Together4Bristol : Christians Acquitted for Climate Action Outside Parliament

Christians Acquitted for Climate Action Outside Parliament

On the 12th October 2022, two members of Christian Climate Action, Rev Sue Parfitt and Ruth Jarman, took part in an Insulate Britain protest. The protest was outside of the Houses of Parliament and the pair refused to stop protesting when asked to by police.

They were at Stratford Magistrates Court this week and were both acquitted, because it was deemed that their protest was proportionate to the climate crisis. Below are the moving closing statements that each of them gave to the judge.

Ruth Jarman’s closing statement

For 40 years I have watched the world heading towards a tipping point of no return into mass suffering, ecological and civilisation collapse.

For 25 years I have been trying to find ways to not be a bystander to this, motivated by my devotion to God and to my children.

On the importance of the issue, Climate isn’t one important issue amongst many. The philosopher Timothy Morton has suggested a new word, hyperobject, to describe something so vast that it is beyond human comprehension. Our psyche, our society and our laws have not evolved to deal with this.

The primary responsibility of a government must be to protect the lives of its citizens. Our government was knowingly allowing people to die in cold homes and refusing to put in place the first no-brainer response to the climate crisis as recommended by its own advisers – to insulate British homes starting with the poorest.

Our action on 12 October last year was just one small attempt to exercise our democratic right to protest the government’s stance on climate and ask that they insulate Britain.

Whatever your decision, judge, I know we were morally right to make our protest.

Thank you for listening to and assisting us in this trial.

Rev Sue Parfitt’s closing statement

On October 12th 2022, I took part in an action with Insulate Britain, designed to draw the government’s attention to its failure to adhere to its targets, established by law and monitored by its own Climate Committee, to reduce fossil fuel emissions. As one small but important aspect of this, we were drawing attention to the government’s failure to commit to insulating the housing stock of Britain and thus – reducing emissions from its leaky 29 million houses, calculated as 15% of total carbon emissions; reducing fuel poverty and saving deaths from cold, estimated that year as being 8,000.

I have spent much time and effort over many years in using legal means to influence our legal representatives and the government in particular. I have written letters to government ministers, lobbied my MP, signed petitions, gone on marches and demonstrations, spoken at meetings, financially supported Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and other environmental organisations – yet carbon and methane emissions have continued to increase, the arctic has continued to melt; sea levels have continued to rise; floods, wild fires, temperature rises have increased exponentially all over the world and in the most unexpected places and the movement of peoples migrating from what have become uninhabitable homelands has reached epic proportions.

I have come to believe that the gravity and urgency of the situation facing humanity and the nonhuman world is requiring much more extreme measures from the grass roots, including breaking the law, in order to wake up the population at large and focus the government’s attention on the crisis. As the UN General Secretary warned last year, “the world is on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” That means, in brutally stark terms, that your children and grandchildren have no future, as they will be living in an uninhabitable world.

Judge, let me turn to the specifics of our case which lies before you. I begin with the Prosecution’s witness, Chief Inspector Robert Wright. I have to say that he was a most unreliable witness. It seems unfair to say so in his absence but I have no choice. First he seemed to entirely misunderstand the organisation with whom he was dealing. He said that he identified us as Just Stop Oil by the “regalia” – I think was his word – that we were wearing, but this cannot have been the case as we were present as part of the campaign Insulate Britain and were certainly not wearing Just Stop Oil tea shirts. Second, he seemed to think that the PM was a man, presumably Boris Johnson and not the female prime minister Liz Truss. This is important because, whereas Boris Johnson had said some positive things about the need to address climate change, Liz Truss had announced the reversal of the ban on fracking, the removal of subsidies for house insulation and the giving of favourable consideration to new fossil fuel excavation. Our action was taken to stress the wrongness of this change of direction and call in particular for the insulation of Britain’s homes, beginning with those of the poorest members of the population. Third, he seemed to have been unaware that the police re-routed the traffic around Parliament Square, using the many alternative routes available in that area, and thus greatly reducing the extent of the disruption and congestion caused by our protest. In the video shewn yesterday by the Prosecutor, the streets were seen to be not full of clogged up traffic but empty because the traffic had been routed elsewhere. Fourth, the Chief Inspector mentioned that there was some hostility expressed to us by motorists which is true but he failed to mention the fact that many passers by expressed their support for our action. As I was sitting near the pavement I was conscious of this fact much more than the inevitable annoyance of some drivers. The Prosecution has given no evidence of any complaint about us made to the police by the public – an important consideration for the Ziegler defence.

Regarding the Prosecutor herself, she asserted her belief to each of the defendants that our action was taken in order to cause maximum disruption to the public. We each disputed this. Why would we want to do what inevitably to some extent creates hostility? I want to state most emphatically that participants in the Insulate Britain Campaign agonise over the dilemma of needing to create a significantly noticeable event on the one hand and causing disruption to the public by so doing. We absolutely do not wish to disrupt the public going about its lawful business and every effort was made on this occasion to keep the disruption to a minimum. However, it is also the case that a protest that has no element of public disruption has no strength behind it, is almost always ignored by the media and is thus not able to convey its message. All this was acknowledged by the Supreme Court’s ruling on Ziegler. This is why it would have been pointless on this occasion to alert the police as they would have, as the Chief Inspector acknowledged, simply re-directed our protest to the pavement or to Parliament Square Garden where it would have passed unnoticed by public and government alike. As the Supreme Court ruling on Ziegler made clear, lack of prior notification does not invalidate a protest.

The Prosecution described the protest as causing significant disruption. I suggest that the extent of a disruption can only be understood if it is compared with other disruptions. For example, earlier this year, in March, Insulate Britain protestors were acquitted, even though they had significantly disrupted traffic on the M25 motorway; and, although the duration of the protest was shorter than ours, the volume of traffic disrupted was much greater. By comparison with that protest, the disruption we caused on October 12th was minimal.

I accept that the main issue that you have to consider Judge in assessing whether we had legal excuse for our action and therefore should be acquitted was that of proportionality. I want therefore to finish by referring to one or two further points of relevance in the Supreme Court’s ruling on Ziegler. The Supreme Court set out several factors that were relevant for the trial court to consider when evaluating proportionality, including whether the action was intended to be peaceful, whether it involved the commission of an offence other than the section 137 offence, whether it was carefully targeted at a location that had symbolic force for the purpose of the protest and whether it was of limited duration. I suggest Judge that our protest on October 12th 2022 met all these criteria. It was utterly peaceful; it involved the commission of no offence other than the section 137 offence; it was carefully targeted at the seat of government, which alone had the power to implement our demands and it was organised to coincide with Prime Minister’s Questions, a time in the parliamentary week which symbolises the moment when the highest authority in the land opens itself to hear the requests of the people. Most important of all, our protest concerned a matter of unparalleled importance, the imminent threat of climate catastrophe, if the governments of the world, including our own, do not change course with immediate effect to reduce and then eliminate fossil fuel emissions.

In conclusion, I suggest that with the passing of the Crime, Police and Sentencing Bill of 2022 and the Public Order Act of 2023, the precious right to protest is in danger of being severely eroded and needs the firm support of the judiciary. I respectfully submit that our protest on Oct 12th in Parliament Square accorded with the parameters set out by the Supreme Court ruling on Ziegler and that we therefore had lawful excuse for the actions that we took, despite the regrettable inconvenience this caused to some members of the public. I therefore hope that we shall be acquitted of this charge.