The following is a transcript of a talk by George Monbiot, delivered at the World Development Movement’s recent annual conference. An audio version of the talk is also included in WDM’s September podcast, available here.
What I want to do now is to try to put the activism with which many of us are engaged into an historical context. And the reason for this is that there’s often a sense that we are marooned by history, that we are abandoned by it, that somehow we are having to build a world from scratch, to build a new world unlike any that anybody has tried to build before, and we have to do so from first principles, entirely with our own resources. And we have this sense only because we have simply not been taught what’s gone on in the past and the extraordinary and fascinating history of activism, activism which often looks very much like the activism that we’re engaged in now, in this country. And I’d like to start, not at the beginnning, because the beginning is probably many many thousands of years ago and lost in the mists of time, but at a recognisable juncture which I find fascinating, which is the immediate aftermath of the english civil war, in 1649. And here we saw a proliferation of movements which bear striking similarities to some of the movements with which we are all engaged in one way or another.
What had happened was that, as you know, the monarchy had been overthrown, and a new class of landed gentry, really, had taken its place. To overthrow the monarchy they had recruited very large numbers of people on the promise that their conditions of life would greatly improve, and paradoxically one of the reasons why large numbers of people joined the new model army was that they were incensed about the theft of their land and their resources through the process of enclosure. Now what enclosure means is the seizure of public goods or commonly owned goods by private interests, or indeed in some cases by national interests, but by interests other than the community which has got ownership over those communal goods, and turning those community goods into something from which a profit can be made for one or a few people. And in England the process of enclosure had been taking place since the 14th century, when the Cistercian monks started grabbing common land, throwing off the commoners and turning it over to sheep ranching, and it had greatly accelerated through and immediately after the civil war, because a new class of landed owners had come along, and had basically terminated the commoners’ rights to graze their animals and to collect wood and turf and have pannage for their pigs, so their pigs could seek out acorns and things in the forest, and to catch fish and all the other things which kept people alive. And so people who were fighting for the new lords of the land, thinking that this would lead to an improvement of their condition, found that in fact it led to exactly the opposite. And this led to an extraordinary flowering of direct action movements.
Now many of the people – these direct activists of the seventeenth century – called themselves levellers, and the idea was that they would level the hedgerows which had been built, the fences whilch had been built around the commons in order to enclose those commons and to privatise them – it was an anti-privatisation movement. But within months of the development of these movements, you saw them beginnning to see that they were levelling not just the hedgerows and the fences, they were trying to level society as well. And what you see developing there was a very clearly articulated, early form of communism. And the first communist manifesto in the United Kingdom was written not in 1848 but 199 years before that in 1649, and it was written by a man called Gerard Winstanley, who called himself a Digger or True Leveller, and he was a non-violent direct activist, and I just want to quote to you a couple of snippets from his communist manifesto.
“In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a Common Treasury but not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another.”
And he then goes on to explain what the diggers were trying to do – and they were trying to disenclose the commons, to get back onto common land, and to turn it into a genuine common treasury for all; and they started in a place called St George’s Hill in Surrey which happens now, paradoxically, to be the most exclusive golf course in Britain. And he said:
“the work we are going about is this, to dig up George’s Hill and the waste ground thereabouts, and to sow corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows, that we may work in righteousness and lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasury for all, working together and feeding together as sons of one father, members of one family, not one lording over another, but all looking over each other as equals in the creation. Jacob hath been very low, but he is rising and will rise, do the worst thou canst, and the poor people thou opprest shall be the saviours of the land.”
And Winstanley set up with the other diggers a direct activist camp – a sort of climate camp type thing, not very far away from where the climate camp will be this year – and they lived by principles of the strictest non-violence: they would resist, but they would never resist with violence. They set up, they built homes out of the local materials, they started digging, they set up a system, a perfect anarchist collective if you like, where they made their own laws. They started campaigning for some things which we still don’t have today: universal suffrage they campaigned for, equal education for men and women – remember this is 1649 – the abolition of the House of Lords [laughter], the sovereignty of Parliament, it was hundreds of years ahead of its time. And they were treated very much like direct activists are treated today. They were ridiculed by the press at the time, but they were also beaten up by private security guards – and often led by the local pastor or the local vicar – and these thugs would come along and they would burn everything and turn them all over – anyone who’s been in a camp attacked by vigilantes will be very familiar with all this – and people would get beaten up, and they never reciprocated, and they had these Gandhian principles of non-violence that we do not turn it back at you. And they rejected the laws which were used to impose upon them. In a letter to the commander in chief of the army, Lord Fairfax, Winstanley said this:
“We shall need no manuscripts or laws, for as our land is common, so our cattle is to be common, and our corn and fruits of the earth common, and are not to be bought and sold among us and we shall not arrest one another. And then what need have we of imprisoning, whipping or hanging laws to bring one another into bondage?”
It was a very interesting relationship he had with Fairfax, because after coming to the attention of the press and receiving a great deal of publicity for what they were doing – this very strange non-violent action where they allowed themselves to get beaten up and didn’t fight back – Winstanley and William Everard, one of his co-conspirators, were summoned to London to meet Fairfax, and they refused to remove their hats, on the grounds that “you are a man as any other”: they did not recognise his authority. And they explained very calmly what they were doing, and basically said, just leave us alone. We’re not trying to overthrow the state, we are just trying to create a space in which we can answer our own needs and we can live by our own laws. Well, Fairfax gave them a hearing, and in fact he turned up later and had a look at the camp, and came away and said it’s no big threat, but then he did nothing to stop the local vigilantes from destroying it, and eventually the camp was burnt down so many times, and the people were so badly beaten, that the thing fell apart. But Winstanley sowed the seeds of an idea, and an idea which resonated through history, and for many years later people would arise and call themselves Levellers or Diggers – even the 1745 rising had Levellers’ contingents in it – inspired by that idea which had been passed down through the generations across a hundred years. And of course it still resonates very strongly with us today.
And subsequent to that there was a whole series of local and popular revolts which resonate with many of the things that we are trying to do now. I remember when I was camped at Batheaston, at Salisbury Hill, just outside Bath, trying to stop the construction of this ridiculous monster road as part of the tory road-building programme, reading about people who had camped two miles from where we were in 1714, to stop the construction of a new road. And these were the Turnpike Rioters, closely allied to the Daughters of Rebecca, who were a sort of Welsh and borders group of people, who were again campaigning against enclosure, in this case against privatisation, and indeed against environmental damage. And what was happening was that the turnpike trusts, which were like the sort of private, PFI roadbuilding companies today, who were building these private roads exclusively for the benefit of the gentry, cutting across the traditional roads which had always been used but you weren’t allowed to go down those roads without paying your toll at the turnpike, they were taking local land to do it, they were cutting down gorse and heather, which was important winter grazing for people’s animals, in order to help lay the foundations for the road and to fill in holes and the rest of it. And these men dressed as women, in these outlandish clothes, very much like the clothes people at direct actions wear, would come and destroy the turnpikes and try to stop this privatisation and enclosure movement from taking place.
Then, starting at about that time, you had masses of enclosure riots across the country, and they would follow these sort of mythical characters who encapsulated the idea of the movement – and Captain Swing was one whose name you hear very often. Of course there was no Captain Swing, but they were all Captain Swing – just as the great anarchist song-writer Paul Gill creates this character called Bill Posters, who will always be prosecuted: he’s a man who stands outside the law, this person who’s always there putting the spanner in the machine. And so Captain Swing, and Ned Ludd of course, in the sort of anti-enclosure movement within industrial society hold a very similar role as being this sort of defining character who doesn’t exist, who everyone follows in a sort of leaderless movement. And we see a series of enclosure riots going all the way from the beginning of the 18th century, right up until – I think the most recent enclosure riot was in 1914 in England, and 1919 in the Western Isles – these were movements against direct enclosure of land, Parliamentary enclosures, but of course in many different ways they continue to this day, and every time people protest against an allotment being taken over or playing fields being built on, or any other public, community asset like that being taken in or enclosed, being handed to the developers, they are members of that great tradition of enclosure riots.
And of course the anti-road building movement, of which I was a part in the early 1990s, was a very clear example of this – it started in a big way at Twyford Down in 1992, where one of the most beautiful pieces of common land in the country was going to be destroyed and handed over to the road construction companies in order to allow people in their Jaguars to knock two-and-a-half seconds off their journey between London and Winchester. And it seemed to the local people, whose precious public asset that was, to be a classic act of enclosure. There’s protests going on right now at a place called Radley Lakes close to Oxford, where RWE npower is trying to fill in this beautiful lake – the haunt of kingfishers and otters and very rare wildlife like cettis warblers – with fly-ash from Didcot power station, containing mercury and arsenic and cadmium, and all sorts of other “environmental benefits”, according to RWE npower – they’re going to turn this into a toxic sludge lagoon, and people are trying to prevent that from happening, and they see it very clearly as being a modern example of enclosure.
So we are not alone. We have historical allies going back a very long way – going back much further than 1649 of course, but these are a few instances I just wanted to draw to your attention. And while people have been protesting against enclosure, governments have consistently used very similar laws against them to try and prevent those protests. In 1662 there was a sort of criminal justice act introduced by the government, which contained exactly the same clauses and the same penalties as the 1994 criminal justice act did, and it was quite uncanny really, it’s an extraordinary historical coincidence that you had a law which prosecuted people for gathering, for getting together more than six people on someone else’s land, under the name criminal trespass it was in both cases; and in both cases, the 1662 law and the 1994 law, you could get an unlimited fine or 3 months in prison for that offence – quite extraordinary. And in the same act there were clauses against “vagabonds” or “sturdy beggars” going from place to place and setting up camp, and giving the authorities the legal chance to move them on, exactly the same as the clauses against new-age travellers in the 1994 act. In 1715 you had the riot act, whose purpose was to enable a magistrate to turn up and literally read the riot act, and if he got to the end of the riot act and there were still people standing there, then the yeomanry could charge them and cut them down. And in the criminal justice act in 1994, and several subsequent ones, there are clauses which allow a police officer to read the relevant parts of the act, and if anyone was still there they could then be arrested, by the time that relevant part of the act had been explained to them – it was very similar to a new riot act.
And we see the authorities consistently trying to legislate direct action movements out of existence, and consistently failing to do so. Since the 1980s, though we saw the growth of great inequality in this country, we’ve seen it accompanied by the growth of new laws which are designed to protect the property of the beneficiaries of this great new inequality. And it starts with the 1986 Public Order Act, which was actually drafted by the Country Landowners Association, and then just handed straight over to the government, and passed through Parliament with very little controversy. Then the 1992 Trades Union act, which was effectively drafted by the Confederation of Britsh Industry, the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, the 1996 Police Act, the 1997 Protection from Harrassment Act, which says that if you pursue a course of conduct – which means doing the same thing twice with regard to someone else – which could be considered to cause alarm or distress, then that is an arrestable offence, and an injunctable offence with the potential for 5 years’ imprisonment. Now what this means in practice, and the way it’s been used by the police, is if you try to say to someone twice, “you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing”, you can be arrested for that.
It’s been taken further now by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which redefines a course of conduct as doing something twice with regard to two completely different people – so if you’re handing out leaflets, and you hand a leaflet to one person, and you hand the same leaflet to another person, that’s a course of conduct calculated to cause alarm or distress, and the same penalties apply, and it basically prohibits all forms of protest. It can also be used interestingly against the advertising industry, but there’s yet to be an interesting test case – if anyone’s prepared to try to pursue one then I think that could be a great contribution to society. But this notion of a course of conduct being exactly the same as protest – and the whole notion of protest is actually defined in the act, it says a course of conduct intended to dissuade someone from doing something, or persuade them to do something. That’s protest, that’s what protest is all about, there’s no other purpose for protest, that’s why we protest. And it’s just a straightforward banning of protest, and it wasn’t even debated in Parliament, there was no discussion of it whatsoever.
But again, history tells us that however draconian this legislation might be, if people have a just cause they will continue to pursue that cause, despite whatever the police and the law might throw at them. And the classic example of this is the Black Act of 1723, which was passed in response to Britain’s first hunt saboteurs – and these were commoners who made use of the commons of Windsor Forest or Windsor Great Park – it was more or less interchangeable – which was originally a piece of land which went all the way from the fringes of London to Reading, it was a huge hunting estate – a forest, incidentally, is not a place where trees grow, technically it’s a royal hunting estate, whereas a chase is a hunting estate for commoners, and so Sherwood forest wasn’t originally a forest, it was a hunting estate, the New forest similarly, in fact most of Essex was once a forest, one third of England under Henry II was royal hunting estate, and everyone else’s rights were terminated over it.
But anyway, the king’s burderers, the people who looked after the dear, were engaging in all these acts of enclosure in order to try to boost the numbers of the deer so that the king could have better hunting, and incidentally to cover up their own corruption where they’d been nicking a lot of the funds for looking after the park, they’d tried to sort of fill the gap by this enclosure, so they terminated people’s rights to graze their animals on the commons of Windsor forest, they terminated people’s rights to gather herbs and berries and nuts and all the rest of it, and firewood and anything else that might frighten the deer, and in response people blacked themselves up and they became the Waltham and Windsor Blacks. They painted their faces black; and again it was this thing that you always do with direct action where you get into costume, you become someone new in taking action, but you also can anonymise yourself somewhat and that can be quite useful. And they would again dress in outlandish costume, and they would go round, they would pull down the structures built by the forest burderers, they would take down their gates, and take down their sort of sentry-posts and all the rest of it, and in response – because of course this was a serious business, hunting – the Parliament passed fifty new laws under the black act – sorry, fifty new capital offences, for which you could be hanged, which included blacking up your face. And yet people continued to protest against the theft of their critical resources through this process of enclosure.
And what I find in this reading of history is a tremendous amount of hope. Hope that we’re not alone. That there is a long tradition which we’re part of, that we have ancestors – and we can appeal to those ancestors, and we can say we’re not freaks, we’re not weirdos, this has been done before in this country, and it’s been done for very good reasons, and it is still being done for very good reasons. But also hope that, whatever they throw at us, if we know that our cause is just we will keep going – and there is nothing that they can do to dissuade us. And in all of these cases, the movements came to an end for other reasons: either because people were just beaten up so much that it couldn’t be sustained any more – well that’s much harder to do nowadays, okay – quite a few of us have been beaten up at direct actions, but not on the sort of scale which was done in 1649 because we have advocates, we can ensure that there are legal processes brought to bear to stop that from happening on a mass scale, so that’s not nearly such a threat as it was; or because the movements fell apart under their own internal dynamics, now we’re all familiar with that; or because in some cases they got what they wanted, and it wasn’t the law which stopped them. However oppressive, however draconian those laws – even fifty new capital offences – it wasn’t the laws which stopped them. And this, to me, is where hope comes from. We’ve been here before, and we’ve won before, and we can do it again, however hard they try and stop us.
The following is a transcript of a talk by George Monbiot, delivered at the World Development Movement’s recent annual conference. An audio version of the talk is also included in WDM’s September podcast, available here.
What I want to do now is to try to put the activism with which many of us are engaged into an historical context. And the reason for this is that there’s often a sense that we are marooned by history, that we are abandoned by it, that somehow we are having to build a world from scratch, to build a new world unlike any that anybody has tried to build before, and we have to do so from first principles, entirely with our own resources. And we have this sense only because we have simply not been taught what’s gone on in the past and the extraordinary and fascinating history of activism, activism which often looks very much like the activism that we’re engaged in now, in this country. And I’d like to start, not at the beginnning, because the beginning is probably many many thousands of years ago and lost in the mists of time, but at a recognisable juncture which I find fascinating, which is the immediate aftermath of the english civil war, in 1649. And here we saw a proliferation of movements which bear striking similarities to some of the movements with which we are all engaged in one way or another.
What had happened was that, as you know, the monarchy had been overthrown, and a new class of landed gentry, really, had taken its place. To overthrow the monarchy they had recruited very large numbers of people on the promise that their conditions of life would greatly improve, and paradoxically one of the reasons why large numbers of people joined the new model army was that they were incensed about the theft of their land and their resources through the process of enclosure. Now what enclosure means is the seizure of public goods or commonly owned goods by private interests, or indeed in some cases by national interests, but by interests other than the community which has got ownership over those communal goods, and turning those community goods into something from which a profit can be made for one or a few people. And in England the process of enclosure had been taking place since the 14th century, when the Cistercian monks started grabbing common land, throwing off the commoners and turning it over to sheep ranching, and it had greatly accelerated through and immediately after the civil war, because a new class of landed owners had come along, and had basically terminated the commoners’ rights to graze their animals and to collect wood and turf and have pannage for their pigs, so their pigs could seek out acorns and things in the forest, and to catch fish and all the other things which kept people alive. And so people who were fighting for the new lords of the land, thinking that this would lead to an improvement of their condition, found that in fact it led to exactly the opposite. And this led to an extraordinary flowering of direct action movements.
Now many of the people – these direct activists of the seventeenth century – called themselves levellers, and the idea was that they would level the hedgerows which had been built, the fences whilch had been built around the commons in order to enclose those commons and to privatise them – it was an anti-privatisation movement. But within months of the development of these movements, you saw them beginnning to see that they were levelling not just the hedgerows and the fences, they were trying to level society as well. And what you see developing there was a very clearly articulated, early form of communism. And the first communist manifesto in the United Kingdom was written not in 1848 but 199 years before that in 1649, and it was written by a man called Gerard Winstanley, who called himself a Digger or True Leveller, and he was a non-violent direct activist, and I just want to quote to you a couple of snippets from his communist manifesto.
And he then goes on to explain what the diggers were trying to do – and they were trying to disenclose the commons, to get back onto common land, and to turn it into a genuine common treasury for all; and they started in a place called St George’s Hill in Surrey which happens now, paradoxically, to be the most exclusive golf course in Britain. And he said:
And Winstanley set up with the other diggers a direct activist camp – a sort of climate camp type thing, not very far away from where the climate camp will be this year – and they lived by principles of the strictest non-violence: they would resist, but they would never resist with violence. They set up, they built homes out of the local materials, they started digging, they set up a system, a perfect anarchist collective if you like, where they made their own laws. They started campaigning for some things which we still don’t have today: universal suffrage they campaigned for, equal education for men and women – remember this is 1649 – the abolition of the House of Lords [laughter], the sovereignty of Parliament, it was hundreds of years ahead of its time. And they were treated very much like direct activists are treated today. They were ridiculed by the press at the time, but they were also beaten up by private security guards – and often led by the local pastor or the local vicar – and these thugs would come along and they would burn everything and turn them all over – anyone who’s been in a camp attacked by vigilantes will be very familiar with all this – and people would get beaten up, and they never reciprocated, and they had these Gandhian principles of non-violence that we do not turn it back at you. And they rejected the laws which were used to impose upon them. In a letter to the commander in chief of the army, Lord Fairfax, Winstanley said this:
It was a very interesting relationship he had with Fairfax, because after coming to the attention of the press and receiving a great deal of publicity for what they were doing – this very strange non-violent action where they allowed themselves to get beaten up and didn’t fight back – Winstanley and William Everard, one of his co-conspirators, were summoned to London to meet Fairfax, and they refused to remove their hats, on the grounds that “you are a man as any other”: they did not recognise his authority. And they explained very calmly what they were doing, and basically said, just leave us alone. We’re not trying to overthrow the state, we are just trying to create a space in which we can answer our own needs and we can live by our own laws. Well, Fairfax gave them a hearing, and in fact he turned up later and had a look at the camp, and came away and said it’s no big threat, but then he did nothing to stop the local vigilantes from destroying it, and eventually the camp was burnt down so many times, and the people were so badly beaten, that the thing fell apart. But Winstanley sowed the seeds of an idea, and an idea which resonated through history, and for many years later people would arise and call themselves Levellers or Diggers – even the 1745 rising had Levellers’ contingents in it – inspired by that idea which had been passed down through the generations across a hundred years. And of course it still resonates very strongly with us today.
And subsequent to that there was a whole series of local and popular revolts which resonate with many of the things that we are trying to do now. I remember when I was camped at Batheaston, at Salisbury Hill, just outside Bath, trying to stop the construction of this ridiculous monster road as part of the tory road-building programme, reading about people who had camped two miles from where we were in 1714, to stop the construction of a new road. And these were the Turnpike Rioters, closely allied to the Daughters of Rebecca, who were a sort of Welsh and borders group of people, who were again campaigning against enclosure, in this case against privatisation, and indeed against environmental damage. And what was happening was that the turnpike trusts, which were like the sort of private, PFI roadbuilding companies today, who were building these private roads exclusively for the benefit of the gentry, cutting across the traditional roads which had always been used but you weren’t allowed to go down those roads without paying your toll at the turnpike, they were taking local land to do it, they were cutting down gorse and heather, which was important winter grazing for people’s animals, in order to help lay the foundations for the road and to fill in holes and the rest of it. And these men dressed as women, in these outlandish clothes, very much like the clothes people at direct actions wear, would come and destroy the turnpikes and try to stop this privatisation and enclosure movement from taking place.
Then, starting at about that time, you had masses of enclosure riots across the country, and they would follow these sort of mythical characters who encapsulated the idea of the movement – and Captain Swing was one whose name you hear very often. Of course there was no Captain Swing, but they were all Captain Swing – just as the great anarchist song-writer Paul Gill creates this character called Bill Posters, who will always be prosecuted: he’s a man who stands outside the law, this person who’s always there putting the spanner in the machine. And so Captain Swing, and Ned Ludd of course, in the sort of anti-enclosure movement within industrial society hold a very similar role as being this sort of defining character who doesn’t exist, who everyone follows in a sort of leaderless movement. And we see a series of enclosure riots going all the way from the beginning of the 18th century, right up until – I think the most recent enclosure riot was in 1914 in England, and 1919 in the Western Isles – these were movements against direct enclosure of land, Parliamentary enclosures, but of course in many different ways they continue to this day, and every time people protest against an allotment being taken over or playing fields being built on, or any other public, community asset like that being taken in or enclosed, being handed to the developers, they are members of that great tradition of enclosure riots.
And of course the anti-road building movement, of which I was a part in the early 1990s, was a very clear example of this – it started in a big way at Twyford Down in 1992, where one of the most beautiful pieces of common land in the country was going to be destroyed and handed over to the road construction companies in order to allow people in their Jaguars to knock two-and-a-half seconds off their journey between London and Winchester. And it seemed to the local people, whose precious public asset that was, to be a classic act of enclosure. There’s protests going on right now at a place called Radley Lakes close to Oxford, where RWE npower is trying to fill in this beautiful lake – the haunt of kingfishers and otters and very rare wildlife like cettis warblers – with fly-ash from Didcot power station, containing mercury and arsenic and cadmium, and all sorts of other “environmental benefits”, according to RWE npower – they’re going to turn this into a toxic sludge lagoon, and people are trying to prevent that from happening, and they see it very clearly as being a modern example of enclosure.
So we are not alone. We have historical allies going back a very long way – going back much further than 1649 of course, but these are a few instances I just wanted to draw to your attention. And while people have been protesting against enclosure, governments have consistently used very similar laws against them to try and prevent those protests. In 1662 there was a sort of criminal justice act introduced by the government, which contained exactly the same clauses and the same penalties as the 1994 criminal justice act did, and it was quite uncanny really, it’s an extraordinary historical coincidence that you had a law which prosecuted people for gathering, for getting together more than six people on someone else’s land, under the name criminal trespass it was in both cases; and in both cases, the 1662 law and the 1994 law, you could get an unlimited fine or 3 months in prison for that offence – quite extraordinary. And in the same act there were clauses against “vagabonds” or “sturdy beggars” going from place to place and setting up camp, and giving the authorities the legal chance to move them on, exactly the same as the clauses against new-age travellers in the 1994 act. In 1715 you had the riot act, whose purpose was to enable a magistrate to turn up and literally read the riot act, and if he got to the end of the riot act and there were still people standing there, then the yeomanry could charge them and cut them down. And in the criminal justice act in 1994, and several subsequent ones, there are clauses which allow a police officer to read the relevant parts of the act, and if anyone was still there they could then be arrested, by the time that relevant part of the act had been explained to them – it was very similar to a new riot act.
And we see the authorities consistently trying to legislate direct action movements out of existence, and consistently failing to do so. Since the 1980s, though we saw the growth of great inequality in this country, we’ve seen it accompanied by the growth of new laws which are designed to protect the property of the beneficiaries of this great new inequality. And it starts with the 1986 Public Order Act, which was actually drafted by the Country Landowners Association, and then just handed straight over to the government, and passed through Parliament with very little controversy. Then the 1992 Trades Union act, which was effectively drafted by the Confederation of Britsh Industry, the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, the 1996 Police Act, the 1997 Protection from Harrassment Act, which says that if you pursue a course of conduct – which means doing the same thing twice with regard to someone else – which could be considered to cause alarm or distress, then that is an arrestable offence, and an injunctable offence with the potential for 5 years’ imprisonment. Now what this means in practice, and the way it’s been used by the police, is if you try to say to someone twice, “you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing”, you can be arrested for that.
It’s been taken further now by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which redefines a course of conduct as doing something twice with regard to two completely different people – so if you’re handing out leaflets, and you hand a leaflet to one person, and you hand the same leaflet to another person, that’s a course of conduct calculated to cause alarm or distress, and the same penalties apply, and it basically prohibits all forms of protest. It can also be used interestingly against the advertising industry, but there’s yet to be an interesting test case – if anyone’s prepared to try to pursue one then I think that could be a great contribution to society. But this notion of a course of conduct being exactly the same as protest – and the whole notion of protest is actually defined in the act, it says a course of conduct intended to dissuade someone from doing something, or persuade them to do something. That’s protest, that’s what protest is all about, there’s no other purpose for protest, that’s why we protest. And it’s just a straightforward banning of protest, and it wasn’t even debated in Parliament, there was no discussion of it whatsoever.
But again, history tells us that however draconian this legislation might be, if people have a just cause they will continue to pursue that cause, despite whatever the police and the law might throw at them. And the classic example of this is the Black Act of 1723, which was passed in response to Britain’s first hunt saboteurs – and these were commoners who made use of the commons of Windsor Forest or Windsor Great Park – it was more or less interchangeable – which was originally a piece of land which went all the way from the fringes of London to Reading, it was a huge hunting estate – a forest, incidentally, is not a place where trees grow, technically it’s a royal hunting estate, whereas a chase is a hunting estate for commoners, and so Sherwood forest wasn’t originally a forest, it was a hunting estate, the New forest similarly, in fact most of Essex was once a forest, one third of England under Henry II was royal hunting estate, and everyone else’s rights were terminated over it.
But anyway, the king’s burderers, the people who looked after the dear, were engaging in all these acts of enclosure in order to try to boost the numbers of the deer so that the king could have better hunting, and incidentally to cover up their own corruption where they’d been nicking a lot of the funds for looking after the park, they’d tried to sort of fill the gap by this enclosure, so they terminated people’s rights to graze their animals on the commons of Windsor forest, they terminated people’s rights to gather herbs and berries and nuts and all the rest of it, and firewood and anything else that might frighten the deer, and in response people blacked themselves up and they became the Waltham and Windsor Blacks. They painted their faces black; and again it was this thing that you always do with direct action where you get into costume, you become someone new in taking action, but you also can anonymise yourself somewhat and that can be quite useful. And they would again dress in outlandish costume, and they would go round, they would pull down the structures built by the forest burderers, they would take down their gates, and take down their sort of sentry-posts and all the rest of it, and in response – because of course this was a serious business, hunting – the Parliament passed fifty new laws under the black act – sorry, fifty new capital offences, for which you could be hanged, which included blacking up your face. And yet people continued to protest against the theft of their critical resources through this process of enclosure.
And what I find in this reading of history is a tremendous amount of hope. Hope that we’re not alone. That there is a long tradition which we’re part of, that we have ancestors – and we can appeal to those ancestors, and we can say we’re not freaks, we’re not weirdos, this has been done before in this country, and it’s been done for very good reasons, and it is still being done for very good reasons. But also hope that, whatever they throw at us, if we know that our cause is just we will keep going – and there is nothing that they can do to dissuade us. And in all of these cases, the movements came to an end for other reasons: either because people were just beaten up so much that it couldn’t be sustained any more – well that’s much harder to do nowadays, okay – quite a few of us have been beaten up at direct actions, but not on the sort of scale which was done in 1649 because we have advocates, we can ensure that there are legal processes brought to bear to stop that from happening on a mass scale, so that’s not nearly such a threat as it was; or because the movements fell apart under their own internal dynamics, now we’re all familiar with that; or because in some cases they got what they wanted, and it wasn’t the law which stopped them. However oppressive, however draconian those laws – even fifty new capital offences – it wasn’t the laws which stopped them. And this, to me, is where hope comes from. We’ve been here before, and we’ve won before, and we can do it again, however hard they try and stop us.