Jonathon Porritt, UK sustainability campaigner and a key figure in the country’s environmental movement for decades, has written a powerful blog decrying the crushing of environmental dissent in recent months.
‘First they came for Just Stop Oil’, he writes, ‘then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them’. This is a conscious echo of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 confessional ‘First they came for the communists …’ warning against the dangers of a creeping authoritarianism of which we only become aware once it’s too late to do anything about it.
Porritt continues: ‘I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.’
He’s right of course, and I would only argue/add that environmentalists have been asleep at the wheel for rather longer than he says.
First off, and most proximately, the seeds of the legislation for crushing dissent were sown during the pandemic and we went along all too readily with the extreme measures taken then. Of course they were justified by the fact that it was an emergency and the occasional 'beyond the pale' action by the police was excused by the fact that the legislation was new, complex, and sometimes difficult to interpret. The key element here, though, is the word 'emergency' and its use in justifying extreme measures. Carl Schmitt famously wrote that 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. The exception in 2020 was Coronavirus, and the exception now is JustStopOil, republicans, or anyone with a bicycle lock. One way of looking at this is that in 2020 the government tested our resolve to resist overweaning power and found us wanting.
We are reaping now the whirlwind we sowed then.
This is a difficult argument to make because the only people resisting these measures at the time were swivel-eyed right-wing libertarians. Somehow, the right have managed to arrogate to themselves the word 'libertarian' as if it belongs wholly and completely to them. There is of course a noble left-wing libertarian tradition which we've allowed to wither to the point where the right fly the flag of freedom and liberty (the irony!!) while any progressive measure carries with it a health warning regarding cancellation, censoriousness and prohibition. I read the following exchange in a recent interview Naomi Klein, and I have some sympathy for what she says:
Q. It seems that some young people sees the extreme right as exciting, while the left is boring and prudish. Like someone who enjoys a cutting Ricky Gervais routine more than politically correct jokes.
A. It is true, and it is dangerous. It has to do with the censorious passion of the left, its policing of speech and the casual cruelty it displays when someone steps out of line. We could talk about cancel culture, if it weren’t such a loaded concept. To me, there’s no doubt that there is bullying, which tends to push anyone who steps out of line. I’m not the only person on the left who is concerned about this. These young people may find the left stifling, a place where a mistake can make your friends turn against you, and they may believe that on the right, it’s possible to disagree, even if that’s not true. There is policing on both sides of the mirror, but I think the right takes better advantage of that strategy to rally people to its cause. I wish the left thought more about how to increase our ranks instead of how to purge them.
So: we’ve forgotten how to be libertarians. One nail in the coffin of left-wing libertarianism was our rather supine reaction to the Government arrogating enormous punitive powers to itself during the pandemic, and this hampers our position regarding the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and its spin-offs. The Act is justified by the government by saying that we (environmentalists) are the new ‘emergency’.
Bonkers of course, but effective.
The second point is that the UK has long been a ‘police state’ (Porritt’s completely correct term) but environmentalists have only just noticed it because they’ve only recently been systematically subject to its effects. (I say ‘systematically’ because they’ve often been on the receiving end in relatively isolated cases - witness the 1985 ‘Battle of the Beanfield’).
There are presently around 87,000 people in prison in the UK, and it has long held the dubious record of the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe. The poor, the non-white, the drug-dependent and the functionally illiterate are massively over-represented in the prison population. This most likely explains mainstream environmentalists’ ‘lack of concern/interest’ - as Porritt so rightly puts it - about policing and its consequences, given that few environmentalists fall into any of these categories. The excessive punishments recently meted out to environmentalists, and which have brought the criminal justice system to environmentalists’ attention, have been part and parcel of the system since forever.
The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences (thank you David Blunkett) and Joint Enterprise Laws are just two egregious examples of the injustices and massive sentences systematically meted out to offenders, and which typically disproportionately affect non-white and poor populations. Martin Tawton’s ten years in prison for stealing a mobile phone is just one of many IPP sentences to set alongside enviromentalists Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland’s absurdly long prison sentences. These sentences are on a continuum and should be criticised together rather than separately. (While we’re on it, Trowland’s comments that ‘It was quite easy to be happy in prison … I don’t think it’s very scary’ - were unbelievably tone deaf and guaranteed to widen the gap between environmentalists and people like Tawton).
In sum, criticism of the laws and policing of environmental dissent must be accompanied by critique of the criminal justice system per se.
So Jonathon Porritt’s blog might have begun with: ‘First they came for the poor, the drug-dependent, the illiterate and the non-white, then they came for Just Stop Oil …. etc’. We don’t want to be seen as ‘special pleading’ for put-upon environmentalists; our quite proper anger at the sentences handed down to or contemplated for activists must be accompanied by solidarity with all the other hitherto hidden, silent and silenced victims of the criminal justice system.
‘First they came for Just Stop Oil’, he writes, ‘then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them’. This is a conscious echo of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 confessional ‘First they came for the communists …’ warning against the dangers of a creeping authoritarianism of which we only become aware once it’s too late to do anything about it.
Porritt continues: ‘I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.’
He’s right of course, and I would only argue/add that environmentalists have been asleep at the wheel for rather longer than he says.
First off, and most proximately, the seeds of the legislation for crushing dissent were sown during the pandemic and we went along all too readily with the extreme measures taken then. Of course they were justified by the fact that it was an emergency and the occasional 'beyond the pale' action by the police was excused by the fact that the legislation was new, complex, and sometimes difficult to interpret. The key element here, though, is the word 'emergency' and its use in justifying extreme measures. Carl Schmitt famously wrote that 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. The exception in 2020 was Coronavirus, and the exception now is JustStopOil, republicans, or anyone with a bicycle lock. One way of looking at this is that in 2020 the government tested our resolve to resist overweaning power and found us wanting.
We are reaping now the whirlwind we sowed then.
This is a difficult argument to make because the only people resisting these measures at the time were swivel-eyed right-wing libertarians. Somehow, the right have managed to arrogate to themselves the word 'libertarian' as if it belongs wholly and completely to them. There is of course a noble left-wing libertarian tradition which we've allowed to wither to the point where the right fly the flag of freedom and liberty (the irony!!) while any progressive measure carries with it a health warning regarding cancellation, censoriousness and prohibition. I read the following exchange in a recent interview Naomi Klein, and I have some sympathy for what she says:
Q. It seems that some young people sees the extreme right as exciting, while the left is boring and prudish. Like someone who enjoys a cutting Ricky Gervais routine more than politically correct jokes.
A. It is true, and it is dangerous. It has to do with the censorious passion of the left, its policing of speech and the casual cruelty it displays when someone steps out of line. We could talk about cancel culture, if it weren’t such a loaded concept. To me, there’s no doubt that there is bullying, which tends to push anyone who steps out of line. I’m not the only person on the left who is concerned about this. These young people may find the left stifling, a place where a mistake can make your friends turn against you, and they may believe that on the right, it’s possible to disagree, even if that’s not true. There is policing on both sides of the mirror, but I think the right takes better advantage of that strategy to rally people to its cause. I wish the left thought more about how to increase our ranks instead of how to purge them.
So: we’ve forgotten how to be libertarians. One nail in the coffin of left-wing libertarianism was our rather supine reaction to the Government arrogating enormous punitive powers to itself during the pandemic, and this hampers our position regarding the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and its spin-offs. The Act is justified by the government by saying that we (environmentalists) are the new ‘emergency’.
Bonkers of course, but effective.
The second point is that the UK has long been a ‘police state’ (Porritt’s completely correct term) but environmentalists have only just noticed it because they’ve only recently been systematically subject to its effects. (I say ‘systematically’ because they’ve often been on the receiving end in relatively isolated cases - witness the 1985 ‘Battle of the Beanfield’).
There are presently around 87,000 people in prison in the UK, and it has long held the dubious record of the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe. The poor, the non-white, the drug-dependent and the functionally illiterate are massively over-represented in the prison population. This most likely explains mainstream environmentalists’ ‘lack of concern/interest’ - as Porritt so rightly puts it - about policing and its consequences, given that few environmentalists fall into any of these categories. The excessive punishments recently meted out to environmentalists, and which have brought the criminal justice system to environmentalists’ attention, have been part and parcel of the system since forever.
The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences (thank you David Blunkett) and Joint Enterprise Laws are just two egregious examples of the injustices and massive sentences systematically meted out to offenders, and which typically disproportionately affect non-white and poor populations. Martin Tawton’s ten years in prison for stealing a mobile phone is just one of many IPP sentences to set alongside enviromentalists Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland’s absurdly long prison sentences. These sentences are on a continuum and should be criticised together rather than separately. (While we’re on it, Trowland’s comments that ‘It was quite easy to be happy in prison … I don’t think it’s very scary’ - were unbelievably tone deaf and guaranteed to widen the gap between environmentalists and people like Tawton).
In sum, criticism of the laws and policing of environmental dissent must be accompanied by critique of the criminal justice system per se.
So Jonathon Porritt’s blog might have begun with: ‘First they came for the poor, the drug-dependent, the illiterate and the non-white, then they came for Just Stop Oil …. etc’. We don’t want to be seen as ‘special pleading’ for put-upon environmentalists; our quite proper anger at the sentences handed down to or contemplated for activists must be accompanied by solidarity with all the other hitherto hidden, silent and silenced victims of the criminal justice system.