In the early hours of October 17th last year, two environmental protesters in climbing gear arrived at the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, Kent. One was Marcus Decker, the partner of Holly Cullen-Davies. “He knew what was going to happen,” she says.
The Dartford M25 motorway crossing spans the river Thames east of London and is one of Britain’s most critical pieces of road infrastructure. Decker and Morgan Trowland shimmied a few hundred feet up its cables and unfurled a banner for the Just Stop Oil climate change protest group. As they swayed on hammocks in the wind, police shut the road below.
It crippled one of London’s main traffic arteries for 40 hours, causing chaos. The protesters were met with government and public fury. They conducted a series of highwire media interviews from their perch about climate change and the need to ban new oil and gas licences, before climbing down. They were arrested and charged with causing a public nuisance.
In April this year, Decker and Trowland were hit with possibly the toughest punishments ever handed down in British legal history for non-violent protest. Decker got two years and seven months in prison while Trowland got three years, longer than the average for a violent assault.
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Their punishments shocked environmental and civil liberties campaigners, who have accused the UK government of an authoritarian clampdown with a series of toughm new anti-protest laws. Even the United Nations has criticised the broader legal crackdown.
Hundreds of climate protesters, mostly from Just Stop Oil’s high-profile campaigns, are now arrested each month. Yet the Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who has rowed back on green policies in a gamble to woo voters, is unapologetic for cracking down on “selfish” campaigners. Climate issues have been sucked into Britain’s relentless culture wars.
On top of his imprisonment, Britain’s government said it also planned to deport Decker, a German national, upon his release. That would separate him from Cullen-Davies, who lives in London with her two children from a past relationship. Deportation is, she sa
ys, the worst part of his punishment.
“What we didn’t know – what nobody advised us on correctly on – was that if he got a sentence of more than one year, they could get a deportation order,” says Cullen-Davies, nursing a cup of tea in a cafe near her Tottenham home.
“We’d talked about the possibility of Marcus being a political prisoner for a period of time. We’d agreed it might be something that was necessary, and therefore I was prepared to support it. [But] he says now that if he had known about the deportation, he wouldn’t have done it.”
Decker, an experienced environmental protester, and Cullen-Davies, a pianist and music teacher, met early in the Covid pandemic during lockdown. After years of worrying about climate change, she contacted campaigners offering to train activists to use music in their protests. She was paired up to give lessons with Decker, who planned similar lessons, and they “courted” over Zoom before starting a relationship. He grew close to her children, “singing them to sleep at night”.
Now Decker is locked up in Highpoint South prison in Suffolk, a round trip of over 100 miles from Cullen-Davies’ home. She doesn’t drive and must rely on lifts to see him, a full-day excursion. “It’s a nightmare,” she says.
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Just Stop Oil was founded in February 2022 with the aim of forcing the UK government to stop issuing new oil or gas drilling or exploration licences. In effect, it wants Britain to wind down hydrocarbon activity in the North Sea, which generates up to £11 billion (€12.9 billion) for the state each year. It warns that extracting new oil and gas will cause further damage to the environment. Its critics say carbon fuels will still be needed for years to come as the world transitions to renewable energy.
The group’s first action in April 2022 saw protesters block access to several big oil terminals across Britain. Cullen-Davies was among those arrested. The action, she says, directly targeted the “system” but generated comparatively little media and public interest.
Their strongest weapon of fear becomes irrelevant to you, and that can make you feel kind of indestructible
— Just Stop Oil co-founder Indigio Rumbelow
“I spent hours in a police cell and many more hours in court, but it got no attention. That’s the only hope really – that what we do gets in the media,” she says. She hopes that media coverage will amplify the group’s climate change message.
After the oil terminals, Just Stop Oil focused instead on protests that the British public couldn’t ignore. It has gained notoriety for disrupting sports events, such as Formula 1 races and the UK Masters snooker tournament, where a protester stopped play by dousing the table in orange powder. The group sprayed orange paint on buildings such as the Harrods store, the Bank of England and the headquarters of MI5. Just Stop Oil’s activists also glued themselves to well-known paintings and, infamously, threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s masterpiece, Sunflowers, in the National Gallery.
After a campaign last year targeting road bridges, such as Decker’s M25 protest, in 2023 Just Stop Oil focused more on disrupting traffic in central London. Its regular “slow marches” on busy streets have infuriated much of Britain’s press and made it the target of public opprobrium.
The Conservative government has responded with tough new laws giving the government and the police greater powers to clamp down on protests. A new Public Order Act was rushed in on the eve of the coronation in May of King Charles, over fears that the procession would be disrupted.
Police now arrest Just Stop Oil protesters the minute they step off the pavement and block a public road. About 630 of its activists were picked up in London across the five-week period to the end of last month. Roughly half were charged. Penalties have been stiffened from fines to potential prison sentences. The UN says some of the new laws are neither “necessary nor proportionate”.
David Nixon has been arrested scores of times for protesting with Just Stop Oil and, before that, Insulate Britain, a climate action campaign group that also blocked roads. We meet in London’s Trafalgar Square on a Friday afternoon at the end of November, as Just Stop Oil protesters assemble outside the National Gallery to march down Whitehall towards parliament.
Nixon had already been arrested and bailed three times that week for protesting on the streets. An activist who quit his job as a carer to protest full-time, he is blasé as he prepares for his fourth arrest. Nixon, too, knows what is about to happen.
“I’m relaxed about it, but I’m not relaxed about climate change,” he says. “I used to work with children but I realised they would have no future unless we do something about climate breakdown. But it’s farcical now – you’re on the road for 10 seconds and you get arrested.”
When it is put to him that if he wasn’t arrested immediately, he would simply stay on the road for as long as possible, Nixon simply shrugs: “I’m not bothered either way. We both know they just want to scupper protest.”
All eyes in Europe are watching the UK with its laws cracking down on protests. Britain is setting an unfortunate trend
— Naturalist, campaigner and broadcaster Chris Packham
As the designated time for the march approaches, police vans line up on both sides of the square and at least 30 officers suddenly appear among the crowds. As his colleagues unfurl a Just Stop Oil banner, Nixon is approached by a police liaison officer who politely asks him if he plans to step on to the road. Politely, he declines to co-operate with her.
The small march – seven or eight Just Stop Oil protesters observed by a larger group of photographers and police – gets ready to move towards parliament. An activist pushes a speaker in a shopping trolley at the rear of the posse. He plays the funeral march as they set off down Whitehall together.
The officers get twitchy as Nixon and his colleagues approach the path at the entrance to Downing Street and near the first World War Cenotaph, where, weeks earlier, far-right protesters disrupted Remembrance Day. Nixon and his colleagues cross Whitehall at the pedestrian crossing, before finally stepping on to the street at the entrance to Parliament Square.
He is immediately arrested and carried off the street in a “dead man’s” limp pose. The shopping trolley activist serenades bewildered tourists in the shadow of Big Ben with Have You Been to Jail for Justice, the protest song by Anne Feeney.
Aged in her late 20s, Indigo Rumbelow is Just Stop Oil’s co-founder and among its highest-profile activists. We arranged to speak one week recently about the prospect of meeting up, but for days she proved hard to contact. It turned out she was in custody after getting arrested for protesting outside Sunak’s London home. How many times is that now?
“I think that is my 18th arrest,” she says, over coffee days later in the Barbican theatre lobby just north of central London.
At one of Nixon’s earlier trials for Insulate Britain, he was warned by the judge not to cite climate change to the jury as his reason for blocking a road. He did so anyway and was sentenced to eight weeks for contempt of court. Another activist, Trudi Warner, then held up a sign at the jury’s entrance to the court reminding them that they were entitled under the law to acquit any protester. She was arrested too. The following week, Rumbelow and about 20 others did the same.
“We sat peacefully in the sun for an hour and then someone came out and took photos of us,” she says. A few weeks later, police raided her home and arrested her. She used to worry about the ramifications of all her legal issues, but no longer.
“You can find a real peace in it. They can throw the book at you and you can move through it. Their strongest weapon of fear becomes irrelevant to you, and that can make you feel kind of indestructible.”
Rumbelow admits there is a “gamble” with protest actions, such as repeatedly getting arrested. It comes in the law of diminishing returns, which forces the group to constantly switch its tactics to make sure its message continues to land.
“It only works if people stand up [for the cause]. Otherwise it’s like: how low can it go?”
She says the group’s headline-grabbing spectaculars, such as sitting on the track at a Formula One race, are important: “But they’re never important forever. Tactics need to evolve, stay fresh. We need to keep it coming.”
Rumbelow suggests that the arrest at Sunak’s house may be a harbinger of a fresh change in tactics that is due to come after Christmas: “We’ve never visited people’s houses before. But now we will bring protests to individuals who we find accountable – you’ll see a lot more of that. In a few weeks I’d be better-placed to speak openly about it – there are good plans developing. I’m part of a group and we make decisions, but those decisions have not been fully made yet.”
Naturalist, campaigner and broadcaster Chris Packham is known to millions as the presenter in his youth of the Really Wild Show on television. To many, he is now Britain’s heir to David Attenborough for sounding the alarm on climate change.
You are going to see a rapid cascade of change in public opinion about what we need to do to fight climate change
— Chris Packham
Earlier this year, he made a documentary, Is it Time to Break the Law?, mulling whether the clear urgency of the climate crisis justified illegal action in the face of, as he sees it, government intransigence. As part of the film, he interviewed Swedish author Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
“I spoke to someone in Brussels recently and he said all eyes in Europe are watching the UK with its laws [cracking down on protests]. Britain is setting an unfortunate trend. There is attritional decay in our freedom of expression through the right to protest,” Packham says as we speak last week.
He highlights that if protest laws are tightened for climate campaigners, they are tightened for every cause. He said there is also “knock-on pressure” on the judiciary to issue tougher sentences.
“We are seeing more people being jailed and for longer. But there will always be people who don’t care about being arrested. If a government doesn’t listen to protest, then it always escalates. The way things are going at the moment, it is inevitable that something like that [somebody actually blowing up a pipeline] is going to happen.”
As long as protests don’t damage the environment or harm anyone, Packham says he supports them. But he believes a protest’s tactics should not become the story in themselves. Although he has been broadly supportive of Just Stop Oil, he wonders if some of its actions “overshadow the message”. Yet he says it is important to “have a radical flank”.
Packham has not been arrested and doesn’t sound as if he plans to be. He is, however, suing the British government for watering down its climate change policies.
“I think in the next few years, you are going to see a rapid cascade of change in public opinion about what we need to do to fight climate change. I think things will be different for protesters in future.”
Just Stop Oil’s campaign has not had the desired effect on government policy. In fact, Sunak has done the opposite of what they want and promised to step up North Sea drilling to max out the UK’s reserves. Labour has indicated it would not issue fresh licences, but also would not tear up those that had already been issued.
Back in Tottenham, Cullen-Davies believes the media spends too much time focusing on protesters’ tactics, and not enough warning the public about climate change. She has raised cash for a high-powered legal team to fight Decker’s deportation.
He is due to be released in February for good behaviour. Decker runs weekly singing classes for prisoners. “They’re showing up each week to sing Imagine and California Dreamin’,” she says.
“I’m sorry that people were disrupted by what Marcus did that day, but that’s how protest works. That’s why this article is being written. That’s why I’m on the radio this week. Disruptive actions get things in the media. Until the government listens to protests, people are going to keep on climbing bridges.”
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