“To members of the judiciary: you are all climate judges now… Lawyers have a responsibility to adopt a climate-conscious, not climate-blind, approach in daily legal practice”, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen told the UK Bar Council in 2021.
While some lawyers and judges took her words to heart, others didn’t. Climate campaigners have won some big successes in the courts – including my own challenge over oil production in Surrey, which paved the way for further legal wins which stopped a coal mine and the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields going ahead.
Yet others campaigning against fossil fuels are being criminalised and sent to prison. Judges have directed juries to ignore evidence of the climate emergency and prevented activists from mentioning climate breakdown when defending their actions.
There are currently 14 people in prison for taking action to protest against new oil. Exeter resident Eddie Whittingham may soon join them. On 30 January, he was found guilty of causing criminal damage when he sprayed red water-based paint on the wall and front entrance of the Treasury back in June 2022, to protest the last government’s approval of the Jackdaw gas field. On 4 April he will be sentenced; the maximum sentence for criminal damage on this scale is ten years imprisonment.
The Treasury protest was one of a series of actions Eddie has taken over the past six years to protest inaction on climate change and to demand an end to the extraction and use of oil, gas and coal.
Where did his drive come from? Eddie told me,
“As a kid I was very concerned about problems in the world, like global warming, deforestation, loss of wildlife, pollution and so on. But as a teenager I become desensitised with these issues. I re-engaged with the climate crisis when I was 20 years old.”
He cites the publication of the Hothouse Earth paper (a scientific paper published in August 2018 which spelled out that the planet is on a path of unstoppable climate change) as one of the key moments:
“It reminded me that the climate crisis required urgent attention, it’s not something you can kick down the road, that our grandchildren will have to deal with. It’s something that has immediate consequences.”
From March 2019, Eddie got involved with Extinction Rebellion, but later became disillusioned with them. He said,
“In 2018 and 2019 XR felt like a revolutionary force, but from 2019 it felt like something was shifting, and their theory of change became unclear to me after 2021. I spent two weeks with them in August 2021, it was clear at that point there was not a lot of strategy there, it was all about symbolic communications.”
Eddie moved to Exeter in 2019 to start a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His activism continued – both with XR and through involvement in other groups, including Green New Deal Rising, Teach the Future (a youth-led campaign pushing for broad climate education in the UK) and the Green Party. Yet none of these was a good fit with his own ideas about the best way to make change happen.
That changed in February 2022 when Just Stop Oil was founded. The group uses civil resistance and direct action to persuade the British government to stop the licensing and production of new oil. Eddie says,
“I had been struggling to find my niche. When Just Stop Oil came on the scene, I was like, ‘I’m in. This is it!’”.
Since then, his commitment to Just Stop Oil has seen him arrested nine times, and imprisoned twice, both times for breaching court injunctions.
The Treasury action for which he’s awaiting sentencing was the first in a series of high-profile protests.
A month later, Eddie and another activist glued their hands to the frame of a Turner painting at Manchester Art Gallery. On that instance, they were found not guilty under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protect freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association.
Then in September, he and 50 others gathered at the entrance to Kingsbury Oil Terminal near Birmingham, where an injunction against protest was in place. All 51 went to prison for a week.
In April 2023 Eddie’s photo appeared on newspaper front pages and in the media worldwide when he disrupted the World Snooker Championship by climbing onto a snooker table and spraying it with dyed corn starch. The dramatic photo went viral and Eddie was again arrested. For this he received 200 hours of community service and £1,289 costs.
“After the snooker action I had a certain profile”, he said, “and I wanted to make use of it so I did an action at my own graduation”.
Eddie sprayed paint outside the hall as the new graduates were queuing up for photographs. He was immediately arrested, and went to prison for three days.
All this time Eddie and his fellow activists have been waiting for the legal outcome of the Treasury action, which took two and a half years to come to trial. Finally last month they were found guilty of causing £100,000 worth of damage. They had assumed the water-based paint would be easily washed off. Yet according to the prosecution, the limestone surface was not easily cleaned, and several attempts were necessary, hence the high cost.
In a stroke of irony, on the same day that Eddie was found guilty of criminal damage, the Scottish Court ruled that Jackdaw, the gas field they were protesting about, had been permitted unlawfully. The consent was quashed, and the UK government didn’t defend it.
The impending sentencing makes it hard for Eddie to make plans. For the past year, he has worked for Exeter Community Energy, signposting people in fuel poverty to available support. That job ended recently and the prospect of a prison sentence makes it hard to look for a new one. He has a place to start a Masters degree in Global Sustainability Solutions at Exeter University this autumn. Whether he can take this up depends on the sentence he receives on 4 April.
Despite the impacts on his life, Eddie would not do anything differently. He says,
“I see the climate crisis as an existential threat. I believe I am likely to die prematurely as a result of the climate crisis. So it seems selfish not to do this if you have a choice.”
“I am lucky that I can put myself in this position. I don’t have any plans for a particular career, I’m not having children, I won’t have a mortgage, I don’t have any dependents, I have a supportive family. I could put myself in a stressful position.
“The climate crisis means billions of people starving and billions of people being displaced, and a rise in fascism. It means you don’t have a country. You don’t have life support systems, you don’t have food in your local supermarket, so don’t talk only about melting ice, floods. It’s the collapse of the physical systems that make life possible.”
Eddie is struggling to make ends meet as he waits for sentencing. His fellow activist Alexia may have to fight deportation. Any support you can give them both will be greatly appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/help-eddie-and-alexia
