radiofree.asia

Jeremy Clarkson just got schooled by Just Stop Oil over ‘political prisoners’

Climate campaigners Just Stop Oil have challenged Jeremy Clarkson to learn the truth about the dozens of political prisoners in the UK.

Jeremy Clarkson: here’s the reality of state repression in 2024

Last week, Jeremy Clarkson falsely suggested that the government had banned farmers from protesting in London. He also told the S*n:

Perhaps if I had draped my tractor in a Palestinian flag it would be different. It seems that if you are from Just Stop Oil or protesting about Gaza, you can do what you want.

But Just Stop Oil highlighted where Clarkson had gone so badly wrong. It insisted that, currently:

there are a total of 40 ordinary people in prison for nonviolent direct action.

Indeed, there have been recent protests by the Free Political Prisoners campaign calling for the release of “the 40+ political prisoners from Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil who are currently in prison”. The repression of these non-violent movements shows precisely how they can’t just ‘do what they want’ and get away with it, as Clarkson ignorantly suggested.

At a time when ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine are ongoing, meanwhile, Clarkson also trivialised such horrors to make a typically stupid point. Playing into racist far-right rhetoric, he claimed that the government wanted to “carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero wind farms”. He added that, in order to do that, it would “have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers”. Needless to say, that’s bullshit.

What certainly is true, however, is that police officers have been arresting Jewish people for speaking out against the Gaza genocide and the many crimes of the Israeli apartheid state. They have been intimidating journalists who dare to challenge the pro-genocide propaganda polluting the West’s establishment media system. And they have been arresting climate activists and raiding their homes, as happened recently to Just Stop Oil’s Sam Griffiths:

As another protester said poignantly after his recent arrest:

[the] lack of real democracy [in the West] breeds resentment and allows bad actors like Trump to exploit the disquiet to further benefit the billionaire class.

Stop “the prosecution and jailing of people of conscience”

Tim Crosland and Paddy Friend from Defend Our Juries recently wrote that:

we cannot stand by as people are jailed for telling the truth and taking action to stop the genocide in Gaza and the continued extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal.

They added:

There is an unavoidable contradiction in government right now between the prosecution and jailing of people of conscience and the civil service code of conduct and international law.  Civil servants cannot be made complicit in breaches of international law and in attacks on the rule of law in this country.

And they explained that:

Defend Our Juries, along with 2000 cultural figures and 67,000 members of the public, has written to the Attorney General Richard Hermer, calling for a public meeting with him to discuss the jailing of political prisoners in the UK and the interference in the criminal justice process by industry lobbyists.

Finally, they insisted:

The criminal justice system has created an unconscionable situation. We are now in a position in which public employees and citizens are forced to ask ourselves: What did I do as British weapons rained down on people in Gaza and as the burning of Fossil Fuels condemned vast regions of the world and countless human lives to ruin? What did I do when the rule of law was threatened and those trying to defend it were being imprisoned?

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.