protest

Heist?

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Can anything surprise us anymore?  As we all hunker down and attempt to deal with the realities of the omicron surge, another threat to national society is not far from the horizon.  Specifically, as I write, the Lords are debating the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – often dubbed simply the ‘Policing’ Bill.  Last minute amendments by Priti Patel have made the Bill all the more controversial with critics likening it to a power grab worthy of Putin’s Russia or Egypt.

Salient among the justifications are the touted necessity of robust response to the activities of the likes of Insulate Britain and XR, famed for their acts of disruption.  Protestor tactics have changed in recent years, the thinking goes, and the police need the powers to respond effectively.  While there is no doubt that obstructing stretches of motorway, blocking trains into the capital and shutting down various printing presses are far from popular, the case made for the kind of legislation we’re currently looking at tends to gloss over issues as to what constitutes ‘legitimate’ protest, how much power is to be handed over to the Home Secretary and the police and what she and they might – or are perhaps even likely – to do with it.

As Monbiot has pointed out, proposed police powers would include being able to ban anyone from protesting who has previously committed “protest-related offences” or who has even “contributed” to a protest “likely to cause serious disruption”.  If you thought “serious disruption” counted only as sitting on a tube train roof or gluing your face to the M25, consider the breadth of the remit.  If a protest is simply noisy enough to cause “serious unease” it could be banned.  But it is entirely up to officers’ discretion as to how many decibels this might entail and ignores the fact that creating some noise is often half the modus operandi of many given demonstrations.

Other, just as worrying, and imbedded ambiguities remain.  Associating with particular individuals or using the internet to encourage a “protest-related offence” for instance.  And police could effectively impose any restrictions they like on a protest and ban static demonstrations altogether.  Other sweeping statements include mandates against causing “serious disruption to the life of a community” and “serious disruption to the activities of an organisation”.  Stop and search powers could be used without given reason and the legislation as a whole would put many more protestors at risk of arrest.

The problems with this go beyond simply an attack on our rights, as disturbing as this may be.  The Bill would undermine the relationship between police and the public and frequently place impossible choices in the hands of those officers trying to do the right thing.  Relaxing of conditions for stop and search would undoubtably impact even more heavily on ethnic groups and curtailment of protests would hinder the ‘pressure valve’ they have always historically afforded.  Pushing dissent underground and radicalising its expression even further serves no one except, perhaps, those charged with drafting even more stringent legislation in response.

Protest, not unlike the British ‘constitution’ itself has long been subject to certain, generally unclarified, understandings.  Like those of the constitution, these understandings have always been vague, have relied to a large extent on a degree of goodwill or at least the acknowledgement of their likely popularity at large.  But equally, protests have traditionally very often entailed policing costs and a degree of disruption.  To argue otherwise is to endorse their restriction to a saccharine enfeeblement that many charged with managing them would undoubtedly welcome.  There’s always been an element of metaphorical push and shove. 

Given that protestors are often driven by the scale and immediacy of planetary crisis, it’s understandable some of them resort to disruption in the face of apparent media indifference.  But while it is true that (as Digital Rebellion have stated), activism can fill gaps in public awareness left by the press, strategies as to how to bring that public awareness on board are ignored at collective peril.  Though the need for greater traction and swifter change at large is sorely needed, no one should underestimate the extent to which people in general grasp the scale and import of the climate crisis.  The question is not whether we should act but how we should go forward.  And we stand to achieve far more with greater unity.

Activism can only ever be at its most instrumental when coupled with – in service to – wider civic society.  That our ecological situation is urgent, desperate is not in doubt.  It is right that people should find and utilise channels to continue to highlight this, to push for faster and greater change.  We can all lay a hand to that and there is as great a need as ever for those in a position to do so to dedicate themselves.  And mass demonstrations to urge on and hold politicians to account are needed today like never before.

Attempts by our government to clamp down on protest would negate all this.  The PCSC Bill is drafted in a way that would at best cause confusion in its implementation and in all likelihood represents a power grab that must be considered along with other proposed legislation including the Nationality and Borders Bill and ‘amendments’ to the Human Rights Act.  When concern about these laws includes even that of a former prime minister, and in quite forceful terms, the alarm bells for us all should now be ringing. 

Acclaimed film producer and long-standing peer, Lord Puttman, has studied the German descent into fascism in the ‘thirties in some detail and his leaving speech from last October, where he says that we’re in a “very bad place” and need to “wake up” is well worth the read.  With government placemen increasingly embedded in the hearts of our institutions, with broadcasters cautious and cowed and dissent barely more than a whisper, if it were judged alone by bulletins and headlines, it’s more important than ever we stand firm.  For all the fear of diatribes, understandable caution over an undue alarm, the biggest threat we face remains that insulant complacency that clings to the assumption it could never happen here.

Please consider emailing your MP about the Bill and signing this petition.

Twenty Years On

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

This January marks the twenty year marker since thousands of people from all round the country converged on the Hampshire, Berkshire border for an often gruelling campaign against the Newbury Bypass in particular and new roads in Britain in general. It’s a familiar story by now, or at least ought to be; what can happen when people come together to protest, of how far both sides are prepared to go when a line has been drawn in the sand, of the hope and bitterness, of the inspiration and grinding attrition of states of muted and mutual conflict.

It had gathered a sense of near inevitability by that point; the culmination of years of campaigning and of the desire to push through what was then one of the biggest road building programmes in the UK’s history. There is much you can say, looking back. Certainly the timeliness of doing so probably speaks for itself, with the latest resurgent road building programme; everything that was fought for stands in peril once again; the landscapes and the hope for a manouvre away from ongoing car culture and all its implications for the climate.

That can be banged on about indefinitely and there’s clearly scope and a case for doing so while we are faced with such retrogressive policies. But, if that case ever seems predictable or reductionist, there’s a lot to be said for that time that was about more than simply a battle with the state. If we came to protest, we also came from an instinct simply to gather itself; to live on the land among like minded people and to find as we did a sense of a very real kinship. We came to escape urban life, to make the most of a chance just to live as a people, back in a place we could truly call home.

It was one of the defining, and sometimes tragic, aspects of the time then that people who felt so keenly connected with nature answered their heart’s calling to put themselves right at the front, to fight against and witness what was being done to this country for the sake of apparently insatiable demands for burgeoning infrastructure. Evictions, ongoing actions and more traditional forms of protest all both inspired and took their toll and there are many I know who, while they’d never have had it be another way, left sufficiently scarred just to want to move on.

At the same time, many felt moved to join ongoing movements; against genetic modification, against global free trade and all its repercussions, seeking to cut off the head of the beast rather than fight piece by piece the tentacles each new road represented. At times, along with many more, I’ve sought a return to those kind of days. And they certainly hold a currency of experience and example for anyone protesting now; against new roads or fracking or dubious nuclear deals.

But, while it might sound naïve, there’s a sense too that these protests shouldn’t really be necessary at all. There’s a sense that people shouldn’t have to put their lives and health on the line due to the culpability of governments. That direct action is still a necessary stopgap when official policy seems out of kilter (at best) if not an example of the very worst a state can do (and in this sense the ongoing campaign against fracking couldn’t be more important), there’s also a feeling at times that there is potentially a wider game; that of the potential for mass behavioural change, for the catalysts of a newfound environmental consciousness that need not be necessarily allied to protest overall. Though when lobbyists and corporations still threaten so much, the role of protestors is clearly as needed as ever.

But for my part at least, direct action is no longer an option. The stress of evictions, the minimal food and grinding months of attrition all conspired to mean that activism is a thing I cannot now repeat. And many more find that frontline campaigning can still be too emotionally and psychologically fraught. But while protest is currently crucial, we can remember too that wider stories can persist; of waking up, of how we lead our lives, of how we see to and relate to the world, of what it can feel like to live close to the earth, whether as part of creation or something more immediate; to see her as the relation she is, not some tableau of resources for the taking.

Environmental responsibility starts with every one of us, removed from any sense of ‘us or them’. It can help spark campaigns but can also fuel another sense; what it means to live well and as lightly as we can. Remembering stories can light up our times, but history more often bears echoes of itself rather than perpetuating more exact repetition. People can learn from what happened at Newbury but I also do not doubt that they can be every bit as imaginative and pioneering as anyone involved in the nineties. Ideally there should be no need for division down partisan lines, just as surely as we all have to see our way beyond the machinations of the poorer aspects of the modern world.

Inspiration can take root in many forms. Perhaps what’s needed more than ever is the currency of enabling greater benevolent change, of how a people can be when we hear the call of our hearts as well as that of the planet. In truth of course there’s never really been a separation – the lie that there has been has helped shape so much of our world. Remembering this unity is perhaps the most important, and still urgent, task that we face.

Over the Tarmac: the Spring

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

If you had to a state a point where the government bid a final farewell to any green credentials, it arguably came with the budgetary autumn review way back in 2011. The 45 road schemes laid out back then have been augmented since by another 150 so that now we seem to be facing a road building programme on a par with the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ schemes of the early nineteen nineties. Those schemes characterised in so many ways the last Conservative government just as the protests against them were symptomatic of wider dissent.

Of the roads planned today, 42 are pretty much direct revivals of those proposed in the ‘nineties and form part of a picture comprised of 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 ring roads with another 60 more minor projects. The whole programme is being estimated at costing around £30 billion. If the figures for the roads built in the previous decade and a half are anything to go by, we can expect a fairly substantial overrun of these early financial projections.

Taken together the roads would affect National Parks, the Norfolk Broads, Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and several World Heritage Sites. They also of course represent a dramatic sea change in transport policy from on high with aspirations to curb car use and promote public transport looking more than a little forlorn. And with road transport emissions accounting for well in advance of twenty percent of UK carbon emissions, the policy effectively scuppers one of the more malleable means by which we can effectively rein these in.

It’s more than a little ironic that vast amounts of cash are being pumped into new infrastructure at a time of austerity so caustic that the upkeep of existing roads is being jeopardized. As a means of funding new roads, the government are looking at schemes such as public-private partnership deals whereby future taxpayers are often lumped with the ‘hidden tolls’ for roads under construction today. But there is still a huge immediate pricetag being picked up by central and local government.

But resistance to all this is growing, most notably with the groups affiliated with the Campaign For Better Transport’s ‘Roads to Nowhere’ campaign. And particularly vigorous protests have been taking place at Combe Haven Valley in opposition to the Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. Earmarked by the DfT themselves as “one of the worst value for money schemes in Britain,” the road’s route has been the scene of incredible acts of front and tenacity as trees have been occupied, camps set up, the less than proverbial bulldozers stopped in their tracks and work effectively delayed for many weeks.

At the time of writing, the DfT have not yet confirmed they will fund their allotted share of the scheme – some £56 million out of a total already spiraling above the £100 million mark. East Sussex County Council are forecast to spend a projected £70 million on the road at a time when it is making wider cuts of the same amount that stand to leave adult social care and children’s services particularly badly hit.

Somehow though, to see the camps spring up, to witness the energy of those making a stand and the sense of release in the process, there seems more in the air than simply a fight against old-school and deviant infrastructure. To go to Combe Haven and see the people in the oaks, to see and hear the pristine valley in the last few days before it’s due to be severed in two, the struggle seems iconic of so many other situations in the wider world. At a time of unprecedented ecological loss, the fact that here in the UK we are losing our ancient woodland at a rate even faster than that impacting the Amazon, any attacks on existing woodland should be more widely recognised for the carnage they really are. And at a time when the government seems deposed to outdo all previous levels of contempt they seem to hold large segments of the population in, there’s something that feels particularly fitting in people staking a common claim in the ground that’s due for destruction and stating enough is enough.

The gruelling conditions on site at Hasting over the previous few months are testament that none of this is necessarily easy. But the rewards for those engaged are clearly evident to see, even in the grip of bitter winter; the knowledge that when people act together there’s a very firm hope for turning round situations that might otherwise prove intractable. But just as the protests of the nineties took years to reach their final culmination, Hastings is just the first major manifestation of the kind of outcry that needs to be taken up more widely if the hydra-like heads of these hundreds of schemes stand any chance of being properly defeated.

This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the Transition Free Press.