Direct action is not a new idea. We've talked in previous episodes in this season about how it was used by the Suffragettes by various civil rights movements, and it's not new to climate or other environmental issues either. Probably the best known organization when it comes to these sorts
of tactics in the environmental space is green Peace. From blocking whaling boats to locking onto offshore platforms, Greenpeace activists have been putting their bodies in the way of environmental harms for decades.
Six Greenpeace activists are on trial in front of a jury at Maidstone Crown Called for causing thirty thousand pounds worth.
Of damage to the King's North Power station.
There was a very real danger, according to our lawyers, that we would go to jail.
I mean this is from a short video that was made documenting an action in the UK in two thousand and eight. But when they got their day in court, the activists made a novel argument.
They argued their actions were justified because they were trying to highlight the dangers of climate change.
There was a lawful excuse that the harm we caused by the damage of painting was insignificant compared with the emissions from Kings North for that one day.
Alone, and the moments when the jury became most engaged was when the witnesses, the defendants or the scientific witnesses were talking about the effects of climate change on our kids and on our grandchildren. As suddenly, I think it put our actions into a different context that made them look quite frankly proportionate and reasonable.
And it worked. It was the first time that what's called a climate necessity defense had worked, and it sparked lots of similar defenses all over the world.
It's verdict. We think mark's a tipping point for the climate change movement. When twelve normal people say that it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal fire power station because of the harm that it does to the planet, then one has to ask where exactly that leaves government energy call us same.
Then.
Just about a decade later, the UK government passed new laws that not only restricted what protesters could do, but also how protesters were allowed to defend themselves in court. Some judges don't apply the new laws so strictly, but others have held people in contempt for just trying to explain themselves. In some courtrooms, the climate necesspe defense has been effectively outlawed. How did that happen and how did
it happen so quickly? That's our story today. After the break, reporter Isabella Kaminski joins us from the UK with a story about the backlash against climate protest and how an obscure law from the sixteen hundreds might be activist best hope. She also wrote a piece for our website on this topic. You can find that at Drilled dot Media. I'm Ami Westervelt and this is Drilled the Real free Speech Threat.
My name is Isabella Kaminski, and I'm a freelance journalist based in the UK who specializes in environment and climate change.
So, Isabella, from your reporting and also just from kind of watching things unfold from Afar, it seems to me like there's been a pretty significant shift in the UK government's approach to protests in a fairly short amount of time. But I'm curious if that dives with what you found as well.
Yeah, so I think it's worth going back to two thousand and eight, when energy firm Ion was trying to build the UK's first new core fired power station in twenty years, and it wanted to do that at Kings North in the south of England, because there was already an old power station there and that became the follow
called focal point for climate activists at the time. And so one day that year, six Greenpeace activists climbed up one of the station's smokestacks, these these two hundred meters high chimneys, and tried to shut it down by occupying it and painting on it. So they were arrested and they had to go to court where they made this really novel argument that they had a lawful.
Excuse for what they'd done because.
The damage caused protect other people's property from the effects of climate change, and the jury acquitted them. That at the time made the New York Times' list of top influential ideas for the year. It helped the government firm its climate commitments. Later that same year, the UK passed into law the Climate Change Act. You know, you can't necessarily make a direct link, but everything's helped shift the conversation. Eon then also abandoned the plan to build more coal.
King's North was actually demolished, and the UK now generates only a tiny proportion of its actristy from coal, but a decade later, government and action on climate change was stalling.
An activist that started talking to.
Each other more and looking really intensively at how they could harness this idea of nonviolent direct action to change the conversation, and out of that, Extinction Rebellion was born.
I'm doctor Gail Bradbrook. I'm one of the co founders of Extinction Rebellion.
Before co founding Extinction Rebellion in twenty eighteen, Bradbrook had spent several years getting involved in various environmental and social justice fights. Isabella visited her at her home in Stroud, a small town in the picture as Cotswolds Hills in southern England, in the fall of twenty twenty three to get more of her story.
It was part of the Animal Riots group at university. I sort of got involved in green politics as well, but have to add it, you know, my dad's a coal miners from the working class background, sort of bounced off the middle class by without realizing that's what was going off for me, no disrespect.
To the people.
Eventually, Bradbrook got her PhD in malch biology. She says she found it difficult to be a working class woman in science and ultimately made her way back to social justice work, mostly working with NGOs, and it was.
Really helpful and that it helped me to learn about strategy and partnerships and fundraising and a whole cletter of like, you know, program delivery type stuff. And at the same time it makes it quite clear that you know, NGOs are generally part of the problem more than part.
Of the solution.
And then I did some cal street school economics. Is a video still a wreckicking round of that. I was trying to teach people economics on the streets because I think we're all kept ignorant eomics.
And yes, we did find that video. Here's a little bit from it. This is from twenty thirteen and bradbrook is standing in front of a bunch of handmade science. One of them reads, remember the Golden Rule. Those with the gold make the rules.
I feel really honored to share this evening with you. My concern is economic literacy. What do we know and understand about economics? And so tonight I want to do two things. Really to talk about economics, and for me, that's about showing the connection between different issues and maybe things that you already know about, like debt or inequality or you know, peak oil or whatever. But how do these things link up. That's the thing that I felt
confused about and wanted some clarity around. So I wanted to share where I've got to on that. And then the second thing is to talk about talking about economics, so you know, I really believe we can't leave economics to economists.
At this point in time, Bradbrook was working with the Tax Justice movement and participating in mass actions around wealth inequality, mostly tax strikes, and then she had an experience. It put her on the path to connecting with Roger Hallam, an organic farmer whose land had been destroyed by extreme weather. Hallam was studying for a PhD at King's College, London,
researching social change and the history of social movements. Their meeting has sort of become the stuff of legends in climate spieces.
You probably know this sort of slightly weird story of going off and praying with psychedelics. That did happen, and it was all very profound. Wasn't the first time I worked with those medicines that there was a depth there
and the prayers were answered. I met Roger Hallam. He was doing similar and different research that was complimentary, and we had this big meeting and then started gathering energy around you know, social change movement, which originally was called Compassionate Revolution rebranded Rising Up and then Xile was a campaign of that.
So is it fair to say that that was about something broader than climate?
Oh? Definitely, So it can send you the Rising Up original.
Yeah, I mean I remember reading about it that since when when did climate become the sort of the focus then?
Has it never been entirely?
No? Because for me, it's just it's all part of it. It's just it's a you know, a symptom of a wider manaise. It's not the thing. And that is such a problem in climate activism because obviously people come in and want to solve climate change and you can't solve climate change because that's not the problem.
They choose the symptom.
Bradbrough and Hallam didn't just relate to each other. They were also very compelling for a lot of young activists who were fed up with the stalled progress on climate in the UK. And initially they had some really big wins. Here's Isabella again.
So it had a huge positive impact in about sort of less than a year after the activists started having these conversations, they managed to succeed in getting thousands of people onto the streets of London in this really really unprecedented display of climate solidarity. You know, some people were arrested, but the actions also changed the public and political mood around climate change. You know, polls show that concern grew.
Parliament later declared climate emergency and the UK set its first net SERTI and that was all in the twelve months after Extinction Rebellion launch, and it also sparked further protests around the world as well, under the banner of Extinction Rebellion and through other sort of climate activist groups.
Bradbrooke said she thought that super successful first year was because Extinction Rebellion's approach was so different, not in terms of using direct action per se, but something a little more ephemeroal what I.
Believe created the success into twenty nineteen and it was limited, but we did smash in climate denial. There was a spirit that was created. It's off the right hemisphere that that's the playful side of humanity. That's the side of humanity. It's visionary and collaborative and together and believes.
In itself, but at the same time it sparked this backlash. So the same year that the government set that net zero target, a group called Policy Exchange put out a report and they called it Extreme Asm Rebellion, and that report warn that extinction rebellion was a major threat and so the government had to do something to crack down on this type of protest.
If you've been listening to this series all along, that name Policy Exchange might sound familiar. We've mentioned this organization before because it's an ATLAS Network member think tank. Here is Richard Walton, a former senior policy fellow at Policy Exchange and the lead author of the report that Isabella just mentioned, talking on a podcast shortly after the release of the report. You'll hear the host first and then Walton.
Mis Walton, thanks for coming on the show. Now. One, I may support many of their motives. I can't support the way they act. But they're not really the mafia, are they. They can't be called an organized crime gang. Good morning, Good morning, Nick Well.
I mean, there's certainly the behavior that we've seen is rather typical, but they are certainly engaged in organized criminality on their LAS scale, and the tactics is one of civil resistance. Civil resistance model that is based on illegal action. So I think what we saw of the weekend with the blockading of the various news print outlets was was a form of anarchism effectively, it was you know, rather typical.
This is a group that you rejects democracy and the liberal free mark economy and explicitly seeks to overturn both.
This is something we've talked about in this season too, this framing of climate activists and particularly those engaging in direct action as being these scary anarchists. Definitely, that's something that Atlas Network think tanks in particular have been pushing. Isabella. Did you see the UK media kind of amplifying that message too, or any politicians sort of picking up that threat and running with it.
Yeah, definitely they started to certainly certain sections of the media started to repeat the kind of language that was being you used, and the framing of.
These groups as.
A threat rather than trying to draw attention to a serious issue. And then it wasn't too much longer before the UK began actually putting some of this stuff into legislation. So in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, the UK Parliament passed two really significant pieces of law which gave law enforcement agencies much greater powers to stop protest tactics that were considered to be disruptive. Certain aspects of those laws as they were being developed in parliament, which were
struck down. The government later sort of pushed through through secondary regulation to try and bypass the parliamentary process. So these pieces of law have really made it harder for people to protest and given enforcement authorities, given the police much greater power to stop it before.
It happens and while people are protesting.
We also know that in the summer of twenty twenty three, at a policy exchange Garden Party Prime Minister Rishie Sunak thank the organization for its help with these legislative changes.
I love that it was at a garden party. That why that makes it so much I don't know, makes it land so much more so. You wrote in your story also about not only how these laws have led to more arrests, but how they've impacted activist core proceedings, which I think is really really interesting. Can I just have you kind of walk us through what you found out on that front?
Yeah?
Sure, So I've been speaking to locked of activists who have been arrested and have been through the court system, And the really key thing is here that activists, when they get to court, whatever the crime they're accused of is, they want to be able to explain their motivations for why they did what they did. And for some that's about getting the issue on the record but talking about
climate change, for example. For others, it's about trying to persuade the jury that what they did was proportionate and that they couldn't be convicted. But judges have discretion in how they run particular trials in their courts, and that's led to this really wide variety of.
Different outcomes for protesters.
So in some courts, activists have been given pretty free reign to explain their motivations for what they did. In some they've been allowed to use particular legal defenses, so for example, a necessity that's saying that what they did was necessary to avoid a greater harm to the planet. But in others they've been really strictly barred from even
mentioning climate change at all. So I've heard activists describe this as a justice lottery, with some people being convicted and going to prison and others found not guilty and allowed to go home. But at the same time, juries vary quite a lot, and in many cases they've been acquitting activists for a whole range of eventss whether or not they've managed to explain their motivations. So the result is that not all judges or politicians are very happy
with that situation. And so there's been this growing tension about how to deal with climate protests in a proportionate way. And meanwhile climate protesters are quite frustrated that they're being handled so differently in different parts of the country and in different courts, even within the same city.
Is there anyone kind of working on just specifically that is, you like, the inconsistency of things being applied, I mean that could go well or poorly for activists. I would guess that, you know, if someone's like, the judges should all be implementing this to the letter of the law, or we should come up with something that's more unifying.
I don't know.
It strikes me as like the classics thing that court cases exist to do, right is figure out this kind of inconsistency.
That there are people and I know people who are tracking with spreadsheets you know what's happening to different people and different courts, and so some of them have figures for about half of protesters, for example, being acquitted compared to the other half found guilty by jewelies. You're right though, that absolutely could fire because you could end up in a situation where the courts actually look and say, well, we want to apply the strict sentences.
To everybody rather than the most lenient.
So there's two things going on here.
It's protesters feeling that the sentences being handed down to them are too strong because in some cases the jail sentences have been hand down have been significantly bigger than they have been in previous protest trials. That's something actually the UN is looking at because there is concern about how the courts have applied this. But in other cases
they're talking about the inconsistency. So there's the tougher sentences on one hand, and on the others, the lack of kind of clear guidelines for how to treat these cases. I think some of these cases are going to the Court of Appeal, so there might be higher courts deciding how it can be applied to the lower ones.
But so far there isn't any any guidance on that.
We don't know exactly what discussions have been had, exactly what pressures have been but we can see that change in charging decisions.
Dr Graham Hayes is a researcher in social movements at Aston University.
As soon as those changes happen, the ability to defend yourself in court is much lesser and the penalties are much greater.
Hayes and his colleague, doctor Stephen Camis, who's an associate law professor at the University of Birmingham, have been tracking what's happening in the courts ever since the UK passed its new protest laws in twenty nineteen. Doctor Gail Bradbrooke, the Extinction Rebellion co founder that you heard from earlier in this episode, was arrested for breaking a window in
a government building during a protest. She just went to trial in twenty twenty three, and the judge in her trial refused to let her explain why she was protesting in the first place. The judge repeatedly warned her to stop speaking when she disobeyed that order, and told the jury to disregard what she was saying.
So in that context, thinking about Gail Bradbroock's stile and the judges warning that if she continued to overstep the bounds that he'd set, that he could move to a judge only trial.
I mean, am I right that that.
Provision was designed to address jury intimidation sort of in the context of serious organized trick crime.
Is that why that was developed in the first place?
These two free criminal justice actor exactly and it was finally contentious of the time.
And another thing that came up in your piece that was new to me as a non UK listener was this idea of jury nullification. And I think it's interesting sort of the role that this concept is playing in these cases and especially around the car proceedings. Can I have you kind of define that for folks who are tuning in from outside the UK.
Sure, this is a really fascinating idea. So it refers to this key legal idea which actually dates back at five hundred years and in sixteen seventy, jurors in a particular case were ordered by a judge to find two Quakers guilty of illegal preaching. So the jury, led by a man called Edward Bushell, refused and they were jailed
and fined until a court eventually cleared them. That case has now become the sort of celebrated principle of religious and political freedom, and the resulting principle is known as during nullification. The idea is that juries can clear people based on their consciences. And in fact, in the Old Bailey, which is the central criminal court of England and Wales in London, it's actually engraved onto our marble plaque there.
That's how important this idea is.
But in response to what's been happening in some of the cases against climate protesters in court, a sixty eight year old woman stood outside one of the courts and she'd written this principle of during nullification onto a cardboard sign. So she wrote, jurors, you have an absolute right to a quit a defendant according to your conscience. The judge in that case, where he was taking a trial of
some climate protesters, was not happy. He felt that the lady Trudy Warner was trying to interfere with the jury, and he referred her for contempt of court, essentially that she was trying to sway the jury into making a particular kind of decision.
So when Trudy next went back to court.
He ordered her to be arrested, and she was later charged with contempt of court. Trudy's arrest then sparked lots of other people to do similar things, so they started standing outside court with very similar signs reminding.
Juries that they have to acquit.
There's been a sort of series of escalating protests, from a handful of people to over two hundred, and at the latest count in December, more than five hundred people stood outside around fifty courts in the UK holding up very similar signs reminding juries of this key legal principle. A couple of people have also been charged, but most of those protesters have not had any kind of haven't had their details taken, and haven't had any.
Kind of legal consequences for doing that.
But it's led to this growing row about what is proportionate.
I think until we get ruling in the Trudy Warner case, we won't exactly know how this will be dealt with from there onwards. I just think we have probably have to wait and see. I think what I would say is that judges have different personalities and they use contempt of the threat of contempt of the threat of imprisonment in order to demonstrate their authority in the courtroom, and you regularly see some judges threaten prison to defendants to keep them in.
Light, so that people who have had legal repercussions are truly warner. And two young women, all of them are being charged with contempt. I haven't spoken to them directly on the record because they're going through this legal process. I have spoken to three generations of one family who were some of the protesters outside one of the courts. They were very passionate about why they were doing this. For them, it was about much more than climate change,
although that was super important. This was about a really important fundamental principle of essentially freedom of speech.
So what is your name?
I'm real Lais Slater, I'm Sarah McDonald, I'm Vivia McDonald, and your three generations of the same family, right, and so why have you come to Bristol Crown Court today? Really to stand up for the rights of life? Actually that's for me, to stand up for life. I've done a lot of climate activism and I've taken part in the actions against the aggressive police Crime Sentencing Bill.
What concerns you about those bills?
I think a lot of things per finding about those bills.
I think the plump down on protests really reflects how the government is trying to and what direction our country is being taken in in a way to repress people expressing their opinions and to repress assembly, which has been throughout history, or way to cultivate change, and I think clamping down on that really reflects their opinions on not just the private protest, but like historical protests as well, and how they have manifested and been brought forwards in
the tradition of cultivating change. It's more important than ever to continue protesting and to continue fighting for change in light of how the.
Government is trying to repress it.
Yeah, that's the thing that strikes me the most about the court preceding stuff is just how you know whether climate is an issue of that you care about or not, or whether you think these protesters are justified or not is sort of beside the point. Anytime you're curtailing people's ability to defend themselves or curtailing what they're allowed to say in their defense, it seems like potentially something that folks might be concerned about.
Absolutely, and that's one of the points that protesters are making, although obviously they want to draw attention to climate change and for people who've been involved in various kinds of activism to not go to prison and to be found not guilt. This is a really fundamental point about allowing people to express their motivations and giving juries as a kind of representative example of the public the ability to make informed decisions about people's actions and about essentially what
is right and wrong. Otherwise you're giving all that power to a judge, into the judiciary, rather than the people themselves.
So all of this stuff that you've been talking about kind of played into Gail Bradbrooks's case as well.
Yeah, So Gail had two trials, and the first trial, which was earlier in twenty twenty three, had to be aborted because she kept talking about her motivations for her actions, and the judge was really unhappy about that. He basically refused to let her do so, accused her of tampering with the jury, and said that the trial would come to an end and would start again later. In between her two trials, there were various hearings where she was
trying to negotiate what she was allowed to say. The extent with which she was allowed to describe her motivations and talk about climate change, and the judge was really pushing back on that. He was incredibly limited in how he allowed her to frame her defense and was basically striking down any kind of legal defense that she had to make. So by the time of the second trial, where there was a fresh jury, she was very technically
restricted and she was defending herself as well. During the actual case though, she managed to sort of push back on quite a bit of it, and the judge was repeatedly stopping her from talking and reminding her of his previous rulings, but she did manage to in various ways get across most of what she wanted to the jury. The re was well, was not really what she wanted
because she was found guilty. She told me that she was happy because she had managed to at least explain herself, which the judge hadn't really wanted her to do in
that case as well. Coming into the court in the morning, there were many people sitting outside with the jury nullification slogans on their placards, which the judge told the jury that they should sort of, you know, take with a bit of pitch of salt so that all these factors were coming together in this trial of an Extinction Rebellion.
Founder bradbrook was sentenced to fifteen months in jail, but the judge immediately suspended that sentence. She was also given a twelvemonth supervision order and one hundred and fifty hours of community service. Once the sentencing ended, Bradbrooke released her seventy five page dossier of evidence, all the stuff the judge had said she couldn't use to defend herself, and she criticized the judicial system for both its inconsistency and
for curtailing people's ability to defend themselves. In a press statement that Extinction Rebellion sent out, Bradbrokes said, quote, our so called justice system is a lottery for climate defenders and not fit for purpose when it comes to tackling the climate and nature crisis. Meanwhile, several other climate activists are either in jail or awaiting trial in the UK.
Next year there are going to be quite a few more trials of climate protesters, some of them accused of quite significant damage, so it'll be interesting to see how the courts treat them, whether they become even tougher make it even harder for activists to make defenses and whether
the sentences are going to be even less lenient. I understand that some activists are going to be making formal complaints about the UK government, that it's acting disproportionately and possibly violating some international laws about the right to free speech and the right to protest. So I think that will be a really important thing to look out for.
The UK government is aware of its image on the wider stage, and so that kind of action might help to show it up as being somewhere which likes to present itself as a climate leader and a bastion of free speech, but isn't necessarily living up to that reputation right now.
Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. This episode was reported by Isabella Kamensky and written by me Amy Westervelt.
Our senior editor for the series is Ellen Brown.
Our senior producer is Martin Zold's Astwig.
Sound design and scoring also by Martin zoltz Ostwik, who composed much of the music in this episode.
Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff.
Our theme song is but in the hand by four known.
Fact checking by Rudan Jan.
Al Atwick is by Matt Fleming. Our first them in my Attorney is James whet.
The show was created by Amy Westerveldt.
You can find a companion web story to this episode on our website at drilled dot Media. You can also subscribe to our newsletter there. It comes out once a week and includes a little bit of analysis on what's happening in climate, plus a roundup of the top five stories or studies to check out each week. It's never more than a ten minute read, and people tell us it helps them stay on top of all things climate. If you want to support our work, you can also
leave us a rating or review. It genuinely helps us find new listeners. And finally, if you would like to fund more climate accountability reporting, you can sign up for a paid subscription to either the newsletter or the podcast. A subscription gets you access to ad free episodes, bonus and early content, and every dollar you contribute goes toward more reporting and more stories. Thank you for that support. That's it for this time and we'll see you next week.