Why I broke the law with Extinction Rebellion
In October 2019, as the police clamped down — unlawfully, as it turned out — on Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests that were taking place around the capital, I sat down in the road and glued myself to a fellow protester. Almost a year later, in September 2020, as it became apparent that the police were once again going to limit XR protests so as to make them as low-impact as possible, I did it again (only this time lying down, and with a lock-on tube rather than glue). I was arrested both times, and after postponements, some legal ins and outs, and some reflections on tactics and strategy, I found myself in the dock at Westminster Magistrates Court pleading guilty to one charge of participating in a public assembly in breach of a Section 14 order and one charge of obstructing a public highway without lawful authority or excuse.
After I’d entered my plea and the prosecutor had set out the Crown’s case against me, I was asked if I had anything to say. I did. As I spoke, I trembled — nerves, mostly, but also emotion. The chief magistrate seemed sympathetic and perhaps moved too; at any event, I was given a conditional discharge — no fine, minimal costs. As a QC told me later, “a conditional discharge is mildest sentence a court has at its disposal and signifies its belief that the offences are as close to trivial as may be imagined.” I have given the fine I avoided to XR instead.
In what follows, I reproduce the statement I read out in court. Parts of it are specific to me, but I share it in the hope that other rebels may find it useful as they draw up their own statements. I also share it in the hope that it will provide rebels with a bit of affirmation as they navigate the confusing, intimidating, and anxiety-inducing legal system. Many of us threw ourselves into civil disobedience in a spirit of togetherness, and although we understood in most ways what we were getting into, the loneliness of some paths through the legal system can come as a surprising and unwelcome contrast. I hope my statement reminds those of you who are on one of the lonely paths that a humane, moral, loving wind is at your back.
Here is the statement.
“Extinction Rebellion protesters have been described by politicians and journalists as extremist anarchists and jobless hippies, as if we revel in the disruption we have caused. I don’t recognise that description, as applied either to myself or to my fellow protesters. I have been a law-abiding citizen all my life. As a lecturer and tutor in philosophy I teach and write about and have defended the legitimacy of the state and its law. I take seriously my duties as a citizen, as a colleague, as a teacher, as a member of my community, and as a father. I haven’t revelled in disrupting people. On the contrary, I have found it an enormous strain, and it has carried significant costs for me, quite apart from this prosecution, that I would much rather have avoided. I did not take the actions that gave rise to these cases lightly.
“Protesters have also been described as gullible, or as puppets of vested interests. I don’t recognise that description either. On the contrary, after I had heard the claims made by Extinction Rebellion, I felt I could not in good conscience repeat them or engage in civil disobedience myself until I had verified them, for they were so momentous that it would have been unforgivable to take them on trust alone. I believe in truth and truthfulness and the scepticism that serves them. Indeed, these values define my career. So I read reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the World Bank, the Committee on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organisation, NASA, and many others. I read scientific papers. I talked to climate scientists. I was no one’s puppet and no one’s dupe.
“Protesters have also been described as alarmist. That is another description I don’t recognise. The science was and is clear and it is devastating. We have been on a trajectory that exposes millions of people to deadly heat, drought, storms, floods, water scarcity, and crop failures, and we have been on that trajectory, knowing where it was heading, for decades. Even in the past week we have heard that glaciers are melting in line with the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios. We have been hacking down, digging up, paving over, and polluting the natural world at an ever-accelerating rate, watching wildlife populations plummet, driving species to the edge of extinction, and destroying the very natural life support systems we will need all the more in an overheating world. Yet we are betting on carbon capture technologies that have never been shown to work at the necessary scale and the availability of an area twice the size of India to grow bioenergy crops in. And that’s just to give us a 50–50 chance of staying below 1.5ºC of warming — which isn’t a safe level anyway. We are not even living up to the little we promised in making that bet, according to our own Government’s advisors. The UK has broken most of its biodiversity treaty obligations, and the world has missed every biodiversity target that it has set in the last 20 years. Scientists agree that the sixth mass extinction has begun, the first since the dinosaurs. And we are driving it. This is not alarmism, but a clear-eyed assessment of the overwhelming evidence — an assessment, I would add, whose import is increasingly recognised and endorsed by political leaders. I submit that this recognition and endorsement is not wholly unrelated to the protests in which I took part.
“So I don’t recognise any of these descriptions. But I do recognise this description: I am someone who cares about the climate and environment and about the millions of people whose lives and livelihoods depend on their protection. I am someone who voted Green and wrote letters to MPs and councillors and signed petitions and avoided flying and bought local and stopped driving and switched energy supplier and donated to environmental charities — all to no effect. I was a child who saw hedgehogs in the garden and seven or eight butterflies on our suburban buddleia bush on a summer’s day and hundreds of insects on the windscreen of our car, and now I am a father whose nature-loving children have never seen a hedgehog or sped through clouds of insects and who come running to see even a single red admiral on the buddleia in our garden.
“I desperately wish to conserve a hospitable world of abundant and diverse wildlife, of lapwings and hedgehogs and bees and butterflies at home and whales and orang-utans and turtles and tree frogs abroad, for my children and all their generation to grow up into. I don’t want to bequeath to them a world of climate-driven mass suffering and shortage and irrevocable damage and a belated sense of the enormity of what has been lost. And if that is what is going to be bequeathed to them — as it seemed it would be at the time I took these actions and may still be, despite the warmer words of today’s governments — then I want to be able to look them in the eye and say that I tried my best to stop it.
“Like every other protester, I did this out of a kind of despairing love, and I did it all utterly peacefully and respectfully. I am well aware of the privilege that allowed me to feel able to do it, and that gives me the self-confidence to speak to the court for myself today. About that I can only say that I have tried to use the privilege for the good of others, and indeed that is why I took the actions that have brought me before the court today.”
Like so many others, I am hugely grateful to John Briant for his unstinting support for rebels and his advice about the legal process. Confusing, intimidating, and anxiety-inducing as it was, he made it much less so than it would been without him.
