One of the most unpleasant aspects of New Labour is their antipathy to civil liberties. It arises naturally from the determination of its founders (essentially Brown, Mandelson, Blair) to turn Labour into a dogmatically pro-business party where the values of business, and in particular Big Business, are made to prevail at every level of the economy and society. Those values centre round not only deregulation, privatisation, globalisation, and a business-friendly tax regime, but also the protection of business property and support wherever feasible to promote business profits. Values that may sometimes stand in the way – democracy, dissent, equal opportunity, personal freedom, tolerance of minority opinion, to name a few – are downplayed or ignored. A regular victim of this pro-corporate authoritarian civic order has been civil liberties. With the assault now being threatened against climate change protesters, it is now under attack again, this time even more extreme than before.

Today’s report that the Attorney General is considering action to clamp down on direct-action climate change protesters reveals that the Government’s obsession with eliminating dissent is now taking a more sinister form. Furious at the acquittal of the Kingsnorth 6, the Government is now intending to erode the key point of the defence that the protesters had a ‘lawful excuse’ for their action in seeking to paint a warning on the Kingsnorth chimney, namely that they wanted to prevent greater damage to property from imminent climate change. That the jury acquitted the defendants in full knowledge of the facts about the damage to property done at Kingsnorth should have given the Government cause to think again about the values implicit in this case – the protection of private profit in the short term versus the protection of the economy and society from long-term catastrophe. The jury saw through the short-sightedness of capitalist wealth creation. The Government is determined to go down defending it.
This is not an isolated incident. In a high-profile episode 5 years ago Greenpeace protesters, including Lord Melchett, trashed a GM field in Norfolk because of the health risks and the environmental risks to organic agriculture, but were then acquitted by the jury. Similar prosecutions of protesters against incinerators, landscape-destroying new roads, increased airport capacity, nuclear plants, and trade in armaments and toxic chemicals disposal have all failed in the face of a defence based on conscience or preventing a greater crime. Nor is this a twenty-first century phenomenon: juries 200 years ago regularly threw out prosecutions for stealing and other relatively minor crimes because they refused to accept that such offences should lead to the death penalty. Even then there was a revulsion against the use of the law by the propertied classes to protect their interests, even though the defendant had clearly broken the law.
This will certainly not be the last case of its kind either. The protestors who peacefully stopped a train carring coal to the Drax plant in Yorkshire, the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country, and then shovelled the coal on to the track are due to be brought to trial in February. I have already agreed to be a witness for the defence in showing that they acted on grounds of conscience and to prevent the far greater risk of global warming overwhelming property in the UK and throughout the world.
Sadly, this case also makes a mockery of the Government’s claim to be a world leader against climate change. Rhetoric means nothing unless translated into action which expresses it. What this latest report reveals is that when confronted with a choice between civil protesters concerned about the long-term survival of the planet and the human race on the one hand and business protesters concerned about their ability to amass profit undisturbed whatever the consequences, New Labour chose the latter even to the extent of being prepared to change the law in the interests of their business friends.

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