In October 2023 I found myself in Court for the first time, charged with Wilful Obstruction of the Highway after an action with Just Stop Oil one year previous. This is an account of what took place in the Court, from memory.
Feeling overwhelmed by the legal admin that facing trial as a Self Repper seemed to entail, I was substantially cheered by a JSO ‘Magistrates’ Strategy’ briefing which I attended a few months before our Court date. The gist of the JSO strategy is to focus simply on speaking our truth to the Court. When we stepped into the road we weren’t trying to avoid arrest or to escape the legal consequences of our actions. The strategy proposes that we enter the Court in that same spirit, and not over-invest in the legal challenges that the Ziegler precedent offers, which in this context – facing a District Judge in a Magistrates Court – very rarely result in acquittal anyway.
My relieved sense of alignment with this strategy was later offset by the fact that all six of our eleven-strong roadblock team who’d already come before the courts during two previous trials had been acquitted under Ziegler. So in our case that carrot was certainly dangling, and my co-defendants were for giving it a try. Our two-day trial was largely focussed, then, on Ziegler-related arguments about whether the police had acted in breach of our fundamental right of protest by arresting us prematurely, a mere fifteen minutes after their arrival on the scene.
The Prosecutor’s cross-examinations focussed on whether or not it was ‘reasonable’ that we chose to remain in the road to the point of arrest, despite our action having already gained the ‘desired media attention’, which seemed to have been understood by the Court as essentially its core purpose.
In the latter part of the trial we stood up in turn to offer our own Witness Statements. I’d come with a written text (below), but in the event set this aside and just ran with what had been backing up in me since the trial began. I’d previously submitted Jon Fuller’s Expert Witness Statement to the CPS on behalf of CGAN (Climate Genocide Act Now). I told the judge that I seconded everything my colleagues had said about Ziegler, but had nothing further to add. Instead I referred her to Jon Fuller’s eleven-page CGAN statement, and told her that I wished to address the context for our action, which was the ongoing climate genocide currently being enacted by the UK government.
I put it to her that if the phrase climate genocide seemed hyperbolic, the Court might consider the UK government’s refusal to adhere to its own legally binding agreements on emission reductions from the point of view of someone in Pakistan, say, who’s just lost their entire family to the recent catastrophic flooding driven by climate unravelling. I told her that we’d acted in the context of an ongoing mass-extermination by “oblique intent” – ie not a directly desired outcome of Govt policy, just a long foreseen and wilfully ignored consequence of it. I said that I’d taken action with Just Stop Oil because this seemed – and still seems – the last available means by which to confront the ethical obscenity of our Government’s refusal to be held accountable to its current policies’ devastating impacts on the young and the unborn.
When the Prosecutor repeated the same line of questioning, arguing that it had surely been unreasonable for me to choose to remain locked on in the road once our action had gained the desired media attention and even past the point of arrest (I’d actually forgotten this detail of the removal process), I replied that within the context I’d just offered his choice of word was frankly offensive; also, that in citing concern with media attention he was addressing an intention which I’d not once spoken of.
I repeated to him what I’d already told the judge: I didn’t lock on in order to gain media attention. I did so in order to bear witness to an immediate and much greater harm before fellow citizens, in the hope of motivating some of them to follow suit. A publicly-witnessed arrest and removal was thus a core and intended outcome of the action, rather than an untimely interruption of it. All of which of course refers back to XR first principles: to confront entrenched and oppressive power with open vulnerability and sacrifice, inspiring others to do likewise. Or not.
I don’t think any of this undermined my friends’ Ziegler arguments. I hope not. Either way, the truth surely remains that we all went there fully intending to be arrested, however long that might take. What clarified itself in me on that Witness Stand was that the Ziegler focus, legally workable as it may be, had muddled our action with a ‘protest’ that might have been allowed to run its natural course, but which had instead been prematurely interrupted by our untimely arrest. (My one previous and somewhat gentler experience of locking on, with XR at Lloyds of London, ran its slightly absurd course in exactly this way, in what still seems to me a successful outflanking of that action by the Met.)
I think I even told the judge that my main concern in taking disruptive direct action of this kind is not that the police will arrest us too promptly – it’s that they won’t, and we’ll be stuck there continuing to obstruct and frustrate our fellow citizens as we wait for the police to show.
I concluded by telling her about the many young adults I encounter in my work as an HE lecturer who are struggling to live with the knowledge that unaddressed global heating and ecological collapse are now spiralling out of control. I said that what seemed to me the most corrosive aspect of this knowledge was their being faced with a political and social establishment who appear not greatly troubled by this lethal trajectory, as they continue to double down on all the key drivers of it. I told her that we acted within this context because we were determined to no longer simply stand by and ignore an unfolding climate genocide.
I returned to my seat relieved to have at least said why I’d acted as I had. To my surprise that relief turned into tears that began pouring down my face once I sat down. Not knowing where to put myself, I held my face in my hands and waited for it to pass. The judge offered a recess which I declined, apologising and saying it was just a release of tension.
Maybe the tears which issued from bringing this stuff before the Court helped in their own way to communicate something to the judge of our intent. Be that as it may, in her summing up she referred only to Ziegler, and to why Ziegler did not, of course, apply to the facts of our case. Quelle surprise. She did take the trouble to tell us that everything we’d said concerning our reasons for acting as we had were “entirely appropriate”, and that the overwhelming gravity of the issue which motivated us was beyond question.
She found the four of us Guilty and imposed what I think is the minimum possible sanction: a twelve-month Conditional Discharge with Court Costs.
Statement to Court (excerpt)
I didn’t take action with Just Stop Oil because of my beliefs, or my opinions. Anthropogenic global heating is not an opinion, nor is the related collapse of Earth’s life systems a matter of personal conviction. I’m standing in court because I’ve listened, for decades now, to scientists, policy advisors and other informed voices who’ve consistently born witness to the accelerating collapse of our planet’s complex biosphere – and thus of all organised human societies – under the impact of ever rising levels of fossil-fuel pollution. I’m standing in court because for 30 years successive UK Govts, having been clearly advised that a catastrophe is unfolding, have chosen to resolutely ignore this advice.
When my eldest son was born in 1993 the IPCC was in its third year, tasked with overseeing a rapid international phasing out of atmospheric carbon pollution. During his lifetime the scale of that pollution, far from being phased out, has increased by 60% – such that more atmospheric carbon pollution has now been released by industrialised societies since his birth than had been in all of human history before it. The consequences of this acceleration towards ecological and societal collapse have not been in any serious doubt at any point throughout those 30 years: I have nothing of substance to offer the Court that was not both well understood and widely communicated in 1993. 30 years on, the UK Govt continues to make policy decisions in brazen complicity with the corporate entities who’ve overseen this catastrophe by successfully gaslighting citizens into believing that there’s any remaining doubt about what’s happening here. Even the Govt’s recent extension of its powers to suppress public dissent, the Public Order Act, was drafted by a think-tank openly funded by these very fossil fuel interests: the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
It remains a deeply uncomfortable step to take, for me, to wilfully obstruct and inconvenience my fellow citizens. I didn’t do so lightly, but in light of the above I felt compelled to do whatever I could to support Just Stop Oil’s campaign, which can be accurately described as demanding that the UK Govt heed international law, and answer to its primary duty of care to the young. I’ve plenty to lose from the consequences of taking action as we did, but no more so than when I stepped onto Hanbury Street on October 30th fully expecting to be arrested for remaining there. My hope in coming before this Court is that it will join us in recognising and bearing witness to the truth of our societal predicament in whatever manner feels appropriate to it.
Stratford Court London 16.10.23
Seacrow Letters 
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