The sentencing of the M25 Just Stop Oil protestors was proportionate and necessary

They crossed the liberal line into harm and denial of the freedoms of others

Creator: Andrew Dykes | Credit: Supplied by Extinction Rebellion

In a liberal society, it is essential that we all grit our teeth and tolerate peaceful protests even when we find them tiresome and annoying and even when we regard the views held by the protestors as morally abhorrent. A government that does not allow peaceful protests is one that is authoritarian and in which corruption is enabled to flourish. Anybody in a big city who is tired and frustrated about having to live their lives and divert their journeys around frequent protests on behalf of causes they cannot support and longs for a ban of them should consider whether there is anything a government could do that would make them wish to gather en masse to protest. Unless you are a very rare individual who thinks you would be quite happy under any authoritarian regime, you should recognise the need to protect the right to protest peacefully.

Nevertheless, protests generally can be very tricky to evaluate according to that central liberal principle:

Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedom.

In principle, freedom of belief, freedom of expression and freedom of association are all that are needed to justify peaceful protest and this right is protected under both European and UK human rights law. However, in practice, there are so many ways in which a protest can do material harm to others or deny their freedoms and contravene other laws intended to protect national security, public safety, prevent crime and disorder, prevent the intimidation of others, damage to property, disruption of the life of a community and the function of local organisations that the law itself is awash with grey areas. In principle, the police must allow the freedom of association and expression, although they require being given notice so that they can reroute or limit protests to avoid the contravention of any other laws. After that, they must use their own judgement to decide if any individual protestor is breaking the law. It is quite messy and unsatisfactory, but this is inevitable given the messiness of trying to protect the rights and freedoms of all the inhabitants of large cities.

It is quite clear that the M25 protests which saw protesters climbing onto gantries above the motorway for several days in a row to cause the “biggest disruption in British modern history” in November of 2022 broke several laws and were ultimately charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and convicted of it. They received the longest sentences for non-violent protest with the ringleader, Roger Hallam, receiving a five year sentence and Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin receiving a four year sentence.

For liberals, however, the issue of law-breaking is separate to that of ethics. Some laws are illiberal or are prosecuted in illiberal ways. For us, then, the question of whether or not it was right to prosecute the protestors and whether their sentences were proportionate needs to be considered afresh on that liberal principle. For many key figures in conservation, environmentalism and human rights, these unprecedentedly lengthy sentences were disproportionate. As Chris Packham, TV presenter and conservationist said:

I believe this represents the direct theft of our freedom, the destruction of our democracy, the deliberate and calculated intimidation of protesters, and that that unless we resist this, the very real danger is that our species will destroy life on Earth.

To Michael Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders,

Today is a dark day for peaceful environmental protest. This sentence should shock the conscience of any member of the public. It should also put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom. Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.

And Tom Southerden of Amnesty International, describing the sentences as ‘draconian’ said,

These lengthy jail sentences for people seeking climate justice should increase the alarm over the ongoing crackdown against peaceful protest in this country, which violates all our human rights.

Meanwhile, X (formerly Twitter) is awash with people giving examples of lighter sentences being given to violent and sexual offenders and pointing out the seeming contradiction between these sentences and the drive to reduce overcrowding in prisons by releasing non-violent offenders early.

Do they have a point? Is climbing gantries and causing a traffic jam to try to get the government to stop exploring for oil in the North Sea a crime that merits a lengthy custodial sentence? I would argue that it is. I would suggest that unduly lenient sentences for violent sex offenders and prison overcrowding are separate issues that should be considered separately and do not address the issue of whether the protesters caused harm to others or denied them their freedoms. There is considerable evidence that they did both.

The crime of “causing a public nuisance” sounds fairly benign. It conjures up images of drivers tapping their fingers on their steering wheels impatiently and calling their employers or spouses to say, “Sorry, I know it’s a nuisance but I’m going to be late. Can you manage the meeting without me? Will dinner keep or should I get something on the way home?” This is not the reality. By blocking most of the motorway and preventing traffic on other roads from joining it, whole segments of the motorway had to be closed off affecting 700,000 drivers and compromising the M25 for 120 hours. Two lorries collided and a police officer was knocked from his motorcycle and suffered a head injury resulting in concussion. Of those 700,000 drivers, many of them were not merely inconvenienced. The jury heard of those who had missed vital medical procedures or exams that were important for their future. Drivers reported that children were gridlocked in cars for six or more hours with no way to obtain water, food or access to a bathroom. Other drivers would surely have been on their way to visit sick loved ones, many would have had children to collect or arriving home from school and some would be carers for elderly or disabled relatives they could not reach. Some would have been medical professionals, social workers or emergency services personnel prevented from doing their jobs.

In addition to the direct impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of drivers and the indirect impact on anybody else who was affected by those drivers being unable to get to them or to work, the cost of the protests was immense. Met Police spent £1.1 million pounds dealing with the chaos. The budget for policing London is already inadequate and money spent on dealing with traffic disruption is money not spent on protecting Londoners from crime. There is no way to know the human cost of that protest but it is reasonable to assume that some crimes (including violent ones) could have been prevented and some crimes more thoroughly investigated leading to the apprehension of criminals (including violent ones) had that 1.1 million pounds not been diverted away from everyday policing.

All this quite clearly exceeds the liberal line of letting people believe, speak and live as they see fit and comes up against the provided it does no material harm to others barrier at which point a liberal society must say “No.” The obvious objection to this would be that allowing climate change to destroy life on earth will cause much more harm to humans and all other animals than that caused by the protest. As Mr. Hallam said, “We only have a limited amount of time to halt the unimaginable horrors of climate and social collapse - and to save our democracy.” To Ms. Lancaster, we are at a “perilous and critical point in human history” and “all other means of democratic persuasion have failed.” Ms. Gethin addressed the harm done by the protest explicitly saying, "It was always my intention to limit the harm caused by the disruption" before adding that the protest would not have needed to happen had those in power taken responsibility for addressing the climate crisis.

Imagine for a moment that disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the bottom end of one small island could meaningfully address climate change, would this not be a good point? The protesters certainly think it is and the main bone of contention for them was that Judge Hehir had ruled that the jury was not to consider evidence of climate change in their deliberations of whether the group had behaved unlawfully. He ruled the protesters motivations a matter of “political opinion and belief” to which Ms. Gethin responded,

I want to remind the court once more that my reasons for taking action were not beliefs or opinions. Earth’s life-support systems are breaking down due to human activities, whether we believe it or not.

Many of the conservationists and environmentalists appear to agree that this amounted to suppression of the truth and made the trial unjust. I do not agree. In a liberal society, one may not force one’s opinions on others, even if they are true. Judge Hehir acknowledged the scientific consensus on climate change. He was not ruling climate science to be a political opinion or belief. The beliefs and opinions he was referring to were those that consider disrupting traffic and causing misery and chaos to hundreds of thousands of people to be an ethical and effective form of activism. He said,

[T]he plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law. And your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.

This brings us to the last clause of the liberal line. People may believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided this does no harm to anyone else nor denies them the right to do the same. Mr. Peckham may speak of the sentencing representing the “direct theft of our freedom” and “the destruction of our democracy” but the protesters were not respecting anybody else’s freedoms nor acting in accordance with democratic principles. In fact, Francesca Cociani, Barrister for Mr. Shaw, argued that he was a low risk for reoffending because, by the time the case came to trial, the demands of the protesters to stop North Sea oil and gas exploration had been met by the election of Labour. That was democracy.

The claim that the sentencing was an attack on human rights, civic rights and freedoms made by Mr. Forst and Mr. Southerden fails to appreciate that people other than environmental protesters are also humans with rights and freedoms. They are not pawns whose lives can simply be ground to a halt to send a message to the government, even if the message is good or true. This is not a way to show a message to be good or true. If another group of protesters managed to shut down an even greater stretch of motorway and disrupt even more people’s lives, cause more important appointments to be missed, dehydrate more children, endanger more police officers and divert more funds from crime policing in an effort to get the government to say climate change is a hoax, it still wouldn’t be. That is not a legitimate exercise of one’s own rights and freedoms. It is an attempt to circumvent the process and the principle of democracy.

The actions of Just Stop Oil are profoundly counterproductive. Before their protest, the government was intending to explore the North Sea for oil. After it, they were still intending to do so and considerable harm to and interference with the freedoms of others had been done and, I strongly suspect, even more people had become antagonistic to environmentalism. Very many people wrongly believe climate science to be anti-scientific ‘woke’ nonsense and much of this is to do with Just Stop Oil and the rest of its messaging. The group also gets in the way of more informed and realistic aims to address the crisis. It would be great if they would stop helping. However, it is not a crime to have bad ideas or dubious politics. It is a crime to completely overrule the rights and freedoms of everybody else, cause massive disruption and divert much needed funding from the police service. It is illegal and illiberal. The protesters may not care that they are being illiberal but they were well aware that what they were doing was illegal. They understood themselves to be committing civil disobedience for which they were willing to pay the price. They must now pay it even if it is higher than they expected.

Just Stop Oil is causing significant problems for liberal societies with their illiberal disregard for the rights and freedoms of everybody else. The correct liberal response to that is to send a strong message that it will not be tolerated. Many people believe a problem with liberalism is that it is overly tolerant, but this understanding of liberalism cannot survive a reading of its foundational principles, especially, I would argue, those set out by John Stuart Mill. Yes, we want absolutely everything to be open to discussion and that discussion to be open to absolutely everybody, but a corollary of this is that we cannot tolerate people or organisations who seek to overrule that process with their own high-handed certainty of their own rightness. Yes, we want people to be free to express their own beliefs and live according to those beliefs, but that freedom ends when it causes harm to other people or denies their right to do the same. The actions of Just Stop Oil are deeply illiberal and they cannot be tolerated in a liberal society. A strong message must be sent that it will not be tolerated or these kinds of protests will continue to take place and continue to do harm to others and deny them their own rights and freedoms.

In court, Roger Hallam’s barrister said that, since the protest, he had recognised the limitations of this kind of activism and turned to “more conventional political campaigning.” If this is true, we can hope that, on his release from prison, he will become a more ethical and effective campaigner on environmental issues. At this point, he and his accomplices are neither. Those environmentalists complaining that their sentences were disproportionate and represent a denial of human rights and freedoms and a threat to democracy must recognise that human rights and freedoms as well as democracy belong to everybody. They can only be preserved by putting a stop to the actions of those who would deny them to others. The M25 protest was just such an action and the sentence handed down to the activists was both proportionate and necessary.