Britain’s Niemöller Moment

British Democracy died along time ago, but this week you were invited to its funeral. 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”. 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”.

The case has indeed shocked many people, but really this has been a long time coming. We should have seen it coming, in fact many of us did.

This is how you slide into authoritarianism, laws made and then implemented while all the time everyone tut-tuts about environmental protestors and gathers around the sewer of social media to condemn them. Before you know it, your rights are gone. Before you know it, the right to peaceful protest is abolished. Before you know it they are locking up young people, old people, academics, mums, grannies and lecturers. But remember you don’t like those Just Stop Oil protestors.

When – just a month ago – protestors were attacked and denounced from all sides and all parties for a stunt at Stonehenge where they sprayed orange paint on the stones our new Prime Minister talked tough: “The damage done to Stonehenge is outrageous. Just Stop Oil are pathetic. Those responsible must face the full force of the law.” Now they have. Well done. Yvette Cooper joined the denunciations saying: “Appalling act of vandalism on one of the UK’s most treasured heritage sites. Protest must always be lawful – criminal damage of this kind can never be tolerated.” The orange paint was soluble and would wash-away in the rain, these laws are here for good.

Cooper’s plea that “protest must be lawful” is ahistorical. Protest can’t be ‘lawful’ if you’ve just made it illegal. This is Britain’s Niemöller Moment. You are not being asked to agree with Just Stop Oil’s tactics, even if you have just been swept up in the latest pearl-clutching condemnation of something your can’t be arsed to understand, you are only being asked to protect the right of peaceful protest, that is all. If you can’t stand up for this we are just gone, just gone.

The consequences of being tied to the British State, to being part of the sort of political cultures where people like Priti Patel are elected and rise to the highest offices of the land are now crystal clear.

So now what?

Well despite pleas from Chris Packham and Clive Lewis to meet ‘urgently’ with the Attorney General, its unlikely that Starmer’s new Labour government will repeal anything. ‘Clamping down’ on protestors the Judge described as ‘fanatics’ is popular stuff and plays to the notion of dangerous extremists disrupting the lives of ‘ordinary working people’.

Judge’s Sentencing Remarks

In the judge’s sentencing remarks (Rex -v- Hallam and others – sentencing remarks.pdf (judiciary.uk) he admits that “I can fairly observe that there is a general consensus, in both scientific and societal terms, that manmade climate change exists, and that action is required to mitigate its effects”.

But Judge Christopher Hehir concluded: “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”

“You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”

This is not true.

The arbiters of what should be done about climate change are the IPCC. Just before the COP in Glasgow the IPCC stated: “All pathways begin now and involve rapid and unprecedented social transformation”.

As the International Energy Agency stated in 2021: “There must be no new oil, gas or coal development if world is to reach net zero by 2050, says world energy body”:

“Exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year and no new coal-fired power stations can be built if the world is to stay within safe limits of global heating and meet the goal of net zero emissions by 2050”.

The defendants are not some outlier mob, they are upholding the truth and articulating the science. The judge’s sentence is not just wildly authoritarian it is denying and repressing facts.

In a particularly Orwellian twist the Judge also ordered, a few days into the trial on 2 July, the arrest of 11 protestors outside the court who were silently holding placards displaying the words, “Juries deserve to hear the whole truth” and “Juries have the absolute right to acquit a defendant on their conscience”.

What are the consequences for all of us from this?

There’s the distinct possibility that these sentences will be used as a marker, a legal precedent for the future and now the police and judicial system will get used to severe and lengthy sentences for pre-crimes, thought crimes and peaceful protest that ’cause a nuisance’. It is possible that this acts as a deterrent but also that the prisons fill up with peaceful people.

There is the possibility that the previous government saw this as politically opportune, a populist move to clamp down on people they looked on as expendable. It is highly possible that such opportunistic politicians had so little regard for our freedoms that the cost benefit of discarding your civil liberties was thought worthy of a few votes.

There’s another theory as to why the British government has enacted such strict protest laws, or why the USA is building literal “cop cities”, and it isn’t because they’re worried about ‘public nuisance.’ The theory is that they’re preparing for the chaos of the climate crisis rather than attempting to avert it. These laws are being out in place now for the coming chaos.

That is a terrifying and likely prospect, but it is also an abandonment of the future. It would mean, if true, an abandonment of a key aspect of democracy, that is, a belief in future change, a belief that elections are part of a functioning democracy.

Writing about Jonathan White’s book In the Long  Run, the Future as a Political Idea, Simon Ings says:

“If democracies are to survive and flourish, they need to believe in the future. The prospect of brighter times ahead — that the problems of today can be solved in the elections of tomorrow — have been one of the key underpinnings of modern democratic systems. But what if that claim no longer holds? What if, say, you believe that an immediate crisis or issue is so pressing — climate change, for example — that the promise that things will work out in the long run no longer rings true?”

So the case of the Whole Truth Five is not just a matter of civil liberties it is a deeper case of suppressing facts and suppressing science. It is a new form of climate denial, a judicial form that will require a new response. Imprisoning activists will not make the facts go away. Supressing protest and marginalising individuals won’t make climate disaster disappear. So how should we respond?

As we gaze at the ominous dystopian scenes perhaps at last everyone is awake to the fact that we have a problem and it is beyond our current means to solve. As Julia Steinberger has written (A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change): “The first step to future success is surely acceptance of present and past failure: and we have spectacularly failed to curb or even slow down increases in greenhouse gas emissions.”

The second step would then be to stop doing the things we have been doing which don’t work.

They include: appeasement of big business and fossil fuel giants; allowing the minimum possible environmental regulation; assuming that nothing really needs to change; lying to each other about the scale of the crisis; pretending that the climate breakdown is some kind of far-off far-away event horizon; petitioning and lobbying centres of power with pleas for change, when all of the overwhelming evidence for thirty years is that this is pointless; allowing climate denial propaganda to freely contaminate public discourse and understanding; kidding-on that western lifestyle can and should just carry on as normal with little or no impact on everyone’s lives; inviting Big Oil into the room at (endless) COP meetings as if they were (or could be) part of the solution; seeing energy as a source of private wealth; talking endlessly of the need to ‘grow the economy’ as a solution to everything – when all the evidence suggest that perpetual growth on a finite planet is impossible.

So we have nurtured all of these insane myths and watched as they repeatedly fail us. We have endlessly asked and pleaded those in power to enact the changes we need and they have repeatedly failed. What’s now very clear is that government and business and international bodies aren’t going to save us, so we need a radically different approach.

So we know what we need to stop doing: appeasing big business; pursuing endless growth and drilling for oil. But to avoid slipping into what’s called ‘reflexive impotence’ what should we be doing instead?

1. Just Stop Oil. They may be annoying but they’re right. As Assaad Razzouk, author of Saving the Planet without the Bullshit has said: “Exxon did this. Shell did this. TotalEnergies did this. PetroChina did this. Chevron did this. BP did this. Gazprom did this. Coal India did this. Saudi Aramco did this: Just 100 companies caused 71% of man-made global warming emissions.” This goes to the heart of the myth that we as citizens are all equally culpable, and any solutions must be channeled through individual behaviour change. In a Scottish context this means stopping Rosebank. As the Stop Cambo campaign explained: “Norwegian oil giant Equinor made more than £15 billion profit in the first six months of this year. Yet the UK government still wants to give them a £3.75 billion tax break to develop the Rosebank oil field. We’re subsidising the wrecking of our future for Equinor’s profit.”
2. Declare a Climate Emergency. As Peter Kalmus, author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution has argued: “Biden’s refusal to declare a climate emergency and his eagerness to push new pipelines and new drilling – at an even faster pace than Trump – goes against science, goes against common sense, goes against life on Earth. In the world of politics-as-usual, with its short-term goals and calculus of “safer to follow than to lead”, I suppose there are reasons and rationalizations for this planet-destroying choice. But speaking as a scientist, it seems ignorant and short-sighted. It’s certainly a form of climate denial. And I have no doubt that fossil fuel executives and lobbyists – and those who chose to stand with them – will, in the future, be considered criminals.”

   Of course President Biden is not going to declare a Climate Emergency, nor are any western leaders elected on the expectation of maintaining business-as-usual and the riptide of production and consumption. But we can declare a Climate Emergency ourselves and withdraw our support from the system at every conceivable level of our existence.

3. Tell the Truth is a mantra of climate activists, meant as a plea for a media saturated in climate banality, lifestyle-ism or false equivalence – if not actively platforming climate deniers. In a media landscape fit for our era, not only would we have a much more honest and stark public discussion through the media, we would also be naming and shaming those propagandists and spinners who are climate deniers. This would and should become as unacceptable in discourse as other ideologies that would result in carnage at such scale.

4. Change the Language. One of the greatest tricks of the powerful is to have us believe we are all equally responsible for the current crisis. We are not. Both within the global North and outwith it, the power relations of those who benefit from our current systems need to be exposed. As Jason Hickel, author of Less is More, how Degrowth will save the World writes: “As climate-related damages hit, remember that this crisis is not due to generic “human activity”. Excess emissions are due overwhelmingly to the core states of the global North, and the ruling classes that control the systems of production, energy and national legislation.” That is also true within those countries of the global North, where low-income communities are also low-carbon communities and where the rich with SUVs and frequent flyer points are likely to be far more carbon intense than others. Given that reality its darkly ironic that elite forces can try and manipulate people from low-income backgrounds in anti-ecological populism.
5. Find New Forms of Solidarity. People are very scared, and rightly so. No-one has ever lived through what we are experiencing and the possibility of crop failure from extreme weather events has moved from possible to probable. The disruptions that we are experiencing now, other people in other parts of the world have already suffered. New civil society forms of mutual aid and support will have to be developed, not least for the impact on mental health of living through climate breakdown. This is a massive challenge in a society in which hyper-individualism and narcissism is cultivated, but taking the time to reflect and come together is an essential part of ‘grounding’ ourselves from the madness.
6. Stop Being Selfish. You don’t have a god-given right to fly to Australia, or to eat strawberries in December, or to buy clothes made in a far-off sweat-shop.  The globalised world is over.
7. Do Everything. There isn’t a clash between ‘big state’ top-down actions and grassroots mycelium oriented ones. Both are needed but as we fight for the former we can build the latter.
8. Reinhabitation. If colonisation, empire and manifest destiny was a driver of social and ecological destruction across the world then the opposite of that is not just decolonisation and repair but re-inhabitation. In a post-globalised world the emphasis must be on ‘knowing your place’ and adjusting life according to geography and locality.
9. It’s Not Just about Carbon. It might seem counter-intuitive but the environmental breakdown is not just about carbon emissions alone. But massive reforestation and habitat restoration – regenerative agriculture and creating green cities are all essential in not just mitigating the impact of extreme weather but slowing emissions.
10. Fightback. It’s very easy to fall into responses of despair or hedonism in such times. But once we acknowledge that the old models of chasing failed leadership for solutions then the options open up for new pathways to change emerge. Mass-scale direct action can be more empowering than another petition, another round of talks with fossil fuel companies or another plea for change to politicians psychologically and systemically incapable of delivering. Equally, having witnessed the true-scale of the position we can begin the task of re-building society on the principles required for survival. As we move towards finding environmental justice there will also have to be a legal process of prosecuting those responsible for ecocide and crimes against humanity.

Only when we begin to move away from the failed models of protest and response to real-world solutions will we begin to find effective means to fightback against the forces destroying our world.