To Westminster, where outside the Ministry of Justice more than 300 protestors have held a silent vigil this afternoon. Activists from a myriad of campaign groups – including Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action and Black Lives Matter – gathered in front of the department building for 90 minutes today to call for the release of political prisoners and the resignation of crossbench peer Lord Walney, an independent adviser on political disruption. The action was organised by ‘Defend Our Juries’ which slams ‘sham trials’ that, it claims, jail protestors for ‘peaceful acts of protest’ like road blocking, traffic disruption and throwing soup at 100-year-old paintings.
Now climate and justice activists have come together to protest the tightening of protest laws and the conclusions of the domestic extremism report by Lord Walney. For his part, the crossbench peer slammed today’s ‘road block stunt’ by ‘extreme protestors’ and shared an ‘instruction manual’ for the event on Twitter, writing: ‘[It] gives insight into a well-resourced network adept in tactics like burner phones usually deployed by hardened criminals.’
Speaking outside the Ministry of Justice today, one protestor raged at Steerpike that the imprisonment of 47 climate protestors – like Phoebe Plummer, who received a two-year jail term this year for causing damage to the frame of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – was ‘all really very disproportionate’, adding:
We should be arresting the real criminals – the people who are actually sending the planet, and our lives, and all of the environmental stuff down the river with the whole climate crisis.
Crikey. Another fumed:
We have more draconian laws to try and shut down any form of peaceful protest. Many people in prison are either imprisoned or on remand for non-violent, peaceful protest. At the moment you know we can be in London almost every day going to different courts with people having plea hearings, people being sentenced or people being tried.
Slamming the Labour’s government early release scheme as ‘ridiculous’, an activist seethed to Mr S about the government’s ‘wrong priorities’. They went on: ‘You’ve got people like Huw Edwards, you know, getting a slap on the wrist and a suspended sentence – and yet we’re locking up climate activists for throwing soup on a frame.’ Oo er.
Steerpike would remind readers that Plummer and her co-conspirator Anna Holland caused £10,000 worth of damage during their National Gallery protest while other campaigners were imprisoned for shutting down a major motorway – holding up workers and emergency service vehicles. Though while worries persist about prisons filling up again by 2025, perhaps releasing climate activists over, er, inmates imprisoned for kidnap and torture might be a smarter move…
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