TADEAS:
Rupert Read
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/ffjNxfSnUoimp6nR/A memo re Roger Hallam being sent to prison for five years for plotting to block the M25:
This is a pretty shocking sentence. But given the new anti-protest laws, laws that have been exceptionally condemned by the UN Special Rapporteur as draconian, I suppose we can’t be too >surprised< by it.
Roger and I have always had extremely different strategic approaches. The Climate Majority Project, which I now co-lead, exists precisely for anyone and everyone who wants to get serious about taking climate action so that we and our kids have a future, but who doesn’t want to sit in a road. Like most people, I don’t agree with Just Stop Oil’s approach at all.
But it is still worth asking how history, if we are all lucky and smart enough to create together a future in which it gets to be written at all, will regard Just Stop Oil protesters such as Roger. History may regard them as blundering, even as counter-productive. But it will certainly regard them incomparably better than it regards fossil fuel interests and those politicians who cravenly do exactly what those interests want.
Roger’s approach is in my informed view a dead end. But at least he is on the right side of history; on the side of the angels, as it were, however cack-handedly sometimes. I think it impossible that any historians fortunate enough to be looking back on this historical moment of decision for humanity will regard him being sent down for five years - at a time when the prisons moreover are bursting at the seams - as anything other than an unjust and bizarre outcome.
Future historians will wonder why he was sent down for five years, while the likes of Boris Johnson, or the heads of Shell and BP, walk free. Those people, and the professional liars who have done their bidding for so long, surely deserve if anything to be behind bars more than he does.
Lastly: The sad thing is that Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil alienated so many people that it is going to be hard to generate big public sympathy / an effective plan for solidarity and early release for Roger and his four fellow inmates. The huge amount of publicity that they generated was in many cases given to them (by right wing / establishment media) >precisely so that they would lose sympathy<, precisely to generate anger and disapproval. ...So there are lessons all round, here.