Last October, we set out to provoke strong emotions relating to the climate crisis. 

On Friday it became clear that we have also provoked the judiciary.

The judge expressed considerable anger in his summing up as he sentenced me to three years.  He used the phrase "to hell with everyone else" at one point. I'll explain the context later, but for now that sets the tone. 


Now in a way I feel a deep sense of relief, because for six months I've been in prison with this worry in the back of my mind - and even before that in the months leading up to the action.

Now I finally have an end date, and that date will only move forward. It has done its big lurch backwards. From now the only surprises will be good surprises.  That's a relief.

It's also a relief and a catharsis to hear some rage from the judiciary, because I know a lot of the public share that rage, and rage is an appropriate emotion for the circumstances. 

We are feeding into an apocalypse of climate and ecological breakdown.  We are doing that voluntarily to ourselves.  We may kill many of ourselves and nearly everything beautiful and alive on this earth.

Except lichen.  Lichen's waiting in the crevices, quietly rubbing its hands together. 


But the situation is utterly unhinged.

You should feel rage, fear and grief. You should feel those intensely because those emotions are inseparable from love.

I cannot love someone or something without feeling rage, fear, or grief at the prospect or the actuality of losing them.

That the judge and a large section of the public expresses intense rage shows that they also feel intense love for something. There are seeds of hope out there somewhere. 

I found it more soul destroying to hear in the past the attitudes of judges and prosecutors during more low-key trials for civil disobedience charges.

You may have experienced this: the men and women in grey suits give a sigh and an eye roll, and express dryly with a patrician air - if you read between their lines - that if only we the disobedient just followed all their neatly written rules, then everything would be fine. 

Everything is not fine. Everything is on fire.  


There is no rule of law in our global context [word unclear] the global society we need.

The strong prey on the weak. Some people are killing others through climate violence, and killing with impunity.  There's no justice for most people in the world.

That is the reality which everyone in Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rising, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil have been grappling with.

While we grapple with reality, much of the judiciary seems to plug their ears and cling to a 'la la land'.

That my judge broke into a degree of rage suggests he may be close to breaking into reality with us.


He falsified one seemingly innocuous fact in his summing-up at the end of my trial which speaks volumes.

The prosecutor had asked me to confirm that 40% of the UK's electricity is now renewable.  I agreed (I felt it was mostly irrelevant - it is not the overall metric of harm that we cause in the UK; that is the total greenhouse gas emissions).

But in my judge's summary he changed that fact to 40% of the UK's energy.  Electricity is only a fraction of our total energy, so the judge misled himself to create this rosy fantasy.

One in which the UK government has made sense of some fast moving plans for the climate crisis.

In a sense he closed his ears to sing 'la la la' and block out the reality which I showed him: that our government has made a voluntary decision to carry on digging up and burning oil and gas for at least three more decades, knowing that this wreaks deadly violence on many of the world's most vulnerable people.

That is violence falling from the sky on people: deadly heat, famine, pestilence, floods, storms and consequently - I see inevitably - wars.

From within the fantasy which my judge carefully maintained around himself, he understandably saw my action as utterly disproportionate.

When you look at the objective reality - that we are speeding into collective suicide, then the proportions drastically change, and the balance shifts.

I don't pretend it's OK to make people miss funerals. That is very painful. It's terrible. 

And it's also terrible to kill people through climate violence.


Now we have only terrible options and far, far more terrible options.

I choose to put my body in the way of that climate violence.

The UK's transport system is its largest source of emissions - the largest source of our climate violence. The lion's share of that is burnt on our roads.  The M25 is our busiest road.

I suspended my body on that bridge to protect people who have no recourse to justice for the deadly harm they suffer due to actions in Britain. 

I met some of those people in India; people with nowhere to hide; no way to protect their children from the deadly heat, famine, water scarcity and disease which we contribute to by our actions here.  

I imagine the billions of vulnerable people like the friends I've met.

And this morning on the news I saw that in India the deadly heat is rising again.

The timing is chilling.

I give precedence to their rights to life. When you put those rights to life on the balance, then the right of British people to pass and repass the QE2 Bridge looks less weighty.

When you consider that the Dartford tunnels allowed two lanes of traffic to continue crossing in both directions while we were suspended, then it looks less weighty still. 

Do we have a right to drive, or is that a freedom?

Fundamentally, our freedom to drive, to burn fuels, should be subordinate to other people's right to life.

Some of those lives are the British elderly already dying in extreme heat.

Some of those lives are our future selves; our children here. 

Despite all of this, I accept that obstructing the QE2 Bridge was a terrible option. 

It caused people pain. Real pain.


Although I agree with the judge's statement that we did not cause a risk to life or harm people - he confirmed that our action was nonviolent with his own words - however, causing people severe emotional pain is not okay.

We should design our actions to avoid that as much as possible.  I could have done better.

But why are we left with only terrible options?


It is because we have a government and media system which refuses to make plain to ordinary people that we face catastrophic suffering on an unimaginable scale; refuses to make plain that by our collective action we can make a difference to that.  We can preserve many of our most vulnerable neighbors' lives. 

You know this is not happening; because you saw it happen in 2020, when government and media resolved to make ordinary people connect emotionally with the reality of suffering should COVID-19 run rampant.  Info beamed at us on all channels. Everyone was mobilized.

Then everyone willingly changed their way of life overnight to preserve their vulnerable neighbors' lives.

We could do that again.  Why aren't we..?

Most of the suffering is now in far away lands.

Could the reasons be rooted in white supremacy, colonialism?  Maybe.

Could the interests of wealthy elites who want to continue profiting from oil have a strong influence?  Maybe.

The Prime Minister was a former Shell employee when I climbed the bridge. That reeks.

Assigning blame doesn't protect anyone. What matters is that this message reaches ordinary people urgently so that our government buckles to pressure and protect us.  That is a fundamental duty.

The powers that be are not projecting this message.


When something urgently needs to be done, the concept of nonviolent direct action is to go ahead and do it; to dare the authorities to stop you.

Dare those who could do it better to get off the sofa and make it happen. Urgently.

Marcus and I had some harnesses and some ropes. And someone's grandmother had a sewing machine and some orange fabric.

We did what we could urgently. 

One of the few ways a few ordinary people can shout out a message so it's widely heard today is to shout it from above a motorway.

So we repeated the simple message to a wide audience:

 1. Oil and gas is killing people now and destroying our future.

 2. We can do something about it. Stop licensing the oil and gas wells now.


I know that we made a lot of people angry by delivering the message in the way we did. And I also know that all of those people love their children. 

Not that they want to destroy their own futures in a collective suicide.  

When the anger subsides, the reality will remain.

Because this is their cause too. Their future. Everyone's cause.

I trust that all British people want to live.  And want their children to live.

This message is deadly serious and urgent, so we shouted it for two days.


Flash-in-the-pan one day protests are a familiar formula and more easily ignored.

So we stayed for two days; doing something extraordinary to communicate the extraordinary danger.

We then came down on day two, because we recognized that the third day would hurt more people than it would help.

Now I had to go through the logic of all that with you here to confirm that I'm not crazy.

In the morning of my sentencing, I read in the Metro paper about a man who was sentenced for three years and a few months for repeatedly punching another man who later died of his injury. It's quite shocking to be handed a similar sentence. 


However, I see how the judge reached his conclusion - his summing-up recounted all the negative effects of our action and ignored all the positives.

I imagine if someone had made a similar judgment of the pandemic lockdown - some people died because their chemotherapy was cancelled; many people missed funerals; children's mental health was messed up; terrible stuff happened to people.

Looking at all those negatives in isolation, the Government would be charged with unconscionable cruelty.

As it is, the vast majority of us accept that the lockdowns were necessary because of all the lives they preserved. We look at the positives too.

I know how my action will be seen in decades to come. I have patience.

As the judge began his summary and it became clear he was taking a very dim view, one thought sustained me.

Everything he decried about my action - recklessly disrupting the lives of the majority - could be said about the UK's climate violence. But on a scale a billion times worse.

I could substitute the actors - me and Marcus - for the UK's government and corporate leaders.

I could substitute the harm - long traffic delays - for mass deaths. Homelands rendered uninhabitable. Whole cultures torn apart.

I could substitute the majority affected - several hundred thousand Britons - for over 3.3 billion who are now highly vulnerable to climate violence.

Many from cultures which have historically been exploited by British elites.

Many who have historically caused so little of the global warming which we feel at present. 

Remember that the fire began in Britain and what Blake named the 'Satanic Mills'.  I would mark that as an aggravating factor on Britain's conscience.


The judge's rant rose to its crescendo with a statement that I chose to continue my action, effectively saying "to hell with everyone else".  His choice of words was revealing - "to hell".  Go to hell, effectively.

For what message are British elites sending the 3.3 billion by continuing to license new oil and gas wells today?

Their message is: we have a right to profit from oil and to hell with everyone else. 

They're telling the people suffering in the unbearable heat of Lagos, Delhi or Dhaka to go to hell.

They're telling mothers in rural Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and other places to go to hell.

And watch their children's bellies swell, and their skin stretch over their skeletal faces crying for the food that is not there.

Go to hell. And if you can't bear the heat, then don't you dare try to cross our moat in a small boat.

We have all the guns, and they're pointed at the sea.


The judge's words and emotions are appropriate in the circumstances. We should fear going to hell, but it is a hell on Earth - one of our own making. That is what we should fear. 

I climbed the bridge to warn people off that path. But no-one wants to walk it when they see what it is.

He continued his Old Testament theme with 'eye for an eye' punishment. Our sentence amounted to 48,840 hours.

Quite close to the 60,548 hours of vehicle delays recorded on the motorway network those days.

The deduction must be for the effect of other unrelated incidents which also caused closures on nearby stretches of the motorway on the days we climbed. 

Clearly he got his calculator out. 


I do not regret my action 'in the round'. When a state imprisons a person to try and stop a social justice campaign, there is a perverse effect.

A full time employee is created; one who is funded and housed by the State, yet dedicated to the movement.

The harsher the sentences, the stronger the emotions among supporters are, and the greater the determination generated.

When people who burn the world are handed fat bonuses, and those who stand up to stop that are thrown into prison, it outrages people.  It outrages a lot of people.

I've been sustained by many words that have reached me describing the literal outpouring of tears for many dear friends of mine.

I know that when I saw friends of mine willingly go to prison for Insulate Britain it galvanized me for action.

When I saw Professor Julia Steinberger - an IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] scientist - glue herself to a Swiss motorway, I knew what I had to attempt.

We step forward when we see other people around us stepping forward. 

In the physical security of present-day Britain (most days, when it's not on fire), we can intellectually understand the truth of climate and ecological collapse, but we can't emotionally connect with it.

Not fully. Until we start to lose people to it. 


However, I don't feel lost. You can read my essay about how imprisonment improved my mental health.

I've acquired a sense of calm and balance since I took the plunge. 

God, some of this must sound scarily zealous, but fear not, you can also chill out here.

Read all the good books; take relaxing art classes; fold origami.

I know that I've got little to fear about prison because of privileges which I benefit from; but I don't pretend that all paths of activism should lead here - that would be absurdly myopic.

However, we need to use any means necessary, nonviolently.

It opens up a lot of tactical options if we have plenty of people unafraid of prison.


Finally, prison is an ineffective deterrent when we are in a struggle for survival.

There is no freedom on a dead planet.

British prison is nowhere near as scary as watching the fires on the news.


100 years ago, far more brutal confinement did not repress the suffragettes.

Now we face immeasurably greater dangers on the outside.

I see my judge as one of those who tries to stand in the doorway and block up the hall. 

The roar of public rage which he gave voice to is the sound of things changing. And they need to change, fast. Or we're dead.

At the first Extinction Rebellion festival I attended, in the heady days of March 2019, I heard Nick Mulvey sing this line: 

 "I don't wanna see us lose". 

Then a pause, which always cuts me up every time I hear it. It's incredibly poignant to consider all the love and rage and camaraderie in the futility, desperation, chaos. It's heavier now because I imagine the faces of friends streaming with tears...

But then Nick pivots, with a wink, and perks us up:

 "I don't wanna see us lose... any more time".

 "This moment is a mountain to move. Let's move it inside. 

 Wake up. Wake up now. Wake up now".