Gaie Delap will turn 78 on Friday, in Eastwood Park prison, Gloucestershire. Sentenced to 20 months last August for climbing a gantry over the M25 for Just Stop Oil, she was released in November to serve the rest of her sentence on a home detention curfew. But the electronic tag that she was required to wear couldn’t go round her ankle because she has deep-vein thrombosis and it might have risked causing her a stroke. It couldn’t go round her wrist because they couldn’t find a tag small enough, which people keep saying is because she’s frail. Delap hates being called frail. Her wrist is a perfectly reasonable size, 14-and-a-half centimetres. It’s the wrist-tag design that’s wanting. The topsy-turvy world where a government contractor, Serco, can fail and fail again, while a citizen with a social purpose gets called back to prison five days before Christmas to atone for that failure, isn’t even the most absurd thing about this story.
Delap was engaged in direct action to raise awareness about the climate emergency, and the day citizens stop doing that is the day that progressive politics might as well give up and go home. Whatever pretzel twists Labour ministers have to perform to sound as if they’re on the side of the decent, honest commuter, while simultaneously signalling that they understand the scale of the climate crisis, they must surely remember this: the trade union movement, the peace movement, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the climate justice movement; every known movement of change has relied on non-violent action to disrupt the status quo.
