Tories are already using draconian measures, brought in allegedly under the mantle of dealing with such things as Islamic extremist terrorism, to target eco-activists.
Tory twat MP Brendan Clarke-Smith has said this: ‘This outrageous decision has given the green light to people looking to commit all manner of appalling crimes in the name of religion to justify their extreme political ideologies.’
He’s referring to the acquittal of these frightening folk:
He’s not talking about a suicide bomber, or machete wielding maniac, but about peaceful protesters.
Their ‘appalling crime’? Traffic disruption. Their ‘extreme political ideology’? A very sound evidence-based concern that government and big business might not be looking after the best interests of the environment/us/our future.
Sadly David Nixon – sent to prison for eight weeks for contempt of court (for mentioning the reasons behind his protest actions) – doesn’t have a dog collar.
Nor is he a man who has committed violence against a woman, for which the very same Judge Silas Reid has infamously handed down far more lenient sentences.
His crime is to place his conscience before the letter of the law. And the letter of contemptible laws at that. I think it’s only right that we hold in contempt that which is contemptible. To not do so is a betrayal of one’s own conscience, or total submission to repression.
These contemptible laws are those that the Tories have been busily putting in place since Brexit. The kinds of repressive laws that are the real reason they wanted out of Europe.
This is the post-Brexit ‘sovereignty’ of Toryism. The freedom for judges (the elite) to bully juries (the hoi polloi), and take us back in time, to Darker Ages.
Nixon is a care-worker. Reid is a lackey for the repressive right. Nixon will be living on a modest wage, and is clearly thinking about the good of others. Both in his work, and in his protesting. Reid, on a massively bloated salary, is an agent of Tory repression.
Talking about such increasingly common UK legal rulings, Professor James E. Hansen, former NASA scientist and ‘godfather of climate science’, has said:
The cruelty of such ‘know nothing’ judges is not so much to the defendant as it is to our children and grandchildren.
found here
And no wonder Toryland UK wanted out of the EU, or any other similar collective endeavour that might take the moral high ground, when the UN is saying this sort of thing:
In the UK, courts have prohibited environmental protesters from putting forward defenses based on “necessity” or “proportionality”. They have also forbidden protesters from mentioning climate change, thereby preventing them from explaining the reasons for their protest. Courts have held convicted environmental defenders who disregarded this prohibition in “contempt of court” and imprisoned them for up to 8 weeks…
Courts should not impose limitations on environmental protesters’ right to a defense, including to explain their motivation for engaging in protest, and should take into account these motivations in their decisions.
This comes from a UN report titled State repression of environmental protest and civil disobedience: a major threat to human rights and democracy. And it’s not talking about North Korea, China or Russia, but the UK!