Hey everyone, it's Mikaela here.
I'm so glad so many of you reached out to say that my last newsletter resonated with you. This one will be a little different but even more important. Let's talk about the Public Order Bill in the UK and why it might mean that activists like myself could be banned from attending protests all together, sentenced to six months in prison or even criminalised for using social media - or even this newsletter - to call for folks to join protests or other forms of direct action.
With the cost of living scandal, civil unrest is now looking inevitable in the West. It's even been revealed that banks and investment firms are currently preparing for an "unprecedented" upsurge. With millions unable to pay for food or heating and the climate crisis worsening, we have been left with no other option but to resist, if the majority of us want to survive in the short or long term. I call it a "scandal" not just a "crisis" because high energy bills are not an immutable reality - it's the fault of the government refusing to implement measures to protect the people.
Refusing to tax these companies adequately (no, this new windfall tax is not enough), refusing to insulate homes, refusing to fund renewable energy and STILL pushing new oil and gas projects like Jackdaw. This scandal is the fault of a government who will do absolutely everything they can to protect the profits of energy companies who prop up the Conservative Party with millions in donations.
I think that with all that's going on, it's almost impossible not to feel angry. We are quite literally being sacrificed for profit. The only reasonable thing to do in this situation is fight back. But, with this new Public Order Bill, the government wants to make strategic resistance all but impossible.
You might have heard about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill through the "Kill The Bill" movement resisting it. After a huge amount of resistance from activists, the most draconian parts of the bill were removed by the House of Lords. But, the government hasn't given up. They're bringing back those parts and giving criminalising almost all forms of protest another go.
The normalisation of criminalising activists should deeply worry us. Not just because of the impact it has on those organising in the UK, but also because of the impact on activists globally. For so many activists and land defenders in countries in the Global South, resisting extractive industries and the ecocidal state is much more risky and often results in state violence. Colleagues in this work have expressed to me their worries about how imprisonment and arrest being normalised will also normalise that fact in the media for activists in more dangerous contexts. The fear here is that folks will react less urgently to a comrade in the GS being arrested. This lack of urgency could put more lives at risk.
I won't go into detail about every part of the bill itself here but I implore you to read up on it elsewhere. I wrote an article on it for gal-dem last week and NetPol wrote a brilliant explainer also.
Look, it's abundantly clear the government is going to this much trouble because they know that direct action works. We've seen it work time and time again over history. Without union organising and strikes we wouldn't have weekends, without Extinction Rebellion protests the government would not have declared a climate emergency, without the collective actions from #StopCambo the Cambo oil field would already be being worked on and without Insulate Britain's actions, we wouldn't be having such a big conversation about the need for insulation. Climate direct action creates the push that is needed to shift the conversation - and actions taken - in the direction of a livable future for all of us.
Back in 2019, I was one of thousands of people in the October Rebellion who put their liberty on the line as part of climate direct action. In an attempt to prevent our "site" blocking the road outside of the department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from being removed, I locked my arm in a metal arm tube for around eight hours. Our site was called "Power In Truth" and was there to expose the UK government's hypocrisy on climate action as they give billions in subsidies, public payments and tax breaks to the same fossil fuel companies who are actively causing the climate crisis.
Locking on was one of the scariest things I've ever done. As someone who is racialised as black, deliberately putting myself at the mercy of the police was terrifying. It really wasn't something I took lightly at all. But, having been at our site for a few days and seeing how much the government was deliberately making this climate crisis worse, I felt that I was left with no other choice. In the end, I wasn't arrested. But, if this bill goes through and I take those same actions again, I could be sentenced to six months in prison.
The carceral system and the state are working to lock us all into a fossil fuel economy. Prisons and policing are violent - they don't exist to protect the people but rather to protect the interests of the state. Racialised and marginalised communities have known this for so long. My one hope is that in resistance to this new legislation, the whole climate movement will finally wake up to the fact that resisting the prison and police industrial complexes is absolutely essential for climate justice. I hope that groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion will recognise this move away from glamorising incarceration and arrest as the "goal" of direct action. If we want a safe and livable future, we need to dismantle the violent systems of policing and prisons and build a safe, more just world, brick by brick.
Please join us in resisting the Public Order Bill. I believe a livable future quite literally depends on it.
If you're reading this and still unconvinced about the argument for prison abolition in the UK, I implore you to have a listen to a podcast episode we recorded about this topic on The Yikes Podcast. Prison Abolition is about building a world where prisons are obsolete.
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