A Gateshead grandmother has been to the dentist, had her haircut and told her grandchildren she might be going away for a while..
That might seem unremarkable, but for Helen Redfern, 58, it's part of preparing for what had previously seemed unthinkable: the chance that later this week she could be bedding down in a prison cell.
Helen was convicted in February of causing a public nuisance, along with three others, during Insulate Britain protests in London in October 2021. Helen, a longstanding environmentalist from Lobley Hill, who runs the Green Heart Collective in Team Valley, had never previously broken the law, but conscious of the rapidly escalating climate emergency, she glued her hands to the road in the heart of London's Bishopsgate during the rush hour on October 25 that year.
Convicted in February, Helen is set to travel to Inner London Crown Court this Thursday - and she doesn't know when she will be coming home. Public nuisance is a common law offence that, in theory, could carry a life sentence.
More realistically though, other protesters convicted for this offence have faced weeks or months in prison. Helen hopes a positive probation report - she's never been in trouble before and has caring responsibilities - might mean she is landed with a suspended sentence.
Helen explained her involvement in first Extinction Rebellion and then offshoot Insulate Britain had grown out of a lifelong desire to look after the planet and live ethically. She said: "We have always done what we can to help the environment but I guess we got to a point where we realised that the little things we were doing on a personal level were not going to change the world. So we started getting involved in Extinction Rebellion locally and attending national events too. I had already been arrested once at one of these."
When Insulate Britain began large scale protests and in some cases deliberately getting arrested, Helen had misgivings - she has caring responsibilities and being in jail would be a huge difficulty for her family. The Insulate Britain demand is that the government improve the insulation of all social housing in the UK by 2025 and retrofit all homes with improved insulation by 2030.
Helen added: "But when I saw them on television doing what they were doing, I wanted to be supportive and wanted to help and so I went down on October 25, 2021. I went down to be involved in a roadblock. I was the only one from the North East so I felt a bit isolated but my friends from Extinction Rebellion and my husband were very supportive. And then I got arrested.
"I had glued my hand to the road and it took them a bit of time to get that off. And then I spent five or six hours in police custody. I didn't think too much about it for a few months. I had been arrested for wilful obstruction of the highway, but then through the post the charge was for causing public nuisance. That's, I realised, a much more serious offence with a more serious sentence."
At a trial in February this year, Judge Silas Reid told Helen and her fellow defendants they would be in contempt of court if they discussed the climate as part of their defence. Other Insulate Britain activists in the same position did so, and were then jailed.
Helen said: "Obviously what we did makes no sense whatsoever without that motivation." Trials like Helen's have caused controversy -and more than 100 barristers have signed an undertaking not to prosecute environmental protest cases. The Gateshead woman said she welcomed the publicity on these issues.
She continued: "The jury took a while, but we were eventually found guilty. We had six weeks before the initial sentencing hearing, but the judge got Covid so it was cancelled. It is now Thursday. We were told by the judge to prepare for a custodial sentence, and the prosecutor has recommended a custodial sentence.
"So I have had to spend time over the last couple of months preparing for that. I've been getting my prescriptions in order from the doctors, I have been to the dentist, I have had a haircut. You just don't know how long it might be. It's naturally very hard to prepare for. I have spoken to other campaigners, some have had an okay time in prison, but others have had a terrible experience."
Due to her unblemished record, and business and family responsibilities, Helen said her probation report was to recommend a suspended sentence. However, she said: "You can never be sure - and there have been some strange things throughout this whole process.
"There have been a lot of positives in many ways, from the publicity around our case for instance. But it doesn't stop this being quite an unpleasant time. It's completely out of our depth, but then the whole system is completely out of its depth."
All of that said, Helen still stands by the principles that led to her arrest. She said: "For me, the demand from Insulate Britain was very straightforward - it's around the fuel poverty many face and have faced, even before things like the war in Ukraine. The figure in 2020 was, I think, that over 8,000 people were dying at winter because of not being able to heat their homes.
"I came to it from the point of view of the amount of energy that is waited because so many homes are poorly insulated. It would've cost far less to retrofit homes with insulation and keep energy bills that way than having to bail people out like the Government has had to.
"And for me it's always about the bigger picture of the climate emergency. At the time we were arrested we were saying that it was coming, now we are saying that it's already here. All over the world, in Australia, America, China, the flooding in Pakistan, it's all happening now and that will result in a huge crisis, migration, everything, whether the Government like it or not.
"Insulating Britain is one step that can be taken to show the UK is serious about the climate emergency. I don't know if I got involved in Extinction Rebellion imagining I would be facing prison. It's not something I have ever been involved in before."
Helen Redfern's sentencing takes place on Thursday in London.
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