Insulate Britain protesters jailed, but as with the battle for a free press in the 1820s, more will appear
Nine Insulate Britain protesters were jailed on 17th November for breaking an injunction not to block roads in climate change protests.
It might seem odd that a Government committed on paper to take action on climate change has determined that the key action to be taken after COP26 is to jail those who pressed for action.
One of those in Court made the point that if protesters were jailed more would come forward. This seems likely and there is a well known precedent in British history.
Around the period of Peterloo in 1819 the (Tory) Government was determined to crack down on radical opinion and calls for democratic rights. Prosecutions for seditious libel were common and the taxes on knowledge(levied on papers) saw the rise of an unstamped, illegal press. Many who published it went to jail, but that didn’t stop publication.
One of the best known was the radical Richard Carlile. In the early 1820s he ran a radical bookshop in Fleet Street known as the Temple of Reason. Carlile was frequently jailed but he had an important principle: THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’
It wasn’t. Before the Government gave in 150 volunteers, shopmen, printers, newsvendors, had been jailed and served over 200 years of imprisonment between them.
Whose were these people? E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class:
The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture
Leave a Reply