From left: Roger Hallam, Anna Holland, Tom Wainwright, and Sarah Noles [Alice Horsley]

DIRECT action against climate change is an “act of war,” a London COP panel heard on Saturday.

Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, told the room that the debate over the right to protest is being framed incorrectly.

“I don’t think it’s anything to do with the right to protest,” he said.

“It’s a rebellion against the most f*cking outrageous act in the history of humanity. Obviously they’re going to put us in prison. If they’re going to kill people in the Global South, obviously they’re going to put us in prison, right? … I’ve just been in court and the defence lawyer goes, ‘well, obviously, if Mr Hallam did intend to close Heathrow, then that would obviously be a public nuisance.’

“I’m going like ‘what the f*ck?’ Heathrow is involved in the genocide of millions of people, obviously I’ve got a f*cking excuse, haven’t I? Would you say that to the French resistance: ‘blowing up the railroad is unpleasant, so you don’t really have an excuse’ ‘no, we’re trying to defeat the f*cking Nazis.’ This is the situation.”

He added: “What’s happening to me is going to happen to you in the next five years. They’re not going to let go of fossil fuel civilisation without a fight. So, those of you looking at the programme, it’s not liberty and right to protest, that’s not the frame. The frame is we’re going to have a f*cking revolution and get rid of these people because they’re disgusting. That’s it. And it’s not going to be nice.”

Panellist Anna Holland and (below) her ‘soup’ protest in the National Gallery [Alice Horsley]

[Just Stop Oil]

Members of JSO were on the LDNCOP line-up to ensure that we had a wide spectrum of debate, even though some find their strategies frustrating. Speakers are not chosen by the event’s sponsors.

Tom Wainwright, a protest lawyer with Garden Court Chambers, told the crowd that he felt that the sheer scale of the climate justice movement “has taken the state by surprise.”

He said that he felt that the way peaceful protest was being framed by the media and the police as a crime was one of the most pernicious ways of undermining people feeling like they could go out to protest.

“Whilst there’s been a lot of arrests that doesn’t mean that there’s been charges and convictions. In a lot of these cases, when they’ve gone to trial, and when people have been able to explain their motivations juries have acquitted,” he said. “It’s a really important part of how the system is and we need to make the most of it.”

Sarah Noles, an activist with Green New Deal Rising – a protest group that specialise in doing “non-arrestable” actions – emphasised the importance of having different kinds of actions that people can do. “The crisis we’re in is so dire and existential that we need absolutely everyone to be doing something.”

Anna Holland, the Just Stop Oil (JSO) protester who threw soup at Van Gogh’s The Sunflowers at the National Gallery, said: “You’ll notice in police reports, in news articles about JSO, we’re never referred to as people, we’re referred to as criminals, as eco-zealots, as wankers, as worse – they will never refer to us as people, even though Just Stop Oil is made up of teachers, of doctors, of bartenders, builders, ex-pilots.”