The Full Force of the Law: Protest and Repression on a Scorched Earth

At 3:45am on 17 October, 2022, a lone car approached the Dartford Crossing from the north and slowed to a standstill at the middle of the bridge. Two men, wearing backpacks, waterproofs and woolly hats, got out of the car and jumped over a hip-high fence between the road and the bridge towers. The taller man clipped his climbing harness to the bridge while his partner, checking for oncoming vehicles, ran across the three empty lanes and did the same on the other side. Both men then swung onto the suspension cables, secured their ropes, and slowly shuffled up to a height of sixty metres.

After a three-hour ascent, they left the relative stability of the cables and hung in mid-air, throwing each other a network of lines with which to secure themselves and the load they had carried up. The man on the eastern side of the bridge took a bundle out of his backpack, passed it by ‘washing line’ to his partner and they jointly hoisted a banner. At first the message was partly obscured by a stubborn piece of masking tape, but the wind rushed in to dislodge it and the canvas unfurled to read ‘JUST STOP OIL’. At midday, having fastened the banner to the bridge’s central towers, the men finally climbed into the hammocks they had brought and waited for the helicopter camera crews to arrive.

A little more than a year later, I visited HMP Highpoint, where Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland were serving what were then the UK’s longest ever sentences for peaceful climate protest at two years and seven months and three years, respectively. I had met Marcus before he went to prison and knew he was committed to the cause: he had been arrested several times and frequently spent the night in his hammock to protect trees condemned by insurance claims or property developments. But he had never tried anything like this. This time, he said, ‘it felt like a really serious thing’. When I recognised Marcus in the news reports from the Dartford Crossing, his serene face framed by outraged headlines, my first thought was how brave this was; my second was, will it make a difference?

The Dartford Crossing action was part of an escalation by Extinction Rebellion (XR) offshoots Just Stop Oil (JSO) and Insulate Britain to recapture the momentum lost during the pandemic lockdowns and to keep climate change on a political agenda preoccupied with economic recovery. Covid-19 briefly created conditions in which both the global cooperation and popular support required to avert ecological cataclysm might have been built. Concerted state action, public education and behaviour change, the flourishing of mutual aid, the (fleeting) appreciation of socially important work and, tragically, the experience of mass death: all apt lessons for a world facing the existential threats of climate and ecological breakdown. Lessons that challenge the sacred logic of capital augmentation and lessons that therefore remain unlearned.

As hopeful calls to ‘build back better’ receded and the oppressive machinery of business as usual cranked back into action, there was a surge of popular protest. JSO’s civil disobedience coincided with the sudden appearance of thousands-strong Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the police murder of George Floyd, and an increase in labour militancy responding to the egregious treatment of workers during the pandemic. The government answered with a legislative backlash comprising the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023 and the Minimum Service Levels Act 2023.

Marcus and Morgan were charged with public nuisance under the PCSC Act. They expected a custodial sentence, but their heavy-handed treatment took them, and many others, by surprise. Denied bail, they joined record numbers languishing in overcrowded prisons. After seven months on remand, they were found guilty by a jury in Basildon, a short drive from the Dartford Crossing. On the morning of the sentencing, JSO lawyers were optimistic that the time already served would suffice, asking Marcus: ‘should we get you out of here today?’

Instead, he was moved to Highpoint in Suffolk. At the visitors’ centre, I emptied my pockets and queued in the waning afternoon sun with a group of mothers, partners, and children, waiting to be patted down and inspected by a sniffer dog. Marcus sat at a low plastic table, immediately recognisable by his long dark hair, beard, and grin. Each table bore a laminated list of rules, starting with ‘no excessive or prolonged physical contact’. Marcus was upbeat, having heard about the acquittal of the ‘HSBC 9’, a group of nine XR protestors that broke the bank’s windows to protest its fossil fuel investments. He reflected that the jury in inner-London Southwark was likely to be more sympathetic than his jury in Tory Basildon, but the choice of target was surely significant too.

The Dartford Crossing action partially closed a major artery around London for forty hours, causing an average delay of six minutes and six seconds per driver, according to the judgement, albeit considerably longer for some. Judge Shane Collery KC explained the unprecedented sentences to the defendants: ‘You have to be punished both for the chaos you caused and to deter others from seeking to copy you in the next protest.’ Marcus said the sentence ‘felt like an extreme breakdown of democracy … You can only be accountable if dissent is allowed, and silencing that dissent makes the world a little bit darker.’

The pair’s appeal was blocked by a panel that included environmental lawyer Justine Thornton who happens to be married to Ed Miliband, now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Marcus was released in February 2024 but is now on immigration bail: a German citizen previously with leave to remain, he is appealing a deportation order which would separate him from his partner and her children. He wears an electronic ankle tag that requires charging for ninety minutes a day, during which time he is attached to a wall socket. After a spate of acquittals by sympathetic juries, judges have made some forms of evidence – like the small matter of the earth-boiling effects of our fossil-based economy – inadmissible. In July 2024, five JSO activists were tried for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance that blocked the M25. Four of the five defended themselves, repeatedly ignoring instructions not to mention the climate and ultimately being dragged by police from the courtroom. The jury took just a day to unanimously find them guilty. Roger Hallam, one of the defendants and co-founder of XR and JSO, was sentenced to five years; the others received four years (these were recently reduced slightly on appeal). Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, attended the trial, calling the result ‘a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest’.

Instigated by an ailing government in the throes of a legitimacy crisis, these developments have been clapped along by a right-wing media branding protestors as ‘eco-loons’ and ‘fanatics’. Grasping for the nationalist truncheon usually reserved for racialised others, the Daily Mail called Marcus and Morgan (originally from New Zealand) part of ‘JSO’s Foreign Legion’. Class identity is more plausibly weaponised, with the tabloid press relishing in the double-barrelled names and private education of some climate activists and the Spectator declaring ‘eco-loonyism … an upper-middle-class rite of passage’. Journalists, many with their own double-barrels and elite schooling, indulge in a kind of fetishisation of the humble commuter against whom they gleefully cast these spoilt activists.

This to-and-fro between state, courtroom and media reinforces an upside-down common sense, in which blocking a road or spraying a building is extreme, while burning a planet is not. Those who cannot rouse themselves over the loss of entire species were suddenly incensed by the threat of JSO’s cornflour paint to rare lichens in a recent action at Stonehenge. The monument, secured in concrete since 1964 and cherished by hippies, neo-pagans and counter-cultural fellow travellers, was immediately reclaimed as a nationalist symbol desecrated by the ‘eco-mob’. The lichens themselves will of course frazzle in the heat of global warming. Sunak and Starmer raced to condemn the group with a vigour they could not muster for the Israeli perpetrators of genocide in Gaza. Starmer, so squeamish about the prospect of an ICC arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that JSO should ‘feel the full force of the law’. David Lammy scolded both climate and Palestine solidarity activists that he favoured ‘change through power, not protest’, but anyone hoping that a Labour government would break with Tory authoritarianism has been roundly disabused.

A week into the new Labour government, Youth Demand, a JSO offshoot focusing on Palestine, chalked next to the cenotaph the staggering number (180,000) that the Lancet estimates could be the real death toll in Gaza. The veterans minister condemned the action as ‘abhorrent’: a war memorial was no place to remind us of the unjust death in our midst. The gradual red-pilling of the mainstream climate movement has prompted promising cross-fertilisation with struggles against other capital-authored injustices. The state has observed this exchange with alarm: John Woodcock, the government’s ‘extremism tzar’ warns that protest launched from the ‘far-left subculture’ is a threat to democracy, as if such action was not itself a symptom of democratic desiccation. Insisting on the inalienable rights of councils to invest in fossil fuels and of arms manufacturers to equip a genocidal army, Woodcock demands that lawmakers ‘reject the idea that there are causes so important the end justifies the illegal means’.

The extremism discourse used to denigrate those who challenge the status quo inevitably spills back onto the street. Climate protestors have been hauled out of roads and rammed with cars. A video of someone shooting fireworks at Marcus and Morgan as they dangled in the dark above the Thames went viral: the comment sections were full of calls to ‘shoot them down’. After far-right former Home Secretary Suella Braverman described pro-Palestine protests as ‘hate marches’, a retinue of genocide apologists lined up to declare central London a no-go zone for Jews on demonstration days. Meanwhile, those expressing solidarity with Palestinians – many of us Jews ourselves – have endured racist and antisemitic abuse and physical intimidation from a deranged alliance of Zionist and white nationalist counter-protestors.

What now? How should we turn the renewed energy of the Palestinian solidarity movement, the osmosis between struggles and the outrage at ruling-class repression into a sustained answer to the crises of late capitalism? Cracks have already appeared: on Gaza, these have been all too gradual, but the mass mobilisations undoubtedly shifted UK policy, precipitating (qualified) calls for a ceasefire and undermining Labour’s sandcastle majority in the 2024 election. The climate protests of 2018-2020 inarguably heightened public awareness and forced a political response; Labour has pledged to end North Sea oil and gas licensing – JSO’s original demand.

The radical flank of the climate movement continues to court arrest with disruptive and spectacular actions, adhering to the logic that Suffragettes and civil rights activists were unpopular in their time. As Marcus remarks, ‘no one needs to like Just Stop Oil’. But neither JSO nor its mainstream counterparts have achieved the scale or regularity of mass participation that we have seen for Gaza. This surely reflects the sheer horror of livestreamed atrocity, the visibility and brazenness of its perpetrators, and the palpable complicity of our own leaders. A pro-Palestinian activist using an ongoing genocide to defend their actions against an Israeli arms manufacturer is, in this moment, more viscerally sympathetic than a climate activist pointing to the floods in Pakistan while they block the M25 (although both defences are now legally inadmissible).

Marcus insists that the motorway is a key site of harm, although he accepts that the disruption is felt by people driving to work, hospital appointments and funerals – the subject of many a talk show phone-in. In How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm exhorts the climate movement to substitute what he sees as self-defeating actions of public inconvenience for sabotage of corporate property. Marcus points out that in April 2022 JSO did target fossil fuel infrastructure over several weeks that saw protestors occupy oil terminals, lock themselves to tankers and drill into tyres. Despite leading to hundreds of arrests, the action was relatively under-reported.

Perhaps more instructive, for those considering Malm’s manifesto, is the response of a state in lockstep with oil interests: high court injunctions swiftly banned protest at key nodes in the oil distribution network and actions such as ‘locking on’ were promptly transposed into new offences. Confronted with the mind-boggling intransigence of those barrelling towards mass extinction, the moral rationale of Malm’s call to arms is clear, but the suggestion that such action would compel states to urgently decarbonise seems less assured. The escalation of protest tactics would be met with further repression: intensified surveillance, longer prison sentences, limits to legal defence.

As I spoke to Marcus about his inventive strategies to escape the twenty-three hours a day that most prisoners spend in their cells – his work on the gardening team; a choir project; voluntary attendance at religious services – it was clear that his was not the typical prison experience. Nonetheless, the monotony of confinement, the proximity to violence, and the helplessness in the face of fellow prisoners’ crises were hard to bear. The separation from his partner, and now the prospect of deportation, have taken a toll on his family. With judges now zealously meting out multi-year sentences, how many others will pay this price?

Alongside, and often in service to, the formidable foe of fossil capital, the Left must confront an ascendant far-right. Co-opting the real and increasingly pervasive experience of insecurity and atomisation, it scoffs at the supposed ‘degrowth austerity’ of climate action and invokes a threat to such degraded symbols of liberty as the fossil-fuelled commute. It casts the convivial struggles for racial, Palestinian and trans justice against traditional national values. Mobilising this decade’s preferred discursive mode – the culture war – it promises to restore past privileges predicated on race and citizenship. Neutralising the revanchist appeal of the far-right requires taking popular understandings seriously. Street movements are crucial, but they are not enough, and their momentum will wane without deeper modes of organisation. Incipient collaboration across movements is heartening, but these must be reinforced by activity at the workplace and community level. Given the urgency of the crises, the need to organise ‘in and against the state’ seems inescapable. In the years ahead, we can expect the full heft of the fossil machine to be thrown at these struggles and the alliances that are surely needed to take it on. The exact constellation of strategies is not yet clear, but the future depends on us working it out.

Rebekah Diski is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick and a teaching fellow at SOAS. She mainly writes and worries about labour and ecological breakdown, and the prospects for an eco-socialist future.