The Just Stop Oil five: 'fanatics' or victims of anti-protest authoritarianism?

"Finally", a judge who "has the guts to do what the British people have long wanted the judiciary to do", said Carole Malone in the Daily Express: "throw the book at those loony eco-activists who bring whole cities to a standstill". 

At Southwark Crown Court last week, judge Christopher Hehir doled out the longest-ever prison sentences for peaceful protest, to five Just Stop Oil protesters. Roger Hallam, who co-founded the movement, was given a five-year term for conspiracy to cause public nuisance. His co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Louise Lancaster and Cressida Gethin, got four years. 

In November 2022, they had organised a demonstration in which more than 45 protesters climbed onto gantries on the M25 motorway, bringing it to a standstill. People could have been killed. As it was, some of those affected missed flights and funerals. An estimated 700,000 vehicles were delayed. The economic cost was calculated at £769,966, not counting the £1 million cost of policing.

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Mass disruption of a different kind

If you think the M25 protest was disruptive, just wait until climate change really kicks in, said George Monbiot in The Guardian. Consider "what a sea surge, a flash flood, a windstorm or a rail-buckling, road-melting, bridge-jamming heat event can do to transport infrastructure". 

The right to protest is the wellspring of democracy. Yet these people were tried "as though they were mindless vandals", and given sentences "of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt" – much longer than the average given for violence against the person (1.7 years). It would be shocking even if our prisons weren't so full that they're being emptied of violent criminals. 

These sentences are "a logical outcome of Britain's authoritarian turn against protest", said Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss on The Conversation. In the past, protesters were treated leniently. But in recent years, new crimes have been created and crucial legal defences have been shut down. There is no lawful defence to the statutory offence of conspiracy to cause public nuisance, created by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which these five faced. So they were not allowed even to explain their motives to the jury.

'Quests for sainthood'

"Protesters have a right to protest," said Tony Dowson in The Critic. "They do not have a right to cause massive inconvenience and harm", which environmental protesters are increasingly doing. Besides, the sentences weren't that stiff, bearing in mind that all the defendants had prior convictions. Hallam had 13; in April, he received a suspended sentence for plotting to close Heathrow with drones. 

The judge called him a "fanatic", said Will Lloyd in The Times. And he is. Hallam compares himself to Gandhi. He believes that a "global carbon elite" is planning to kill billions, and that Western societies will collapse within a decade. 

Such views are, however, widespread on the environmental Left. We can expect many other Britons to end up on their own "Hallam-like quests for sainthood".