The battle between climate protesters and the government is raging, and most people know who is in the right. The people trying to sound the alarm about the climate crisis are closer to mainstream opinion than those enabling fossil fuel corporations to make almost $3bn a day in profit while the planet burns.
Many in the government probably know it too, but to openly confront that reality would mean doing the unthinkable: pointing to corporate short-termism as the source of the crisis.
The default alternative is to crack down on the right to protest. This is unlikely to deter the protesters, as Just Stop Oil has vowed to defy the law until the government imposes the death penalty. However hard Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak might try, they can’t legislate away determination, commitment and, well, the science.
But here’s the dilemma for the protesters: the government can indeed start to take out individual protesters through long prison sentences, unlimited fines and seizing their stuff. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act allows the police broad powers to restrict protest, based on what they interpret to be serious disruption – if a protest is too noisy, for example, or protesters are deemed to be causing a public nuisance, such as occupying a public space. The public order bill goes even further. It extends stop and search, and introduces serious disruption prevention orders – you can’t hang out in the wrong place with the wrong people if you have been convicted of a protest-related offence twice before.
These measures won’t stop protest, but they do challenge our strategy and tactics. A Just Stop Oil protester was recently sentenced to six months in prison for climbing a gantry on the M25. National Highways has secured a high court injunction that lasts until November next year against protests on the M25, with specific individuals named. More and more activists are being found guilty of criminal damage and going to prison for being disruptive. This number looks set to rise as arrests are already in the thousands and mounting.
The type of protest considered acceptable to government is rapidly shrinking. This is a massive threat to democracy. And this is why, as the government starts to crack down, the climate movement needs to step up, to raise its game. Some tactics can make it too easy for the government to drive a wedge between protesters and the wider public. Getting arrested regularly is not something most people can afford to do. Preventing ordinary people from getting to work or hospital inevitably alienates, making criminalisation easier. The protesters must not allow the government to score on that front.
The other tactical dilemma for Just Stop Oil is that the protests remain in the same register and rely on a few brave individuals. Another day, another gallery. Tomato soup, mashed potatoes, chocolate cake. It keeps the media talking – and this is essential – but who are they trying to persuade? The government, who won’t be persuaded? Ordinary people, who are already aware of the depth and scale of the crisis?
With governments moving intolerably slowly in doing what is necessary, it falls on ordinary people, including those on the frontline of the effects of the climate crisis, to intervene. As it happens, they also have the power to transform things.
A step up means that, rather than coming into confrontation with ordinary people, the climate movement seeks common cause with their struggles. A dual strategy follows from this, and is gaining increasing attention from within the movement.
First, the focus must include maximising street protest over the climate, and supporting wider protests about the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine, both of them tightly linked with energy policy. While direct action over energy is crucial, it was encouraging to see Just Stop Oil and others on the climate bloc at the recent People’s Assembly demonstration over the cost of living crisis.
Second, the movement must identify with the rising militancy among trade unions and working people – those who can stop production, whether it’s oil and gas or SUVs. This means supporting the strikes over pay and conditions, turning up to picket lines and mobilising numbers to organise the biggest movements possible.
This is starting to happen, and Just Stop Oil is supporting striking workers at the UK’s largest oil refinery at Fawley in Hampshire, operated by ExxonMobil, which recorded £17.3bn in profits over the last quarter. We need more of this kind of action, where the climate movement and labour militancy come together.
Persuasive arguments are being made for the climate movement to make a strategic refocus on production rather than consumption. This is because the crisis isn’t mainly about consumption, important though that is. It is mainly about the way production is organised, what is produced and who profits from that production.
The protesters are not selfish or reckless, as transport secretary Mark Harper claims. Nor are they extremists, as Suella Braverman wants us to believe.
It is those who are blocking change who are the real extremists. Make no mistake, the protesters must continue. But by expanding the range of tactics, and by making a strategic turn towards those who have real power in society, we would become unstoppable.
Feyzi Ismail is a lecturer in global policy and activism at Goldsmiths, University of London
