In the middle of October, after leaving my partner and her two children behind, I straddled a cable with my friend Morgan at 3am and climbed 250ft up the QE2 Bridge, also known as the Dartford Crossing. We are both well-trained as climbers and were safely secured as we nudged ourselves up the bridge. Once at the top, we threw a line across the four-lane motorway and hung a huge orange banner which yelled “JUST STOP OIL”. To make it more newsworthy, we then rigged up our two hammocks, and literally hung out for a total of 37 hours, causing a gridlock after police closed the bridge to traffic. Like a fire alarm we tried to be loud and annoying, impossible to ignore, in order to safeguard human life. I have studied many other protest movements of the past, so I knew it needed to be disruptive to get noticed and receive media coverage. It certainly wasn’t a spontaneous action. This was a desperate last resort after we have spent years trying everything else.
Over the last 12 years, I have given up my career as a musician and worked with different community and environmental groups, as well as scientists, learning more about the physics, biology, social implications and ethical considerations regarding the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced. I have given talks, handed out leaflets, written to politicians, danced in the street, sung inside the House of Commons and reduced my own environmental footprint in every way possible. I have supported friends at attempts to become politicians themselves and marched the streets, leading crowds into song.
All these efforts have had an impact, but none got anywhere near the attention of the QE2 climb. The fact that much of it could be seen as negative attention because the tactics were unpopular doesn’t really matter. Evidence shows that disruptive tactics don’t actually deter people from the cause itself—however much they dislike the action. And our aim was to alert people once again to the cause.
I get no joy out of causing disruption to the public. I wish I wasn’t one of the ones who had to do it and I certainly wish I wasn’t being held in Chelmsford Prison. But as I see it, we are at an unprecedented time in history where there is no other choice. We are facing a threat to the entire existence of humanity. We are woefully off track from any of our targets, and this will lead to devastating consequences within our lifetimes, let alone our children’s. In so many parts of the world it has already led there.
I was prepared to be one of the few to do disruptive, non-violent (although annoying I recognise) action to try and force the political change that is necessary. Someone has to do it, and with no children to support and a stamina and constitution which I believed could stand the potential trauma of time in prison, I chose to take that risk. I genuinely believe this will have made a difference, however infuriating it was for those people stuck in their cars that day. I’m really sorry if you were one of them.
Just Stop Oil is aware of the risk that we could block ambulances and emergency vehicles. But our “blue light policy” means we always let emergency vehicles with lights flashing past. And when Morgan and I were on the QE2 bridge we didn’t block the road. Emergency vehicles passed back and forth beneath us. Some newspapers tried their hardest to hijack people’s misery by attempting to link the closure of the QE2 Bridge to an unrelated car accident that happened on a different motorway. The ambulance service, however, issued a statement clarifying that its crew was not delayed and arrived at the crash well before the 40 minutes reported by these papers. The spokesperson even pointed out that an air ambulance also attended the scene, a detail the papers did not mention.
As a response to climate protests, the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act went through parliament last year, with devastating consequences. It is effectively ending freedom of assembly and rewriting the crime of public nuisance to be so vague and wide reaching that it could be applied to just about anything that the police and the courts don’t like. In addition to public nuisance, we have seen privatisation of protest law in the last few years as judges have been granting ever-more extensive corporate injunctions to criminalise otherwise legal protest. Those were originally designed to protect people from domestic violence but are now being abused to heavily fine and even imprison people engaging in non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.
The use of such injunctions will be made even easier by the new Public Order bill which is currently going through parliament. I am perplexed by these new repressive laws. There already was plenty of legislation to deal with seriously disruptive disobedience. But in the public eye, they have to be seen to be responding to protest. However, exactly like judges barring protesters from talking about their reasons, it is a response that completely and deliberately misses the point.
I believe government ministers tacitly recognise that they are doing something deeply wrong maintaining laws which threaten our public welfare and climate and ecological collapse. They know they will need to use unjust tools to maintain obedience, preparing for when more people wake up and take action. Using these laws, the government, state-friendly media, the courts and the police try to disregard the legitimacy of protesters’ political motives and conscious objections to injustice. They do their best to portray them as nothing more than criminals mindlessly threatening so-called ordinary people’s lives.
I do accept responsibility for the backlash to our protest—although I’m not sure backlash is the right word. Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have been explicitly mentioned by politicians justifying these new laws. This shows that our actions worked. They got noticed and responded to. Some might argue that the imprisonment of peaceful citizens concerned with the greater good will have a similar effect to the action itself. Many more conversations are being had about the imprisonment and the reasons for it. Each prisoner costs the state about £49,000 every year. When facing infinite loss, we must try all options.
I recognise that a significant portion of the population will be angry with me and not understand the message. They may see it as thwarting of their freedom. However, everything they love is threatened by the climate and ecological emergency. I believe that once their anger has worn off, they will choose to stop harming themselves and everyone dear to them. The urgency and severity of the situation really needs to be in people’s faces more often. Through our actions we are presenting a great opportunity for mainstream media who are otherwise, in silence, complicit in the fossil fuel-driven genocide.
There couldn’t possibly be anyone who has properly understood the situation and still condemns our actions. Floods caused by climate breakdown had already damaged motorways: for example, the flood in Germany where 200 died, so our disruption is comparably negligible.
At the beginning of the year, Extinction Rebellion announced that they had “quit” protesting. The statement, We Quit, was a cunning move. It spread the message to a big audience: no one is coming to save you or the lands you love from the climate and ecological emergency. However, they haven't actually abandoned protest, but just announced a temporary shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic.
The action outside Michael Gove’s office using locks and paint and people glued on a few days after the We Quit announcement proves that it is not an actual end to protest. Everyone in Extinction Rebellion is aware that Just Stop Oil has been the group focusing on frontline disruptive action since April 2022 anyway. Through this announcement, XR enables those who disagree with disrupting the public to join in a large coalition of groups taking action.
We’ve had guards unlock the cell to show their colleagues pictures of us on the bridge
I am convinced we need all levels of commitment, and I know from experience that engaging with climate breakdown and taking action is a journey of many steps. I am still a very active member of Extinction Rebellion myself, and believe that we need more dialogue and cooperation among those willing to face the most consequential of all issues that we as a species have ever faced.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some people choosing to engage in more radical property destruction. Think Earth Liberation Front. After all, we’ve already had 27 COPs and emissions are still rising. But radical acts shift the Overton window so that things like sitting down around the Houses of Parliament in April seem more politically and socially acceptable.
In prison, the vast majority of inmates are aware of our action as it had such massive coverage. We felt a little bit like celebrity inmates at first. I got a lot of respect and questions of excited amazement; a fair few who’d got stuck in traffic themselves but mostly they just joked about it, as well as continuing to ask questions about our reasons for doing it.
The frightening technical risks and novelty of the action obviously won some people over as supporters before they had any clue why we did it. Among the prison guards, reactions have ranged from “I don’t even care why you did it” to “How can I support Just Stop Oil?”
Certainly, most are baffled we’ve been imprisoned and, even more so, that we were rejected bail.
As I have toothpasted photos by the prosecution service of us on the bridge up on the wall here in my cell, the many prisoners that visit our cell during “association time” to play chess see them and usually ask questions. We’ve even had guards unlock the cell to ask whether they could show their colleagues the pictures. I appreciate every chance to address the issues and answer questions. The gravity of our action helps communicate immediately and instinctively the gravity of the warning we sought to deliver.
Last year saw 138 conscientious protectors in the UK behind bars. Prison does, however, seem like a small sacrifice compared to the suffering which we are inflicting on millions. What’s freedom in a dying world?
It won’t matter in the bigger picture what the government will throw at protestors. This is only the beginning of what is coming. People are not just going to lie down and wait for the biggest suffering in the history of this planet to take everything we love.
Besides, they’ve got lovely biscuits in prison. I eat them with a slice of pear and peanut butter, dunked into tea with plant milk. And my tomato seeds have just started to sprout.
