Features
Man vs machine
Adam Weymouth
In 2009, environmental activist
Adam Weymouth was among those arrested for
planning to disable a power station. Finally acquitted this summer
after a chaotic two-year trial involving climate scientists and an
undercover policeman, he ponders the lessons learned.
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On Easter Sunday 2009, I joined more than a hundred people
gathering in Nottingham to hear of a plan to shut down E.ON’s
Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station – the second biggest in
the UK – and to keep it closed for a week. One team was to stop the
coal conveyors which fed the boilers, whilst another would climb up
the inside of the chimney before abseiling into the flues,
preventing the plant from re-opening. It had been rigorously
planned, and safety was paramount. There was no question of homes
loosing power, as the National Grid would take up the slack. If
successful, we would keep 150,000 tonnes of CO2 out of the
atmosphere, the equivalent of the 33 least polluting countries
combined.
Standing outside our meeting place the night before we were due
to launch the plan, I watched the lights of a helicopter high above
us. Someone joked that it was probably the police. A few minutes
later, hundreds of officers were surrounding the building. We
offered to let them in, but instead they smashed the doors down.
Over the next few hours 114 of us were searched, hand-cuffed, and
driven away to fill up the cells of Nottinghamshire. It was one of
the biggest pre-emptive policing operations ever undertaken in
Britain. And, as we were to find out later, it had been planned for
months.
During the year-and-a-half of police interviews and legal
bureaucracy that followed most had their charges dropped until just
26 of us remained, charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated
trespass. It was the first time such a charge had ever come to
court. Twenty of us stood trial in November 2010. We admitted our
role in the conspiracy, yet pled not guilty, defending ourselves on
grounds of necessity. As an example, even if you didn’t have a
driving licence you would be justified in jumping in a car that was
rolling down a hill to stop it. We argued that stopping the
emissions from Ratcliffe was both necessary and reasonable, in
light of the impending chaos of climate change, and the complete
inaction of government to do anything meaningful about it.
James Hansen, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists and
Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, took the
stand to detail how we are approaching certain climatic tipping
points that will lead us down a path of irreversible climate
change, and described the pivotal and catastrophic role that coal
is playing in this. ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ he said ‘that young
people are angry when they know that politicians are lying to
them.’ Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and Britain’s
first Green MP, spoke of how the government is failing to tackle
the issues with anything close to the sort of vision and conviction
that are vital. We described how we had arrived at a point where we
saw that these two conflicting worlds as entirely incompatible, and
saw no other option than stopping carbon emissions at source. When
the judge came to sum up, we felt we’d done all that we could to
make a very clear and persuasive case.
MACHINATIONS OF STATE
A political trial brings together
all the elements of the story into one scene for the final act.
Rather than an abstract state pushing pawns with invisible hands,
the whole machinations of that state were laid before us. The
judge, the police, the prosecution, the chief executives. Rather
than the figures and statistics we read in the newspapers, there
were the scientists describing the disintegration of our
spluttering planet. And rather than abstract public opinion, there
sat a jury, a cross-section of the community, to give their verdict
on us and on our methods.
Rarely have I experienced the lumbering juggernaut of the state
so acutely, and how the scales seem tipped on the side of those who
uphold the system. I listened as Raymond Smith, the former plant
manager, spoke of how they chose to burn coal, the dirtiest,
highest emitting fuel there is, because it provides the greatest
profit. I listened as Dr Ian Roberts, Professor of
Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Medicine, told the
court that we risk a ‘generational genocide’ as we ‘sleep walk into
a nightmare’, and that 150,000 people a year are dying already as a
result of man-made climate change. It had been a long time since I
had heard so bluntly things that I knew but often chose to hide
from. Yet there was no space in that courtroom for my frustration
and despair. I watched as the machine eased to its apparently
inevitable conclusions, as the inequalities and looming tragedies
became statistics and fell under the typist’s fingers and echoed
about the walls and into nothing.
Yet there is a glaring chink in this armour. It is the jury. It
is the public. It is the way that people think. At the end of
three-and-a-half weeks, it was twelve ordinary people who were
given a free choice to find us guilty or not, based on the evidence
they had heard. People are not just the potential spanner in the
works. People own the machine, and every morning they make a
decision not to switch it off. And what happened? After three days
of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict. Guilty as
charged.
UNDERCOVER COP
Around that time the news broke about the police officer Mark
Kennedy, exposed by the people he had lived amongst for seven
years. The media seized on the story. Living undercover as Mark
Stone in Nottingham, he had been posing as an environmental
activist, travelling to protests all over Europe. He was also one
of the 114 arrested back in 2009, and had been involved in the
plans from the beginning. So that was one mystery cleared up.
Days before the second trial was due to start, the lawyers for
the remaining six defendants, who were defending themselves on the
basis that they had not yet made a decision to take part in the
protest, submitted another claim to the prosecution for disclosure
of all evidence that related to the case. What they were looking
for was any sort of report that Kennedy might have made that could
have lent weight to their testimonies. Lo and behold, before the
end of the next day the prosecution came back and said that ‘new
evidence had come to light’, and they would therefore be
withdrawing from the trial.
That new evidence turned out to be a series of tapes covertly
recorded by Kennedy while we were being briefed on the eve of the
direct action, and withheld by the prosecution. As the Lord Chief
Justice said months later, this undermined the ‘elementary
principles which underpin the fairness of our trial procedures’.
These tapes would have shown that those who claimed that they were
undecided about taking part in the action at the time of arrest
were indeed telling the truth. They would also have shown that we
believed what we had maintained throughout our trial – that
our planned action was crucial in order to save lives. Felicity
Gerry QC of the CPS had claimed throughout that it was just a
publicity stunt that was more fun than voting, and we had only
planned to shut down a power station because we had been unable to
get tickets for Glastonbury.
A review was ordered, and in April the Director of Public
Prosecutions took the unusual step of inviting us to appeal. And so
it was that we walked into the Court of Appeal on July 18, 827 days
after our arrest, to hear the Lord Chief Justice’s ruling. ‘It is a
case,’ he said, ‘which has given rise to a great deal of public
disquiet, which we share’. Something had gone ‘seriously wrong’
with the trial, and the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence
which would have ‘seriously undermined’ their case. ‘As a result
justice miscarried.’ After just an hour, we walked out with our
convictions quashed.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
It is nice to be vindicated. Yet many questions do still remain
unanswered, and despite multiple inquiries (seven by some counts,
eight by others) it seems unlikely that we will get answers any
time soon. Who was it that made the decision not to disclose the
evidence? Why were only 26 charged, or why were 87 wrongfully
arrested? How many undercover officers are out there, also trying
to prevent peaceful, proportional action? Why was the plan not
nipped in the bud back when the police first knew about it – why,
instead, a decision to arrest as many people as possible just
before it happened, and then tie them up for two years in the
courts? It is difficult to see how such tactics help facilitate
protest, which, as we are often told in political soundbites, is a
healthy part of a functioning democracy.
The media fascination with Mark Kennedy has shifted emphasis off
of those higher up the shadowy chain of command, away from those
who might be able to answer these questions. With representation by
Max Clifford, an upcoming documentary and rumours of a feature
film, it doesn’t look like that fascination is going to go away any
time soon. If the inquiries do eventually decide that something has
gone wrong, we will most likely be told that Kennedy was just one
rogue in a perfectly good system, and if we could just root out the
rogues then we’d all be back to normal. But is that really the
case? Our appeal came on the same day as the parliamentary
committee for News International, and so singing a song of
corruption was hardly something new. But the timing made it hard
not to feel, as the allegations gathered around Westminster, that
rather than a few rogues in an otherwise healthy system, the
corruption went right to the heart of the system itself.
COMPETING NARRATIVES
Yet despite all this, the jury did find us guilty. Lacking
Kennedy’s crucial evidence, their decision became a choice between
two competing narratives. Our earnest stance of saving lives and
the failings of democracy, versus the prosecution’s insistence that
we’d have been happier at Glastonbury, and that we had made no
previous efforts to convey our message, despite our proof to the
contrary. We should not ignore that they chose the latter. Whilst
tempting to write their decision off as a jury that just didn’t
‘get it’, or as a state which had weighted everything against us,
it isn’t always useful to carry on playing the role of the
misunderstood underdog. It may be useful to look a little
deeper.
I feel guilty. Not about planning to shut down a power station,
because I have never wavered in my conviction that putting our
bodies in the way of emissions is proportional and right. But
guilty of other things, things that I believe may well have
contributed to the jury’s unanimous verdict. Guilty of not
adequately communicating our reasons for what we chose to do (and
real communication concerns itself with what is heard, not just
what is said). Guilty of assuming that if we told people enough
facts then they would absorb our vision of the world. Guilty of
thinking we could turn up in an ex-mining community and not engage
with peoples’ immediate and local problems. Guilty of thinking we
had the right to speak for people without first asking them if we
had this right, when we come from a demographic that you could fit
on a pinhead. Those are things that do not go away when the
convictions are overturned.
In trying to force our own vision upon the world without taking
the time to listen and understand, are we further entrenching the
stories which we were originally hoping to challenge? Indeed,
people do not respond well to having changes forced upon them,
having new ways of life shoved down their throats, and we can be
thankful for that. Working with blind urgency will never build
community and it will not build solidarity, and it is these that
will truly challenge the current status quo. We are so very prone
to unconsciously repeating the same myths we have grown up with.
Stories that sustain the ‘us and them’ dynamic that closes down a
deeper, holistic conception of the world.
Stories that stress that the world is shaped by individuals, and
those individuals are the ones with the loudest and boldest voices.
Stories that fail to address privilege. Stories that fetishise
progress as the direction of humanity, that claim we are on an
upwards path to a final destination, some secular version of
heaven. But these stories can change, if we begin to be aware of
our taking part in them. It is us who must become the
storytellers.
True storytellers neither tell you the story that you want to
hear, nor a story that will shape the world into their vision of
it. They speak a story from a true place, and they trust the rest
to the wings they give their story, and to their listener. There is
a gulf between storytelling and advertising, and this is it: we
must discern whether the stories that we carry, and that we live
by, are true ones, for if not they will not find their mark. To
discern comes from cernere, to separate – it is to sort the truth
from the rest, within ourselves. This is the very basis of
spiritual activism. Stories that are not true will manifest
accordingly, for it is truth that is the essence of life
itself.
BETTER PARABLES
When we were arrested we were building up to what was being touted
as the most important meeting in human history, the 15th UN
Conference under the Climate Change Convention, in Copenhagen. It
came and went. As we sat through the trial the 16th Conference, in
Cancun, came and went also. Now we are in 2011 and climate change
has all but vanished from both the political and social agenda.
Yes, this is understandable, due to the pressing urgency of other
questions, and the immediacy of people’s concerns. And no, this is
not understandable, because it has not gone away.
Areas of clear cut forest stare back unblinking and the islands
are blurring at the edges. The world is thirsty and the wounds are
fly-blown and we have reached a point that even if it heals there
will still be a legacy of scars. Yet still we tend to fall back on
our familiar stories in times of need. I believe the jury’s
reaction to us emphasises that.
Clearly, what we have failed to do is to draw the links and tell
the tales that show that environmental justice is an issue for
every person on this planet, and that the same system that
perpetuates ever increasing emissions also perpetuates poverty and
oppression. The riots in London have made apparent the fear and
anger that people feel when authority is being challenged, but not
in their name. Any action needs, first and foremost, to unite and
empower communities, by supporting, inspiring, and making these
links explicit. If we do not, we may rightly be judged guilty.
Christianity has long understood the power of parable, and how
it can open spaces that allow a deeper morality and spirituality to
flourish in ways which simple instruction cannot. Perhaps, again,
that is where we should be looking, for the stories that have borne
truth across millennia within their words.
Perhaps the Church has a role to play in exposing the illusory,
unsubstantial nature of the myths we now believe. For these modern
stories can change. The cliffhangers are starting to seem more like
bad endings. Education, unemployment, debt, health, the environment
– the future is being pulled from beneath our feet. We will live
with these problems, and our children will live with these
problems. People are realising this, and they are choosing not to
back down. The fight against climate change can be a part of this
changing story. We can tell it as one symptom of a system of
oppression that has turned its back upon the marginalised. We can
join others, not just invite them to join us. Supporting the
struggles of others is also direct action. Or we can try and tackle
climate change in a way that plays into and shores up the pervading
narrative, and continues to exclude those that are already excluded
by the very system we claim to fight.
This is our choice, and it is not an incidental choice. It is
one that lies at the very heart of who we are, and who we will
become.
Read the story of the whole trial here.
Adam Weymouth
