The ‘Whole Truth Five’ Refused to Be Silenced – And They’re Heroes for It

On Thursday, Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam was sentenced to five years in prison after he unmuted on a Zoom call. Four other activists – Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker-De-Abreu – were sent down for four years each for similarly sparing their peers the indignity of having to yell ‘turn your mic on’ into the void. 

But muted we are. And more muted we’ll become as the chilling effect of these criminal convictions take hold. 

The five were convicted for joining a Zoom call recruiting activists to take part in direct action ultimately aimed at stopping new oil and gas explorations. The sentences – the longest ever for peaceful protest in Britain – were handed down at Southwark Crown Court for the crime of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. That’s a legal invention that appears to be the product of the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022. Previously, courts had been reluctant to hand out custodial sentences. As barrister Adam Wagner has said, just a few years ago, organising a disruptive yet peaceful protest would have been unlikely to lead to any prison sentence at all. 

Nobody, least of all Just Stop Oil, would deny that the resultant action, involving shutting down a part of the M25 orbital motorway in November 2022, was disruptive. Clearly, that was the point – to illustrate how dependent we are in everyday and unthinking ways on fossil fuels, and how ill-equipped we remain to live without them even as the climate collapses. Now, you don’t need to support Just Stop Oil’s tactics to find these sentences extreme. According to Ell Folan, they each exceed the average custodial sentence for robberies, drug and violent crimes.

But the judge in the case, Christopher Hehir, didn’t want to know. And nor did he apparently want the jury to know. He ruled that the five defendants could refer in their defence only briefly to the science that motivated them, and even then only as “political and philosophical beliefs”. Like astrology, flat-earthism, or Avril Lavigne’s many doppelgangers. 

The defendants, though, weren’t there to play. Protests by the ‘Whole Truth Five’ and their supporters caused the police to be called seven times to the two-week trial. Four out of five of the defendants were themselves remanded to prison for refusing to be silenced by the rules of the trial judge. And 11 people who protested outside the courtroom were charged with contempt too. Remember how we all criticised Vladimir Putin for clamping down on dissent? For the record: me neither.

One of those five – Daniel Shaw – was so badly treated that the UN’s special rapporteur on climate defenders Michel Forst wrote to the British government, referring to Shaw’s treatment as “punitive and repressive”. After yesterday’s sentencing, Forst said: “This sentence should shock the conscience of any member of the public. It should also put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom.”

Vocal UN interventions are a fair sign of a state sliding towards failure. Another is the free press conspiring to clamp down on hard-won freedoms to protest. It turns out that the five political prisoners were dobbed in to police by a journalist from the Sun, who infiltrated the Zoom posing as a person who actually cares about the future of the planet. According to my colleague Clare Hymer, the police rewarded the ultra-scab by inviting her to witness Hallam’s arrest. It’s the circle of pond life.

And the trial judge himself has a record of pro-cop leniency. Hehir hates disruptive traffic jams, but appears to mind less about policemen abusing their power over women. In 2015, a cop was brought up on charges after he and a colleague took an intoxicated woman home after an incident in a bar. They parked up, and one officer “had sex with her” while the second enjoyed a “sex act”. In Hehir’s court, that second act was utterly unjail-worthy, with the judge awarding no prison time because he wanted “to bring this sad and sorry tale to its end with a final act of mercy”. Yesterday’s judgement may itself be some kind of Swiss-style final act of mercy against the steady erosion of protest rights we’ve endured in this country.

Disagreement without violence is a messy freedom we all ought to enjoy. As Lord Justice of Appeal John Laws once put it: “Rights worth having are unruly things.” The court appears to disagree. But the five defendants who clung to those rights and did unruliness from the dock? Heroes – on speaker.