Last week activists from the climate change group Extinction Rebellion chained themselves to the doors of law firm Eversheds Sutherland at One Callaghan Square in Cardiff.
Demonstrators wrote "defending climate criminals" in graffiti on the glass at the front of the building. A black liquid, seemingly used to represent oil, was poured on the front steps of the law firm, and other banners have been placed alongside.
At the beginning, three people were blocking the door. However when the police moved in to arrest them two voluntarily stepped aside. One of them stayed firm and was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, although he was later released without charge.
Read more: Extinction Rebellion chain themselves to entrance of building during day of disturbance in Cardiff
His name is Marcus Bailie and he is 68. Originally from Northern Ireland but living in the Valleys for the last 25 years. He has been described as the “most prolifically arrested” members of the group in Wales.
“I have been arrested eight or nine times,” he told WalesOnline. “All in the last three years, my first was in 2019. Some have been dropped immediately. Quite a few have been dropped eventually, though I have appeared in court a couple of times.”
Marcus says that the reason he is happy to be the protester who gets arrested is that the consequences for him are likely to be less severe than other people. “I'm white, male, middle class, British and retired,” he said. “I don't have the same barriers that many people would have. Many people say they really want to be more involved in direct action but can't because they have young kids to look after or have older parents. They say ‘if I get arrested, I lose my job’. There are barriers are an awful lot of people. So I'm just really lucky I suppose.”
There have been lazy attempts to characterise Extinction Rebellion activists as all unemployed and simply agitators. Marcus says this just isn’t true: “I've worked all my life. Climate activists get quite a bad name very often. People like Boris Johnson, described as ‘scroungers’. It is really scathing. And it kind of sticks.
“So when we're on protests it's not unusual for someone who doesn't like what we're doing to attack us as scroungers and shout ‘go and get a job’. And the guy next to protesting will say ‘hang on, mate, I'm a plumber’ and somebody else will say ‘I'm an accountant’.
“They are taking time off from their real jobs, paying jobs because they passionately believe that mass non violent and I stress nonviolent direct action works. Historically, it's been shown to work. Violent, direct action, very, very often doesn't. But there's loads of good research to support nonviolent direct action. Because it works. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the usual suspects. There's a long pedigree of this kind of action.”
The protest against Eversheds Sutherland was because the group accuse the firm of defending "climate criminals" because they have represented oil and gas companies. The group also claim that Eversheds Sutherland have facilitated the use of protest-banning injunctions against groups like Extinction Rebellion, to prevent activists from disrupting said clients’ activities. The protest in Cardiff was part of coordinated action across several cities.
Marcus said one of the key priorities for the group was safety. He told WalesOnline: “I had done quite a lot of reconnaissance of the place. So I knew that if we wanted to barricade the front door it wouldn’t be very hard to do. But I checked that there was another entrance into the carpark at the back so there was no safety issue in terms of barricades front door. If there was a fire alarm people could immediately go out the back door. We would also have dismantled our barricade and so there were no safety issues. When the police arrived, they weren't at all concerned with that. We explained about the back entrance into the carpark.”
According to Mr Bailie most of the public are fine with the protesters but not always. He said: “Sometimes, but not often, they get angry, but very seldom violently. Verbal aggressiveness is a very common reaction to a form of denial. I spend quite a lot of my energy talking to people and trying to say, ‘look, you might think that going around getting arrested a bunch of times is pretty radical, but I'm just an ordinary sort of guy’. But I'm not trying to get people to suddenly transform their lives. It's a slow process. It was for me, I don't see why it should be instantaneous or anybody else.
"I've had a growing concern about climate change for about 10 years, including growing anxiety about reliance on ever increasing global GDP. The world is going mad. We're spending too much, we're burning resources that we should realise are scarce.
"I have looked into some of the things that make us content. We know that by buying things we get a dopamine hit. But if we keep just doing the same thing, we get smaller and smaller dopamine hits. So we have to buy bigger stuff more often. And ultimately, it does not lead to us getting happier. People have started looking at what makes good communities. And a big part of the solution, I believe, is localism. And I mean, Wales, we've got some really good stuff about localism."
He added that the Welsh Government were doing "the best they feel they can" and praised the roads review announced recently. Though he said that Westminster was still "hell bent" on growth.
He said: "I am just an ordinary sort of bloke. Ordinary people are starting to make some changes. And to be fair, the Welsh Government are doing what they can to help but to make it easier. So Lee Waters announcement about the roads review in the Senedd was brave pioneering stuff. That was a tough decision and we're supporting them as best we can. We can't build our way out of congestion. There is loads of evidence. The Welsh Government get that and they are doing the best they feel they can which at times just isn't enough.
“Westminster is a bit of a different story. They're still hell bent on growth and that's Conservative Party and the Labour Party. Perpetual growth on a finite planet does not make any sense.”
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