Protesters jailed, but as with the battle for a free press in the 1820s, more will appear.
Five Just Stop Oil supporters have been jailed for four and five years at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to organise non violent direct action on climate change. The aim was to disrupt the M25. The previous Government criminalised such action.
The point has been made 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 newspapers) 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 freethinker 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.
Interestingly though Thompson was also clear that while those who broke the law and fought for press freedom were part of the rise of a radical working class movement, they themselves were not usually workers, with the power to organise and challenge capital at the point of production, but artisans.
However the reading culture they promoted and developed fed into the rising working class movement and was one of the motors for Chartism from the later 1830s.
Perhaps the protests of Just Stop Oil wont change the world but they might help create a movement that does.
Leave a Reply