Camp for Climate Action Affair

John Vidal of the Guardian/UK, had a piece titled Heathrow Eco-Protesters Steal a March on Police, reprinted at CommonDreams.org on 13 Aug. In it, he reported that protesters had set up a camp on the perimeter of Heathrow Airport two days early to circumvent police intervention. This action came about thusly.

The Camp for Climate Action was organized as a mass protest by climate change protesters due to plans by Heathrow Airport to expand it's operations with a third runway, a sixth terminal, and an increase from the current limit of 480,000 flights per year to almost 800,000. The land the airport is looking to develop is scrubland on its north perimeter. The development is also said to be a threat to the communities of Sipson village and Harlington, with the entire village of Sipson due to be destroyed to make room for the runway.

BAA, British Airports Authority, attempted to prohibit the protest on the grounds that it was intended to disrupt the airport with direct action. It did so by seeking a court injunction that was specifically targeted at four individual activists, but which would have had such a broad application it would have forbidden as many as five million people from going to Heathrow to demonstrate. The four individuals are:

• Joss Garman: The son of an airline pilot, now a London University politics student. Co-founder of Plane Stupid, which has taken peaceful direct action against one airport and occupied BAA offices.

• Leo Murray: Co-founder of Plane Stupid. Grandson of the late Lord Greenwood, a Wilson-era cabinet member who introduced much of Britain's first clean air and river legislation.

• Geraldine Nicholson: Chair of the No Third Runway Action Group, an umbrella organisation for all residents' groups in Hillingdon with concerns about the expansion of the airport.

• John Stewart: Chair of Hacan ClearSkies, Heathrow watchdog group with 25,000 members. Named UK campaigner of the year in 2005. The group has marched through central London to highlight its concerns about the airport.

BAA argued that it needed to include the organisations and supporters of the four individuals in case they were part of the camp. These included the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust, Greenpeace, and the Woodland Trust. BAA's lawyer, Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden, is quoted: "I am seeking to bring within the definition of protesters persons acting unlawfully in the name of Camp for Climate Action. We are only trying to injunct people who are acting unlawfully ... we only wish to injunct those who wish to obstruct us or prevent us using the airport. We say there are four groups who are intending to have a climate camp - the raison d'etre is to disrupt our lawful activities. What BAA does not want is people coming on to the airport to act unlawfully and, on the evidence, these four groups intend to [do] just that."

There was nothing in the few reports I saw to suggest that protesters were specifically going to obstruct travellers or ticket counters, and the only way they could obstruct other airport operations would be to breach security by entering restricted areas. There is a reason access to such areas is restricted: personal safety. You don't want people being injured by machinery or vehicles if you are any kind of a decent human being. And from the viewpoint of the brasshats, such an incident would be highly embarrassing if you are the one responsible for the airport, and you don't want some hot-head being sucked into a jet engine because, after all, those engines are expensive.

The injunction sought to keep protesters away from platforms 6 and 7 of Paddington station, all trains travelling to Heathrow, the Piccadilly line of London Underground (the subway), the M4 motorway and all service stations between junctions 3 and 6. Junctions 13 to 15 were also included.

Now, BAA acted unilaterally in seeking this injunction; Transport for London and London Underground said they had not been consulted about it, and their counsel, Martin Chamberlain QC, told the court that this injunction was "an attempt to bind 5 million people". He is quoted: "What Mr Lawson-Cruttenden has said ... is that it has been clear all along that the only people sought to be injuncted are the four named defendants. It is quite the reverse. It has been clear all along, until the moment we arrived at court today, that in fact the people sought to be injuncted included all the members of the defendant organisations ... This is unjustifiable and disproportionate." (Although that is not necessarily the position of his clients and might only be his professional opinion.)

Aside from this, the judge, Mrs Justice Swift, a member of three of the groups, said she was confused about what BAA wanted and instructed the company to return to court on 02 Aug with a skeleton legal argument to justify its case. Also on 01 Aug, some Members of Parliament spoke out against the BAA's action. Susan Kramer, MP for Richmond Park, and who represents people living near the airport, is quoted: "This injunction is a challenge to a basic British value. People who have been quietly opposed to the airport expansion are now getting fed up. This attempt at an injunction against a very reasonable group smacks of arrogance." Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, who had accused BAA of being "out of their skull" earlier in the week, said that it was exaserbating the situation and merely paving the way for hardcore protesters to invade the camp.

On 01 Aug, the BAA backed down from seeking this injunction, although it did finally win only a limited legal protection which prevents three of the named individuals and the entire Plane Stupid campaign group from entering the airport. Other campaigners are lawfully entitled to stage peaceful protests. Still, having adopted its wrong-headed viewpoint, it continued to maintain that the protest was specifically planned with intent to commit illegal actions, and it subsequently decided to treat the protesters and demonstraters as de facto terrorists.

On 11 Aug, another article by Mr. Vidal, co-written with Ms. Helen Pid, reported that armed police units would act under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This section of that law gives the police the power to:

• Stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism;
• Search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them;
• Hold people for up to a month without charge;
• Search homes and remove protesters' outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats.

The article reported that up to 1,800 extra officers would be called in to prevent an estimated 1,500 people from disrupting the airport.

And the purpose of the exercise was clearly illustrated to be the service of vague and ill-defined fears of terrorism, that I can only interpret to be specious excuses to violate freedom of speech and expression. The article reported that:

• Metropolitan police chief Sir Ian Blair said he fears that a minority of protesters intent on breaking the law could cause massive disruption as Heathrow prepares for its busiest week of the year.

• Met commander Jo Kaye, in charge of the specialist firearms unit, said on 10 Aug that some people would "want to get their message across using criminal means".

• Scotland Yard's plans for handling the protests are revealed in a document seen by the Guardian newspaper, and which was produced by Met commander Peter Broadhurst during a legal hearing at the high court which imposed restrictions on a number of named campaigners; the document reads in part: "Should individuals or small groups seek to take action outside of lawful protest they will be dealt with robustly using terrorism powers. This is because the presence of large numbers of protesters at or near the airport will reduce our ability to proactively counter the [threat of a] terrorist act.

Now these concerns, by and large, are valid. You know very well that there's at least one in every group. The thing to keep in mind is that this principle also includes groups of law enforcement officials. The only difference is that in protesters, that "one" is likely to be a hot-headed idiot, while in law enforcement, that "one" is likely to be a pig-headed idiot instead. Pig-headed idiots do not tolerate challenges to their authority or anything less than immediate, abject obedience to their whims. Hot-heads want what they want and they want it now.

Now, envision a scenario where the hot-headed idiot is in a confrontation with the pig-headed idiot, and try to imagine how quickly it might escalate out of control.

Not very difficult to do, is it? So you can as easily imagine that with aggressively confrontational personalities on both sides of the line, a peaceful confrontation can suddenly explode into a hostile and thence a violent confrontation with little warning or no warning at all. The thing is, the statements by the police officials are not only vague and ill defined fears, they are also self-fulfilling prosephies. Odds are that there is going to be a violent confrontation under such circumstances because the police expect there to be one. What the police and government officious [sic] never take into account is the principal role they play in bringing such prophesies to fruition.

Along with the above, the police report makes it clear that the government has encouraged the police forces to make greater use of terrorism powers "especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000". The upshot of it is: a civil authority, law enforcement units, and the U.K. government are acting in complicity to squelch civil disobedience, at the very least, under the rubric of The War on Terror. Indications are, however, that they are going well beyond the pale of the law and the Magna Carta and expanding anti-terrorism hysteria into a full scale assault on the right of free speech.

The Guardian had established that, recent to 11 Aug, at least two climate change campaigners had been arrested at Heathrow Airport by officers abusing ant-terrorism powers. One of them, Cristina Fraser, was stopped while cycling with a friend near the airport. Ms Fraser, a first-year London university anthropology student, has been on aviation demonstrations with the Plane Stupid group. She was charged under section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which makes it an offence to make a record of something that could be used in an act of terrorism. If that wording is accurate, then you could be arrested as a terrorist just for taking photographs of your loved ones as you say goodbye to them at a British airport.

In any event, Ms. Fraser claims she was carrying nothing at all, and described the incident thusly: "I was arrested and held in a police cell for thirty hours. I was terrified. No one knew where I was. They knew I was not a terrorist." In short, the British police effectively "disappeared" a citizen who was an innocent bystander at the time of her arrest. And after holding her in violation of all her civil liberites for thirty hours on a completely trumped up charge, did they apologize to her? Hah! The police later recharged her with conspiring to cause a public nuisance. Keep Ms. Fraser's name in mind, by the way, it appears again further down.

I, for one, can well see why it is the protesters of Great Britain are not putting any faith in the idea that they will be treated fairly and justly by their government and elements thereof.

So, the organizers of the Camp for Climate Action launched their operation on 12 Aug, two days early. The surprise move was successful at catching the police off guard. And so we get to Mr. Vidal's third article on this free speech exercise and the censorial movement against it: Heathrow Eco-Protesters Steal a March on Police; reprinted at CommonDreams.org on 14 Aug. Mr. Vidal described the subsequent reaction in writing:

In four minutes and 30 seconds yesterday, two double-story scaffolding tripod towers were erected and a banner slung between them. Within the hour, up to 150 people had come and were unloading pallets, tents, compost toilets, wind turbines, kitchens and bikes. In another hour, the police arrived. At first the officers tried to stop the camp being built, but later they were instructed not to impede. "There was a standoff, but after a misunderstanding they let us carry on," said a protester.

By yesterday morning, the police had blocked off all approaches to the site and were liberally using powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act to stop all cars and search anyone they thought was likely to go to the growing eco-village.

"They went through our stuff minutely," said Anna, who had arrived from London. "They know we are not terrorists. It's an abuse of the law. And they were taking everyone's pictures, too. Why? This is a legal camp."

As the protesters' equivalent of a camp quartermaster walked round with a map showing where the 24 marquees, the kitchens, the media center, latrines and neighborhoods should be set up, there was growing interest in the communal food. Unfortunately, the star cook, an anthropology student, Cristina Fraser, had been arrested and was in the back of a police van.

And true to form, the last word in stupidity goes to the BAA, still parroting its a priori, unwarranted assumption that the entire purpose of the protest is to violate airport security or the civil liberites of travellers or to inconvenience the airport staff. Mark Bullock, the managing director of BAA Heathrow, said BAA, "always respected people's democratic right to protest lawfully. We believe that there is an important debate to be had regarding climate change. However, we do not believe our passengers and staff should be harassed or obstructed by any unlawful direct action."