More than any other group of activists who don’t use violence, the British state comes down hardest on those who are motivated by ecological concerns. It does so which such violence and frequency in a manner which seems irrational compared to the threat these groups represent.  It invested huge resources planting  undercover agents for years in small networks which posed no conceivable threat to public safety, still less the capitalist system, and the trauma inflicted on innocent women was laughed off by senior officers.

The thinking of the men who ran the Spy Cops still prevails and we cannot know what comparable scandals will emerge in the years to come. The ITV series touched on the fact that this form of explicitly political policing was developed as a response to the youth rebellions of the late 1960s and police forces have longer institutional memories than groups of climate activists.

When the cops arrested people attending a meeting of Youth Demand in a Quaker building, they were tooled up as if they were auditioning for one of those Channel Five documentaries where they burst in on violent drug dealers in a grim northern town. This is the British version of the Israeli technique of “mowing the grass”.

It is apparent that the state took a strategic decision to be exceptionally vicious with the members and leaders of Just Stop Oil (JSO) to prevent anyone trying to emulate their tactics. Graeme Hayes of Aston University told The Times:

“Using conspiracy charges to bring in leaders — in politics, it’s called a decapitation strategy — has allowed the police and Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute people who weren’t necessarily undertaking action themselves but would have been at the heart of developing strategy.”

This is another way of saying that people like Roger Hallam and Louise Lancaster can be jailed for four years solely on the basis of their ideas rather than anything they have actually done.

I went to a local JSO meeting a couple of months ago and they were the least criminal looking people you could ever encounter. They may have presented themselves as a “revolutionary spearhead” but they seemed to lack the ruthlessness required to suppress counter-revolution and embraced martyrdom as an honour in a way that was more reminiscent of early Christians. The average Labour right winger is a thousand times more vicious. Theirs is more a veganism and herbal tea vibe with which my inner Dzerzhinsky often struggles. For all that, the hatred they inspire on the right of British politics is impressive. Who else gets articles along the lines of  Good riddance to Just Stop Oil and its deluded fanatics?

JSO issued a statement last week announcing that it is now abandoning its strategy of “pressuring the state by exploiting its current weakest point: prison capacity.” The meeting I attended was a lot smaller than the previous one I had been at, and it was apparent that the prison sentences and harassment had taken a toll.

When the IRA, another “revolutionary spearhead”, albeit one for which violence was the unifying programme,  ended its border campaign in 1962 it said “foremost among the factors motivating this course of action has been the attitude of the general public”. The campaign might have been stupid and an ill-conceived failure, but at least they were honest about the lack of popular support. JSO have taken a different tack. They say that they are “one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history”, before adding:

“Governments everywhere are retreating from doing what is needed to protect us from the consequences of unchecked fossil fuel burning. As we head towards 2°C of global heating by the 2030s, the science is clear: billions of people will have to move or die and the global economy is going to collapse.”

If that is what success looks like…

Absent from the statement is any meaningful explanation of the abrupt change of tactics. There is no shame in going into struggle and recognising that the state bludgeoned and “criminalised” you into a defeat, but it is always more educative to set out plainly what happened.

Starmer’s illiberalism, racism and determination to impoverish the poorest will lead to either a Reform government at the next election or outbursts of rage and frustration. We have seen how the state is going to deal with opposition and complete, unconditional solidarity for those on the left who will be harassed, arrested and imprisoned will be essential.