The guardian have been desperately trying to agitate for outrage about this for a week or so now, but I haven’t seen it commented on or reported anywhere else. Fundamentally this woman was convicted of a criminal offence and sentenced to a period of imprisonment. She wasn’t sentenced to a curfew, that was a subsequent arrangement.
What was her criminal offence?
Blocking a motorway deliberately. We can debate whether the sentence is just or not, but that is orthogonal to debate about the tag.
Interesting! Sending a 77 year old woman to prison just because she blocked a road seems quite over the top. On Christmas nonetheless. Good for the Guardian to stand up for her.
Calling the M25 a road is like calling the Thames a stream. I can see which community we’re in here, but it’s being deliberately obtuse.
Delap was among several dozen Just Stop Oil supporters who, during a four-day campaign, climbed gantries over the M25, which encircles London, forcing police to stop traffic and leaving an estimated 709,000 drivers stuck in tailbacks.
You block one road and there’s 709k drivers stuck, and probably not much more people than this as most people are alone in their cars. But yeah we shouldn’t touch cars infrastructure for something more efficient!
It also blocks routes for emergency services, and a significant chunk of those 709k people would include sick people, elderly people, people even on their way to hospital themselves - all stuck in their cars, without easy access to food or water if it had lasted the days the protestor wanted it to. Even if the police had somehow managed to find a way to clear the traffic people could easily have been harmed.
This was not just some little traffic jam and a 5 min delay on the way home, it was a complete stoppage of traffic moving with a potential for people to have been stuck in their cars for hours to days due to gridlock.
However people may feel about cars or the environment, what they did was dangerous and could easily have killed people.
“Conspiracy to cause public nuisance”, as far as I recall. With emphasis on conspiracy. Causing public nuisance without a conspiracy would not have been a criminal offense at all.
Disclaimer: I’m an anarchist and I don’t consider that a crime.
I agree. There seems to be some underlying attitude from the guardian that people should be outraged because she is old or ill?
The curfew scheme is a way to try and reduce the prison population due to costs, not soenthing that she was specifically sentenced to nor some entitlement. She was sentenced to jail, she was eligible for the curfew scheme but she cannot wear the monitoring tag, so - like other people - she has to serve her sentence.
Ultimately she commited a crime and was convicted and sentenced. She pleaded guilty to the crime.
People are also trying to make out that it’s wrong to imprison people for peaceful protest. They’re being imprisoned for public nuisance - that sounds like nothing but they attempted to block the M25 motorway and create gridlock in southern England. They’re lucky they didn’t get charged with more - public nusience charges IS the lenient treatment.
Blocking the m25 is not just “a few delays” as some of the press have decided to report it, that’s potential chaos on an unprecedented scale. It is not just a slight inconvenience - motorways are major routes for the emergency services as well as the public, and the people who may have got stuck in serious jams may have included sick and vulnerable people. Would we be sympathetic if they’d succeeded and someone died in their car from a heart attack, or a pregnant lady was forced to give birth on the M25, or a diabetic had a crisis and couldn’t be reached by emergency services? And all that’s before we even consider the economic impact of they’d succeeded.
We need to be clear the plan was not just a small traffic jam - it was gridlock of the major motorways which was to last days. So people may have been stuck in their cars for days on the M25 and other roads as the emergency services tried to sort the chaos.
They’re lucky they only got charged with public nusience and not under the anti-terror legislation. Would we be expected to be sympathetic to attempts to shut the M25 if it had been done by Jihadists? I don’t think it’d be called “peaceful protest” then.
She was sentenced, as much as I recall, for causing mild inconvenience to the masses.
Didn’t burn anything down, didn’t blow anything up, didn’t attack anyone, just conspired to obstruct traffic - and maybe actually obstructed some traffic.
That’s some great big criminal offense, IMHO. And having laws like that on book - allows any government to crack down on any demonstration planned in secret - because “look, a conspiracy to cause public nuisance”.
As much as I recall, conspiring was the big deal, and they dragged out some law intended for the mafia, which was quite ridiculous. Conspiring to do anything - even conspiring to ruin the climate for future generations by recklessly burning lots of fuel - sure seemed to be a great big criminal offense under that law, but I could be absent-minded because fuel company bosses aren’t in prison.
Side note: in China, they have a similar crime - a crime that you can stick to almost anyone, named “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. [1] In my opinion, even from a boring old statist viewpoint, having a legal system with stick-to-anyone crimes is a bad idea.
Back when it happened, I think I commented something to the tune of -> if a cunning protester had overturned a truck and trailer on the same stretch of road - strictly outside the presence of other cars - pretending to be a hapless trucker who lost control - the road would have been twice as closed, and the stealth protester would have walked home in the evening, with only high insurance bills waiting in the future.
(This is not intended as legal or tactical advise, and overturning a car without extensive practise can have permanent negative health impacts. It might be safer to stop a “damaged” tractor and pretend to be a hapless farmer whose trailer with a load of bullcrap almost broke off the vehicle, or maybe the bullcrap hatch accidentally opened and it’s on the road now. Strictly by accident.)
I think I also estimated that if someone had cut power to a big intersection’s traffic lights without saying a word, obstruction would have been just as great, but chances of getting caught really small. (This is not intended as advise either.)
