If someone were to punch a police officer the obvious reaction is “well, I can sort of understand in an abstract way your burning hatred for the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, but it was a bloody stupid thing to do in the circumstances and don’t be too surprised if you get locked up for a while”.

When Just Stop Oil activists get sentences of up to five years after taking part in a Zoom call and being grassed up by a Sun “journalist” the only possible reaction is indignation. This is press and judicial activism in support of the fossil fuel industries and climate change denialists. The substantive offence was “conspiring to cause a public nuisance” by briefly blocking a motorway. This in a country where countless thousands have journeys disrupted by cancelled trains every week and a software glitch disrupted business and travel for millions.

What has been done to Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Lucia Whittaker, Louise Lancaster, and Cressida Gethin should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who is ever likely to take part in strike, join a demonstration or participate in a protest. It is the purest expression of the judicial process as a form of class warfare and has to be challenged by trade unions, Labour and Green Party members and anyone who takes civil liberties seriously.

The British judiciary is reported to be famously incorruptible. Not even a lowly magistrate would dream of taking a bribe but people like Christopher Hehir, the judge who sentenced five supporters of Just Stop Oil to up to five years in prison, are as politically reliable as any of their Moscow counterparts. It is not hyperbole to compare the imprisoned activists to the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In 1834 they were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia for a virtually identical offence when they organised to set up a trade union. Hehir stands in a long and violent tradition of application of the law in favour of the rich and powerful.

Putinesque

I went to a Just Stop Oil meeting a year or so ago. I pointed out that not everyone is able or willing to engage in some of their forms of protest and they accepted that. However, what I heard was a group of people with a deeply informed understanding of the science of climate change and its impact on the poorest people on the planet. I was very impressed by their determination and commitment to make huge personal sacrifices for the benefit of humanity and nature. They are in a direct line with the Tolpuddle labourers, the suffragettes and the miners who were framed by cops.

Starmer, the human rights lawyer with the mile wide authoritarian streak, is on record as expressing a deep hatred for Just Stop Oil and even that nice Ed Miliband has jumped on the bandwagon against them. If there is not a massive campaign to get the jailed five out of prison as quickly as possible and the Putinesque legislation under which they were sentenced repealed, this will be a huge defeat for the left, the environmental movement and the working class.

Sign the petition here to help get them out.