Image source, Getty Images
- Author, Justin Rowlatt
- Role, Environmental correspondent
When five activists who caused chaos on the M25 were jailed last week, some thought the law had finally caught up with Just Stop Oil.
Celebrities have expressed anger at the long sentences – and a United Nations official called their treatment “unacceptable in a democracy.”
With Roger Hallam, the architect of the modern environmental protest movement, and his co-conspirators now behind bars, this could well be a “checkmate” in a five-year legal chess game between the state and an increasingly audacious group of environmental direct action groups.
But at least for some Just Stop Oil activists, it doesn’t seem to have worked.
This should come as no surprise, as getting imprisoned has always been part of the JSO’s strategy. It’s one of the first questions new arrivals are asked: Would you be imprisoned?
Speaking exclusively to the BBC in a recorded message from his prison cell this week, Hallam stood by his actions.
“The strategic moral imperative is resistance to the greatest [crisis] “In the history of humanity,” said the JSO co-founder.
Direct action remains “the right strategy,” he added, convinced that even if in the short term some people may be dissuaded, others will only become more determined.
This raises the question of what Just Stop Oil plans next – and whether they are about to break the law once again.
Image source, Getty Images
The organisation was co-founded by Hallam and burst into public consciousness with a series of protests involving hundreds of people blocking roads in central London, culminating in the April 2019 protests.
Protesters brought parts of the capital to a standstill for more than a week and threw a large pink boat into the middle of Oxford Circus.
It was a spectacle, but the police were furious because they were unable to fulfil their frontline duties. By the end of the year, XR protests had cost them £37m.
Meanwhile, XR has split under the weight of public fury at the chaos.
In July 2020, the group expelled Hallam and subsequently disavowed actions that interfered with people’s daily lives, saying it wanted to “prioritize presence over arrest.”
Enter Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain, two new groups set up by Hallam and other disaffected XR members to continue the disruptive direct action tactic.
The JSO is by far the more active of the two. In addition to its unannounced motorway occupations, it has targeted sporting events including Wimbledon and the Ashes, and notably paralysed the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield with an explosion of orange chalk dust.
Today, police chiefs can impose time and noise limits on protests.
It is now a crime to “fix” yourself to an object with superglue, but the most important new power is the offence of public nuisance, used effectively against protesters blocking roads.
An activist can be guilty of public disorder if they do something that causes “serious harm” to the public, defined by Parliament as causing “serious annoyance” and “serious inconvenience”.
Between its introduction in 2022 and the end of 2023, figures show that 250 prosecutions were brought for this offence, many of them against climate protesters. Around half of these resulted in a conviction.
But the law says someone cannot be convicted of causing a public nuisance if they had a reasonable excuse for what they did.
Is the climate emergency a reasonable excuse?
The protesters have repeatedly said their reasonable excuse is that they want to draw attention to their fears for the planet, but judges say that is not a legal defence – because there is no need to sit in the road to do so.
The first major test of this law took place in October 2022.
Some 36 hours later, an eight-mile traffic jam, a million vehicles delayed and a £917,000 bill for the economy, Trowland was jailed for three years and Decker for two years.
The five M25 members were given longer sentences because they were the main conspirators in a plan to bring together 45 people to block the entire London ring road.
In neither trial were the defendants able to use climate change as a legitimate excuse for their actions.
In the M25 case, there were periods when some defendants refused to cooperate with the judge because he asked them to limit what they said in court.
This meant that the jurors had no choice but to convict, but the outcry still followed.
But the key question is whether imposing sentences that protesters see as draconian will succeed in deterring future demonstrations.
Image source, Essex Police
Arrests have always been part of Hallam’s tactics, which draw inspiration from the suffragettes and Gandhi’s struggle for independence in India.
The idea is that imprisoned activists become martyrs to the cause, living symbols of the urgency of the climate problem and their commitment to it. And the issue is also publicized.
The new Labour government shows no sign of wanting to change the law.
Hallam thinks a policy change is unlikely. “They’re probably going to try to get an easy win by going after people that most people don’t like,” he suggested.
So are Just Stop Oil and groups like it running out of legal avenues?
Judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have long ruled that peaceful protesters should not be imprisoned.
The Court could decide that the law in force in England and Wales is incompatible with the fundamental rights to protest and freedom of expression.
At this point, not only would Sir Keir Starmer find himself in a very awkward position, but the protesters themselves might be encouraged to resort to superglue once again.
