10 months and counting

With rare certainty we now know in advance the actual day on which an important climate threshold will be passed. It’s not a new temperature rise, or the calving of another Manhattan-sized chunk of glacial ice in Greenland, but the likely jailing on 24 February of 13 climate campaigners who staged a protest against aviation expansion at Heathrow airport.



It would be the first time that peaceful climate campaigners have been sent to prison under laws forbidding “aggravated trespass” since they came into force. Last July, 13 people from the Plane Stupid group staged a lie-down protest on Heathrow’s north runway shortly after publication of the Airports commission report that recommended a new runway be built at the airport. As a result of the action, around 25 flights were cancelled from a daily average total of 1,300 flights, and others were delayed.

At the trial, which concluded in the 13 protesters being found guilty of aggravated trespass last month, scientific evidence was presented that showed halting a flight may be the most significant individual action capable of reducing emissions.

The judge accepted that the protesters were people holding genuine concerns who had acted with integrity. They had, for example, called the police to alert them about their protest as it began, they were peaceful, and no one was hurt, merely inconvenienced, during the protest. But the judge told the 13 that the action was so serious it was “almost inevitable that you will all receive custodial sentences”.

According to the UK ’s Sentencing Council, prison is reserved as a punishment for the “most serious offences”. There are broadly defined thresholds for what this means which leave significant discretion for judges to interpret. Even when a “custody threshold” is crossed, a custodial sentence is not “deemed inevitable”, if other courses of action such as fines, community service or suspended sentences are appropriate. Judges have to consider whether it is “unavoidable that a custodial sentence be imposed”.

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, a barrister and criminal law specialist at Matrix Chambers who has specialised in protest-related cases, says that even for protesters with previous convictions, the worst she has heard of previously is a community order: “It is extremely surprising that custody has been raised as a real possibility. The typical sentence for first time offenders convicted of aggravated trespass in these types of cases is a discharge or at worst a fine.”

Crucial in forming a custody judgment is the issue of causing “harm”. This can include physical harm to individuals, or to the community at large in terms of damage to public health and “economic losses”. It matters especially how and to whom the harm is caused.

The predominant reason given by the judge in the Heathrow case to justify likely imprisonment was the “absolutely astronomical” costs resulting from their actions.

Yet, at the time of the protest, Heathrow officials were keen to emphasise that both runways had remained open throughout the protest and there were just “some” delays and a “few” cancellations. The actual cost of the action is hard to pin down, airport police were quoted saying it was in the “couple of millions”. This appears hardly “astronomical” and rather less, for example, than the many millions lost to travellers through the long-term VAT scam carried out by Heathrow airport retailers.

No, for truly astronomical costs passed on to the public, and resulting from the actions of genuinely reckless individuals and organisations, we need to turn to the finance sector.

According to Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England in 2010, the cost of the financial crisis to the UK economy was between £1.8 trillion and £7.4tn. Conservatively, then, it was at least 1 million times more expensive than the inconvenience caused by a group of climate campaigners. But, as the Economist observed, in the UK: “Not one senior banker has gone on trial over the failure of a bank.”

This is not history as the reverberations are still with us. The economic sins are being compounded and risks recreated, and clear opportunities to build a green economy are being missed.

A key mechanism used by the Bank of England to stabilise the financial sector was so-called quantitative easing (QE) – a process of injecting money into the economy by purchasing government gilts that were in the hands of the private banks with new money created by the Bank of England – to the value of £375bn. This year, very quietly, the Bank of England stands to receive a £20bn windfall in effect as some of those gilts are redeemed; £8.4bn has landed already.

Because the bank is committed to maintain the existing level of QE, it is set to recycle the windfall as more conventional QE. The problem is that there’s a general belief that all QE did ultimately was inflate the price of assets, such as property, mostly held by the already wealthy with little benefit to the real economy. Doing more of the same will just repeat the cycle.

Instead, the windfall could be injected into the economy through the green investment bank or a new national investment bank and go to support green businesses with great potential, such as the solar sector and the green economy through a green new deal more broadly. Mark Carney, the Bank of England’s governor, has long indicated that with political approval, there is no technical problem with such innovations.

At present, we have a perfectly perverse system. It punishes those with integrity who take individual risks for no private gain in the name of a greater good, and rewards the reckless who dump risks onto others for their own private gain.

One of the campaigners waiting to be sentenced, Danni Paffard, remains positive, saying: “A short time behind bars is nothing compared to the life sentence of climate change faced by many around the world.”

But, both legally and economically, it’s time for the UK to raise its sights and develop a sense of perspective. The Heathrow 13 should not be going to prison, but I can think of some others who should.