“They’re trying to bully us into submission to scare us out of doing the right thing, to allow them to do the wrong thing.” – Tracey, Insulate Britain

This is part two of a three-part series. You can read part one here.  

At the Conservative Party conference in October 2021 Priti Patel announced a number of measures that seemed to specifically target both Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion. Alongside announcing a “one-stop shop” for cracking down on ‘illegal migrants’, she said there would be ​tougher punishments for obstructing the highway. What had been a maximum £1,000 fine would now incur an unlimited fine, six months imprisonment, or both. 

Insulate Britain are “trampling over our way of life and draining police resources”, Patel said:

There will be new challenges and new tests. And we will meet them, strengthened by our belief in this country. That is my promise to you, that is my service to the people of Britain.

Patel is talking to a room of supportive onlookers. However, one wonders if she exempts people who decide to protest against ‘the state’ from being “the people of Britain”.

In the wake of the conviction of five activists, including Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, and Insulate Britain co-founder Roger Hallam, as the author of the Public Order Bill Patel’s comments deserve scrutiny. 

Representatives from campaign groups Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Palestine Action (founded in March 2020), say that what sounded like a new crackdown was actually nothing more than the official announcement of a diversification of punitive actions taken by a more and more authoritarian government and an escalating surveillance state.

Patel: legislating for existing operational reality

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (PCSC Act) was introduced to parliament by the Ministry of Justice in 2019. Roundly condemned by the public and politicians alike, a number of clauses were struck down in the House of Lords in 2022. These included, ‘Serious Disruption Prevention Orders’, ‘suspicionless’ stop and search powers, noise conditions on protests and an amendment to a proposed increase to the penalty for “wilfully obstructing the highway” so that it only applied to the Strategic Road Network, instead of all public highways.

Lawyers warned the government the proposals in the bill “clearly violate international human rights standards”.

“This will be the biggest widening of police powers to impose restrictions on public protest that we’ve seen in our lifetimes,” Chris Daw QC, a leading barrister and author, told the Big Issue, which calls itself the UK’s number one street paper and social enterprise .

The Ministry of Justice and Home Office have worked in tandem before, in the deportation of prisoners It’s possible that the Home Office introduced the Public Order Bill in response to what it perceived as impending civil unrest. 

According to Netpol, a campaigning group that challenges police power by working on the front lines with movements for social justice, the Bill “seeks to revive the amendments that it lost in the Lords”. The PCSC Act and Public Order Act were just laws catching up with actual operational policy. 

Exacerbating an already toxic environment

Tom Fowler was targeted by undercover officers for many years whilst part of South Wales Anarchists and active in environmental and social justice campaigns. He has spent much of the last 14 years taking legal action against the police, doing live reports from the SpyCops Inquiry, launched in 2015, and producing the Spycops Info Podcast.

He told the Canary that the:

Criminal Justice Act and Public Order Acts are a hallmark of British governments. They come out every couple of years. There were numerous bits of legislation all through the 70s… the closest thing was RIP, the Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act, released in the early 2000s, which gives a certain sort-of free framework, and more recently, the Criminal or the Corporate Human Intelligence Sources bill, the CHIS Bill which legalises basically anything – you can make a murderer as an undercover officer, and it’s perfectly okay.

I mean, it had the support of the Labour Party so that was just formalising what already happens anyway.

A spokesperson from Extinction Rebellion, who wishes to remain anonymous, believes a crackdown on activists was merely exacerbated by Patel’s conference speech. She told the Canary:

Priti Patel was giving it this big talk about stopping us before we could start.

There was one incident – which was very poor behaviour from the police – where they ran up to a bus and smashed the windows with the people inside. They [were] trying to climb up the bus and drag people out. That was unnecessarily aggressive on their part. I think it’s disproportionate.

It felt to me that it came in the context of a sort of whipping up politically of the pressure on them, which I would say comes directly from the [Commons] front benches.

Physical force and injunctions

Tracey Mallaghan, a spokesperson from Insulate Britain, was arrested at a protest in 2020. Subsequently she was fitted with a GPS tracker. She told the Canary:

I smashed a window of HSBC and they banned me from Tower Hamlets. I’m on a GPS tracker and because I’m not allowed in Tower Hamlets they can track wherever I go in the whole world.

She also received an injunction and had her assets including a laptop and mobile phone seized:

It was like ‘we know you’re prepared for prison so we’ll come for your assets’. I’m broke, I’m disabled, I lost my job, I am at risk of losing my home because they stop benefits if you go to prison for too long.

Speaking in the summer of 2022, the anonymous spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said she was aware of a number of people within the organisation who had been raided, either at home or at work:

Places where people are making banners and placards have sometimes been raided by pre-emptive police action. 

We’ve had storage locations that they’ve entered by breaking the door down… it was basically where people were keeping food stock to bring out and feed people on the ground. After they used a battering ram to break the door down they seized sound equipment and cushions and food.

The state hasn’t just been using physical force. It has been using the courts more and more.

The justice system: propping-up the authoritarianism

According to their own press office, between September and November 2021 Insulate Britain members had 857 arrests of 174 people in retaliation for 18 days of action. In addition, 15 people have been imprisoned for various lengths up to six months. Since April 2022 there have been more than 20 people arrested, with five imprisoned for up to three months. 

The Canary interviews were conducted before 7 October 2023.

The co-founders of Palestine Action say that since September 2021 they have carried out 34 actions resulting in 103 arrests. Nine people were remanded at their Bristol action, two of those people remain in prison. Before September 2021 there were five activists remanded. In 2020 there were 70 actions, including 21 occupations, and 100 arrests. 

The Canary’s anonymous Extinction Rebellion spokesperson says the police have been taking away laptops and other devices from their homes:

If your house is raided, if your warehouse is raided, if your office is raided, they usually routinely take all phones and all computers that they can find. There have been cases with our crew that have not resulted in people getting them back for more than a year.

There were some people there that were arrested for conspiracy to cause public nuisance. They had the charges dropped. They were given back their equipment. But anyone who wasn’t there has to give their name in order to get their stuff back.

This type of information gathering is routine, and lawyers for the group have said:

Well, if you want it back that badly, then you know, you can give them your name. But you are giving them information that you don’t need to give them.

When asked about their policy on pre-emptive raids, the Metropolitan Police told the Canary:

All police forces can execute search warrants on properties which may be linked to criminal activity or conspiracy to commit criminal activity. Devices, such as laptops and phones, may be seized as evidence.

Tracey said:

I personally am two computers and several phones down. I wasn’t given a list of things that they’ve taken. I still haven’t got that, no idea when I’ll get them back.

Labour voted this all through

The Public Order Act makes provisions for new offences relating to public order, provisions for police functions relating to public order, and serious disruption prevention. The accompanying factsheet goes further in saying:

These new measures are needed to bolster the police’s powers to respond more effectively to disruptive and dangerous protests. Over recent years, guerrilla tactics used by a small minority of protesters have caused a disproportionate impact on the hardworking majority seeking to go about their everyday lives and cost millions in taxpayers’ money and put lives at risk.

There were 277 ayes and 217 noes for the Public Order Bill in the House of Commons. The Labour Party which was perhaps whipped to vote no had no dissenting MPs, and the SNP and Liberal Democrats made the bulk of the other no votes. 

However, the opposition day votes for a repeal of the Public Order Act 2023 on 16 May 2023 may be an indication of whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is likely to attempt to repeal it or not now it is in government. 57 Ayes and 278 Noes.

It was not mentioned in the party’s manifesto. However it has said that Labour’s mission in government is to “take back our streets”. Take back the streets from whom remains to be seen. 

Meanwhile, the state has used all means at hand to surveil and target another very visible group who have had, until recently, less press than their peers Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.

Palestine Action

In July 2022 Palestine Action activists again protested outside Elbit System’s UK headquarters in Holborn. Elbit Systems Ltd is an Israel-based international military technology company and defense contractor. According to its own website the company develops and supplies a broad portfolio of airborne, land, and naval systems and products for defense, homeland security, and commercial applications.

At their London headquarters I spoke to Max, who was filming two Palestine Action activists who were locked together and another who was chained to a ladder before they were arrested. He said:

We have cost them literally millions of pounds. Unlike other groups we aren’t as interested as petitioning or a more passive boycott.

We are interested in costing the pillars of occupation money and we have cost them millions of pounds since we started and we prevented hundreds of days of work at these factories taking place and we know how profitable these companies are and with simple math we can divide their profits by how many days we have cost them.

In November 2020, Palestine Action co-founders Richard Barnard and Huda Ammori went on a trip to Wales for recreation. ​Both Richard and Huda were apprehended for a Schedule 7 stop under the Terrorism Act by the Wales Extremism and Counter-Terrorism unit at the Welsh border. 

According to StateWatch, a charity for research and policy analysis on civil liberties, human rights, and democratic standards, a Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides stop, search, question, and detention powers in ports and airports where ‘examining officers’ are able to stop, question and/or detain people to ascertain whether they are likely to be engaged in acts of terrorism, without the need for any reasonable suspicion.​

I asked both Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion if these measures had ever been used against them. They said no. 

‘The law doesn’t apply here’

However, during their detention, Palestine Action co-founder Huda says they were:

stopped and separated and then straight away they just asked for all of our passwords​. Basically under Schedule 7 you don’t have the right to no comment and they remind you that if you say no comment to anything you will get charged under the Terrorism Act.

You don’t have the right to a lawyer, so it’s completely different to being arrested outside of a port where you actually have lots of rights and the right to not reply. They basically interrogated us for three or four hours​.

As soon as we got there they split us up. I refused to give it [the password] for my laptop because I had other people’s details and I wasn’t comfortable. I was barely asked about what we were doing in Wales; they didn’t seem to care about that.

What they seemed to care about was Palestine Action.

They cared about what my family background was, what religion I was. My family’s name is because I’m Iraqi and Palestinian and I’ve been to Iraq and it was in my passport. They were asking me a lot about the Middle East and then my whole history of activism. After two hours I asked for a cigarette even though I don’t smoke and they said “oh you can smoke it inside” and I was like what do you mean? We can smoke it inside, isn’t that illegal? They said “Oh, the law didn’t apply here” and so it kind of felt very very serious to say the least.

Failing to deter ‘actionists’

The Wales Extremism and Counter Terrorism Unit (WECTU) could neither confirm nor deny contact with either Richard Barnard and Huda Ammori. However they did say that:

Counter Terrorism Policing adheres to guidelines as set out in Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act and that smoking is prohibited indoors in public buildings in Wales.

Richard had a similar experience, except they told him:

‘It’s nice to have someone like you here’, and I was like what do you mean by that? And then he was rather sheepishly going well you know, not a Muslim and white person because normally we just take Muslims’.

From the border they were passed on to the Metropolitan police, as were their belongings – which included a stencil that was later used as evidence in the Met’s case against them.  

Both Huda and Richard’s passports were taken from them.

The impression that Palestine Action’s co-founders had in 2022 is that they had been targeted by this new legislation because of what they are fighting for and for some of their members’ identities as descendants of countries in the Middle East.

It hasn’t stopped them however, and they have taken numerous actions this year against Barclays bank, demanding their ‘divestment from Israel’s weapons trade’ since the founders were arrested. 

The Terrorism Act being used as overreach

Asked if Tracey or anyone else in Insulate Britain has had their passports taken she told the Canary:

That hasn’t happened to us yet.

See, again, more repression, the weaker they think you are, it’s harder. Because racism just exists, right?

There’s so many forms, so many layers.

So to take the passport of somebody like me, grey haired, middle aged British women? Nah. Take it off of a couple of people from Israel, from Palestine Action, they think they can get away with it – right?

Nonetheless Steven Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, was detained by Kent police at Folkestone under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was released on unconditional bail. This past weekend he’d fled Britain to “put himself beyond the reach of authorities”, as he was due to be in court over alleged contempt proceedings for making a documentary, Silenced, which repeats false claims he made about a Syrian refugee that led to him losing a libel case in 2021.

On 30 September 2021, Huda was also charged with conspiracy to blackmail. She told the Canary:

one of the evidence that they have against me is that I retweeted something, and I know like 200 people retweeted that tweet as well. We really feel like we can affect Israel’s largest weapons company and make them think twice about doing business with the UK.

Their shareholders are aware this is happening, according to their own media they have undertaken a very expensive PR campaign where they try to win the people over.

We made repeated attempts were made to speak to Elbit Systems and the management company JLL of their London office in Holborn but they could not be reached for comment. 

Too little, too late – or not paying attention?

Palestine Action continue their battle against the state’s overreach in court and their campaign in the wake of the nine-month long Israeli aggression on Gaza which has now spilled over to Yemen and Lebanon.

In March 2023, a further Insulate Britain protester was jailed for five weeks for causing a nuisance to the public. Insulate Britain’s protests formally stopped on 4 November 2023, when 62 protesters blocked the roads around parliament.

There have been numerous protests. An open letter to the Attorney General signed by more than 1,200 artists, athletes, and academics – including Coldplay singer Chris Martin, artist Tracey Emin, director Danny Boyle, author Sir Philip Pullman, and Annie Lennox – condemned  the “injustice” of the sentences of the five Just Stop Oil protesters.

One has to wonder if the signatories had paid attention as other activists were targeted from 2021 onwards or as the Public Order Act went through parliament, whether the Just Stop Oil Five would be in jail today. 

According to Tristan Kirk, courts correspondent for the Evening Standard, on 25 July ten more Just Stop Oil activists were charged with conspiracy to interfere with Heathrow Airport. Eight were remanded in custody and two on bail.

All eyes on Starmer

Writing from prison, Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam said:

This trial was not about “the right to protest.” It is not about “a cause,” “an issue.” It’s civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality.

So whilst Priti Patel may have introduced these bills into parliament, even if she does manage to become leader of the Tory Party (winning its current dog fight), she won’t be near the levers of power for years if not decades to come. And the Tory home secretaries that came after her, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly (under who’s tenure the Public Order matured into the Public Order Act), won’t be near power either.

Therefore, we must turn our eyes and potential ire towards Yvette Cooper and her boss, Sir Keir Starmer, the man, the legend – and the former Director of Public Prosecutions.

Featured image via the Canary

By Samantha Asumadu

This post was originally published on Canary.