Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25
Campaigners receive longest ever sentences for non-violent protest after being convicted of conspiracy to cause public nuisance
โI 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.โ
Don't you get it? There's no more fucking time to fuck around. Earth will be uninhabitable for humans if we continue the course.
Earth will be uninhabitable for humans if we continue the course.
Lol, that'll show us!
Ah shit.
What do you mean turn people against the cause?
Like you think people will be like, yeah to spite these people imma start burning coal for fun. Like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Because playing nice has worked so well so far, right?
The sentences are 5 years in one case and 4 in the others.
Seems like a bit much to me.
Our prisons are designed for revenge and punishment not just to those going to prison, but to have a terrifying affect on others.
So ironically, the use of 5 years prison time is the real terrorism, in the literal sense of trying to make people terrified of protesting and of putting someone in a cage for 5 years.
Yeah 4-5 years too much.
Passing sentence on each of the defendants at Southwark crown court, the judge Christopher Hehir said: โThe offending of all five of you is very serious indeed and lengthy custodial sentences must follow.โ
Hehir admitted there was a scientific and social consensus that human-made climate breakdown was happening and action should be taken to avert it. โI acknowledge that at least some of the concerns motivating you are, at least to some extent, shared by many,โ he said.
โBut 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 the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law.
โAnd your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.โ
Fuck everything about this judge.
How are they harming their fellow citizens? They planned a peaceful protest. Maybe someone else can find where they caused an issue bc I can't.
They planned a peaceful protest
No they didn't. They planned to shut the M25, one of the busiest motorways in the UK. Shutting that would force traffic onto all the roads around it, progressively gridlocking the entire south-east and causing misery for at least tens of thousands of people, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ran into six figures.
There's nothing peaceful about a massive DoS attack on the nation's infrastructure.
BTW before you bleat about protest being banned in the UK, no it isn't. Peaceful non-disruptive protest is enshrined in law and everyone has the right to protest about anything they want. What protesters don't have the right to do is disrupt the lives of those around them or to try to force the nation to capitulate to their demands by holding the country to hostage, which is exactly what those JSO wankers are trying to do, and is why they are so hated by so many people in this country.
JSO's message may well be 100% correct. It's not the message that's the problem, it's trying to force it down everyone's throats. You know how much you hate vegans and evangelical Christians? Well JSO is both of them put together on steroids.
Peaceful non-disruptive protest is enshrined in law and everyone has the right to protest about anything they want.
Name a protest that is non-disruptive and worked. Also giving someone a jail term bc they might cause a problem with a protest is not a valid point.
The planning part makes this suspect for sure.
But there are ways to peacefully protest without blocking a fuckin highway. People that do this should be slapped. I think they do more harm to their movement than a myriad of other options that donโt involve them pissing off everyone just trying to go about their lives.
There are people who would otherwise support their cause that are negatively affected by dumb decisions like this. While I donโt agree with the sentencing for planning a dipshit move like this, these people should consider better ways to make a statement.
This kind of disruption is exactly what climate change is doing - negativity affecting people just trying to go about their lives and make ends meet. Dumb decisions are being made which causes people with no choice in the matter to suffer.
The question is - why are you angry when poor people do it (on a limited scale, for a few hours) but not angry when rich & powerful people do it (to everyone, forever)?
That's the genius of this kind of protest. Clearly too genius for some, tho.
The media and people in general ignore non-disruptive protest. When protesting pollution, bringing motor vehicles to a halt is arguably a pretty good choice compared to, say, the stone henge (which I don't have a problem with either). Whether the optics are good is debatable. The media is mostly corporate owned, and they'll try to make any protest that goes against their interests look bad anyways. Which is probably why they only cover disruptive protests.
There are people who would otherwise support their cause that are negatively affected by dumb decisions like this
(Y) doubt.
The sort of people that wring their hands at leftists peacefully protesting are the same people whose hearts bleed for people who commit hate crimes or vote to dismantle human rights. They're either deliberately trolling or they are victims of propaganda with no ideological object permanence. Either way, you can't convince them by meeting their terms. The troll or the propaganda will move the goalposts, the centrists will follow, and it will be like you never did anything.
Everyone can empathize with people driven to crime because of how deeply they feel the current politics has it wrong. What differs is who people choose to extend that empathy to. If you don't empathize with the left, nothing you hear about them on the news you currently watch will change that. Everything will appear to have bad vibes.
As for the literal effect of blocking a highway for an hour - it causes fewer delays for cars on the M25 than one week of Tory public transit policy. The better public transit, the fewer people need cars, the fewer traffic jams. If such delays are truly unacceptable to you, you should find any candidate that isn't radical left revolting.
Wait, for planning? Is this pre-crime?
Get your sick sticks ready
You should not get a prison sentence for "planning" something unless it's terrorism or another act of extreme violence. I.e. the guy who was just jailed for planning to kidnap, rape, and murder Holly Willoughby.
Arresting people for planning a nonviolent protest is authoritarian behaviour.
This is the UK, land of the GCHQ (same as the NSA, but worse, and when the Snowden revelations brought up what they were doing, it was simply made legal, unlike in the US), the most video surveillance cameras per person in the World, were they've been using techniques such as kettling of demonstrations for years and were the police were early adopters of AI face recognition cameras.
That place is hugelly authoritarian, they're just posh about it and their use of violence against normal people tends to hide behind "rules and regulations" unlike cruder nations were the cops just shoot them.
longest ever sentences for non-violent protest
For planning non-violent protest. They didn't even fucking commit "public nuisance."
Just to be clear, you get a shorter sentence here for beating the absolute shit out of people. Rapists have been given less time. You could do the exact same thing but Vladimir you did it because god hates gay people or whatever and barely spend a day in prison.
They were given those sentences because these protests are working. So, the fossil fuel lobby's plan is to make the human cost of it not worth doing.
Yes, they really are that cartoonishly villainous.
A rightful punishment for us being mildly inconvenienced and billionaires losing a couple of dollars that day.
Mildly inconvenienced, you say? I bring my pitchforks and torches even for people making sense on a platform I don't even visit regularly. How dare they even think of or plan for mildly inconveniencing me?
News of the sentencing reached the public broadcaster here in Estonia, including Dale Vince's comment that "this resembles Russia or maybe North Korea" and Chris Packham's assessment that "this is a threat against freedom of speech".
I hope the judgement gets overturned on appeal, and the law that enabled the judgement gets scrapped or rewritten.
I also suspect that the next people who want to stop traffic will not choose peaceful assembly as their method, but will use far more dangerous methods - sabotage from distance, e.g. no more traffic lights on a big intersection. Needless to say, state will cry "terrorism" then, and that is not a desirable outcome, so I hope nobody feels compelled to prove the point.
In these difficult times this is awful and depressing news :(
Outrageous!
Does King Charles have pardon powers?
The thing about the UK system is that the King might nominally do something, but what he does is entirely decided by the cabinet. There are a handful of residual powers (eg: interfering with the timing of Canadian elections) but that's pretty much it.
How do appeals work in the UK?
Facing the end of the world is neither here or there
Said the judge. I wonder if heโll remember his words in a few decades when itโs the end of the world?
โI acknowledge that at least some of the concerns motivating you are, at least to some extent, shared by many,โ he said.
โBut 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 the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law.
โAnd your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.โ
A quote from someone who will probably die long before we see the worst effects of climate change.
Whoever (judge or whichever other position) said that should have considered the personal risk these people took in order to take an action many others would benefit but also shy away from. Especially considering that the ones responsible to reflect the wishes of the people and benefit of the people have given themselves all the exceptions that will protect them from not doing their duty.
