having infiltrated Just Stop Oil’s Zoom call and passed evidence to the police. The journalist was given exclusive access to Hallam’s arrest.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023 were trained largely on the direct action wing of the climate movement, although they made room for other targets, notably the rights of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. Policy Exchange, the think tank co-founded by Michael Gove and funded by Exxon-Mobil, inspired much of the detail in the legislative assault on protest with its report ‘Extremism Rebellion’, which described Extinction Rebellion as a ‘subversive’ group planning to precipitate ‘the breakdown of democracy and the state’.

The Public Order Act is ostensibly aimed at preventing ‘disruption to the life of the community’, but its provisions largely focus on disruption to corporate interests. It introduces a new offence of interfering with key national infrastructure, including roads, rail, air transport, harbours, oil and gas exploration, production and refining, electricity generation and newspaper printing. In effect, it gave the police increased powers to stop protesters targeting oil and gas companies or trying to prevent the detention and deportation of migrants.

The new legislation itself ignited a wave of protest, with a Kill the Bill movement speaking to the thousands mobilised by Black Lives Matter in 2020, but ultimately losing momentum as pandemic lockdowns receded and the policing bill was forced through Parliament. Much of that organisation and energy has since been channelled into the pro-Palestine movement.

Young activists, in particular, are connecting struggles against fossil capital with those against racial injustice and colonial oppression. Youth Demand, an offshoot of Just Stop Oil, calls for an arms embargo on Israel as well as an end to new oil and gas licences in the UK. This cross-fertilisation has not gone unnoticed by the state: in May, John Woodcock, a cross-bench peer and government adviser on political violence and disruption, released a report on ‘protecting our democracy from coercion’, noting the overlap of tactics and personnel among the more radical elements of the movements for climate and Palestinian justice. He described these groups as part of a ‘far left subculture’ and recommended removing their rights to assemble and fundraise.

After a string of cases in which pro-Palestine and climate activists were acquitted of criminal damage offences, the then attorney general, Victoria Prentis, in February applied to limit grounds for defence, and judges have been increasingly zealous in their restriction of admissible evidence. The UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, who attended last week’s trial, called it ‘a dark day for peaceful environmental protest’ that should ‘put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom’.

The new Labour government has said there will be no new North Sea oil or gas licences – Just Stop Oil’s original demand – but anyone expecting them to reverse course on protest may be disappointed. Keir Starmer, who supported Just Stop Oil during his leadership campaign, had a characteristic change of heart once leader, calling them contemptible. In June, he said they ‘must face the full force of the law’ for spraying cornstarch paint on Stonehenge, whose stones are home to fragile and rare lichens (which, incidentally, won’t survive the climate crisis). The incoming armed forces minister welcomed last week’s sentences as a ‘strong message’ to other activists.

Is this common sense? It is, of sorts. It’s the kind of common sense that Gramsci saw as constitutive of ruling-class hegemony: not good sense, but a set of ideas that props up the status quo and in which a wide range of people can find meaning and anchorage. It’s a common sense that says: ‘Of course we must do something, but not that.’ It’s a common sense that embraces fossil fuel companies and maligns climate activists as extremists; it applauds net-zero commitments even as we hurtle past the agreed target of 1.5°C of warming; it reconciles the oxymorons of ‘sustainable’ jet fuel and ‘carbon neutral’ coal mines; it says that private investment will save us; it countenances a world of mass extinction but not one without capitalism.