Bulletin 01: 13th January 2025
Fires burn, jails fill, marches banned and more
Hello, good morning, happy Monday and welcome to this week’s tgf bulletin.
Here you will find news stories you might of missed (with a little analysis thrown in for good measure!), listings for protests, events, solidarity demonstrations and more for the week ahead as well as dates for your diary.
I had intended to include links to fundraisers and mutual aid organisations and opportunities but then I got caught up in a whole email length limit saga because I gassed on too much and to be honest it makes sense in my head for them to go out on a Friday because of alliteration so, that’s when you will get them!
Anyway, grab a coffee, sit yourself down (or grab onto that tube or bus handle if you’re reading this on the way to work) and let’s get it…
You might have missed:
Jails fill up with climate protestors as LA burns
I’m sure like me many of you have been glued to your screens watching the hellish fires rip through Los Angeles devastating communities, destroying homes and tragically taking the lives of at least 16 people. You’ll no doubt have seen the rumblings of a major political spat about to erupt from the ashes of the fires (some still burning after 7 days) between local, state and federal officials all apportioning blame for the handling of the disaster to one another.
It has been pointed out, by the LA fire chief no less, that funding to the LAFD, including civilian positions like mechanics, was cut by $17.5 million (funding to the LAPD was increased by $126 million over the same period). Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley also stated that over 100 fire apparatus were out of action. The use of incarcerated labour (there is another word for this!) to fight the fires has also, quite rightly, come under intense scrutiny.
What has been quite interesting is, much like during the horrifying mud slides in Spain, the forest fires that ripped through Greece or Australia in recent years, and the historic floods that hit Britain year after year, any idea that the impact, creation or legacy of the disaster might have been somehow exacerbated by climate crisis is immediately shouted down as politicising tragedy.
Of course it’s beholden upon all of us to approach any discussion, particularly those about a situation where people have lost loved ones, homes, and/or treasured possessions with compassion and empathy. That being said there can be no more political moment than a moment of tragedy where there are clear routes of blame and responsibility to be taken — particularly by those who continue to bake our planet whilst raking in billions in profit and pouring millions into campaigns to denounce, dissuade or disarm those fighting for climate justice.
For me, one of the most enduring images of the last few days has been the sign of the Getty Villa captured amongst burning vegetation in a Fallout like hellscape, with the art museum itself, a replica of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, looming through the smoke in the background.
I couldn’t help but think of the image of Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland next to Sunflowers - orange soup slowly dripping down the glass protecting the painting, Plummer and Holland’s hands stuck to the wall underneath it with superglue as they both kneeled. There is, if I remember Plummer saying at the time, no art on a dead planet. You will note, the same people who very publicly soiled themselves because of the idea of some soup being thrown on the glass case around a painting seem to have remained awfully silent as flames lick around the Getty Villa and the countless millennia old artworks encased within it…
As my wonderful friend and brilliant activist Fran wrote on her instagram, “This isn’t an ‘I told you so’ moment, every day I wake up and WISH I could be proved wrong. Every climate activist would love to be wrong! We’d love to be doing something else!”
It is a bitter irony then that as LA burns and flames threaten the very heart of the west’s cinematic centre, here in Britain the state’s continued campaign against those who have committed themselves and their lives to fighting for action continued.
Last Tuesday 7th January, a family doctor who disabled petrol pumps at Esso Thurrock services on the M25 on 24th August 2022 was sentenced to one year in prison. Dr Patrick Hart appeared before Judge Mills at Chelmsford Crown Court today after being found guilty in October 2024 of Criminal Damage.
In his closing statement at Chelmsford Crown Court during his trial, Dr Hart said: “I disrupted people as an act of care. I damaged the petrol pump screens as an act of care, because in times of great peril, a caring person has to stand up for what is right. My actions have already cost me greatly. I have been handed a suspended prison sentence, and thousands of pounds in costs through a civil injunction for this exact same action. I have been penalised at work and stand to be suspended or lose my licence to practise as a doctor. But I regret nothing. Because to not do it, would have been to give up on caring, and that would be worse. In the face of the permanent collapse of our climate, our economy, our society and life on Earth, the only thing that keeps me going is our continued capacity as people to care, regardless of what happens. Yes, I fear prison, but I am ready to go if I must.”
Elsewhere, last Thursday 9th January, a Just Stop Oil activist who climbed the M25 gantry after an unprecedented 40 degree heatwave was given a suspended sentence after being found guilty of public nuisance. Abigail Percy Ratcliff, 25, a student from London, was among five supporters who blocked the M25 in three places by climbing on the overhead signs after Just Stop Oil declared the M25 a site of civil resistance on 20 July 2022.
Before taking action in 2022 Abigail said: “The UK crossed the 40 degree threshold yesterday, runways melted, wildfires raged and hundreds died. This is not the new normal, it will keep getting worse until we just stop oil. We must act now. I joined Just Stop Oil because I was worried about my future, about my sister’s future, but I think a lot of us have realised this week that we’re not talking about the future, we’re talking about now, it’s happening today.”
Abigail was previously remanded to prison in November 2022 for three and a half months.
Among those still in prison for action on the M25 is 78 year old mother of two Gaie Delap. A retired teacher from Bristol, Delap was sentenced to 20 months in prison back in August for her part in actions blocking the M25 (around the same time the Labour government released a large number of people early because of over crowding in prisons). In a letter to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Delap’s MP and co-leader of Green Party of England and Wales Carla Denyer said the sentence was “an example of an ongoing and serious problem with disproportionate sentencing for climate activists”.
In November last year Delap was released to serve the rest of her sentence on a home detention curfew but her ordeal was far from over. The electronic tag she was required to wear as part of her bail terms could not go on her ankle because she has deep vein thrombosis and it risked giving her a stroke. The alternative - to put the tag around her wrist, was not possible because the private company charged with fitting the tag (Serco) couldn’t find one small enough. For context Delap’s wrists are 14 and a half centimetres around. The average for a women is 15-16 centimetres. There is much to write about privatisation, the ability of companies like Serco to not only profit from the horrors of the carceral state (both in terms of the “justice” system and the machinations of the immigration system) but to be able to preside over endemic abuse, be wholly unfit for purpose to the point of incompetence and still get government contracts but, I’ll save that for another day…
The long and the short of it is Delap was recalled to prison five days before Christmas 2024. Last week, Gaie Delap spent her 78th birthday in prison. A vigil to mark her birthday was held outside Eastwood Park Prison on the evening Friday 10th January.
Lily Pridie, her daughter, had this message for her mother, “Please stay strong and keep your spirits up. We are so proud of you. Thousands of people are supporting you. Let’s hope that something positive comes out as a result of this awful situation.”
JSO, Denyer and others continue to campaign for her release and I will, of course, keep you all posted on the progress of the case.
The Met ban Palestine protest
From one insane crackdown on protest to another, I regret to inform you that the Metropolitan police are at it again.
For almost a year and a half Israel has been enacting a genocide in Gaza. As images of death and destruction, shredded bodies of children, decimated schools, hospitals, nurseries have filled our screens we have marched in our millions across the world in support of those being slaughtered under seige. Here in London, as well as actions in our local boroughs, those marches have taken the shape of dozens of national demonstrations, some of which are reported to have potentially drawn people in numbers that eclipse even the anti Iraq war demo in 2003.
The demonstrations have been called by a coalition of six groups (Stop the War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, and Muslim Association of Britain) who have been responsible for the organisation of the marches, and thus for communicating and negotiating with the police.
This weekend, on Saturday 18th January, the first such march of this year was due to take place. According to organisers the route, which started just outside of the BBC on Portland Place, central London to Whitehall, was agreed with the police in November 2024. It is a route that has only been used twice by Palestine demonstrators in the last 15 months of marches, the last time being February 2024.
It is, however, a starting point for rallies and demonstrations that has been used over and over again by a huge variety of different causes and groups. The symbolism of beginning at the most recognisable offices of the state owned British Broadcasting Corporation and ending in the heart of government in Whitehall has been lost on precisely zero organisers of big marches, which is why, over the last decade or so I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood with friends as marches gather up around us, the Orwellian windows of Portland place gazing down on us before we set off into the city.
The police, in reneging on their agreement and banning the use of that route, have stated that the march could cause disruption to a nearby synagogue. They state that they have been lobbied by members of the congregation and local leaders on the matter.
Organisers of the march have rightly pointed out that the Met have “acknowledged, there has not been a single incident of any threat to a synagogue attached to any of the marches. Any suggestion that pro-Palestine marches are somehow hostile to Jewish people ignores the fact that Jewish people have been joining the marches in their thousands.”
Long before this round of inspiring solidarity and protests, Jewish groups have been integral to resisting Israeli aggression against the Palestinian peoples. Groups like Na’amod have been tireless in exposing the complicity of successive British Governments with the atrocities committed by Israel. They have been an integral part of the Jewish Blocs on these marches that have often numbered in their thousands. Across the world millions of Jewish people have shown their support for the people of Palestine and condemned the genocide committed by Israel.
The invoking, and subsequent infantilisation, of Jewish people has been a tactic of those who support the Israeli onslaught in Gaza throughout the entirety of the last 15 months. Time and time again we’ve heard stories from both Jewish and non-Jewish zionists claiming they know Jewish people who are ‘too scared to go to central London each weekend’. The people who claim the ‘Jewish people are tired’ because their friend misread a sign that said ‘Parking’ for ‘Palestine’ and ‘started to panic’. It is exactly this homogenised condescension that was used by then Home Secretary Suella Braverman in her unrelenting and unhinged attacks on the marches back in November 2023 (the same attacks that emboldened the far right into mobilising and then attacking the cenotaph on remembrance Sunday).
There are many, I think it’s fair to say, that have really lost the run of themselves when it has come to the Palestine marches. You’ll remember calls for Commissioner Mark Rowley to ban Palestine marches on Armistice Day (a move that runs antithetical not only to the freedom those who died in war were said to be fighting for but also to domestic human rights legislation, our international treaty obligations and the very foundation of the basis of the loose and uncodified constitution that just about holds the institutions of this country together).
Former Labour MP John Woodcock, also known as Lord Walney, who became the Conservative Government’s ‘independent advisor on political violence’ and who has advocated for banning groups like Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action laid a report before Parliament that advocated a pay to protest model, as a direct reaction to the Palestine marches. A quick scan of the ‘independent advisor’s’ social media feed will give you some indication as to the folly of that moniker whilst dig a little deeper and you’ll find links to defence and oil companies…
Far be it from me to commend the police for doing anything (other than disbanding themselves), but the Met have, for the most part, resisted the majority of the more unhinged demands even when the noise was at fever pitch. That changed with this ban which represents a chilling escalation in the ongoing clampdown on those who seek to resist Israel’s genocide.
Announcing the ban on the march, Commander Adam Slonecki, who is leading the policing operation in London this coming weekend, said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (one of the six organisers of the march) have “said they will not change their position” and continue “to encourage protesters to form up in Portland Place.”
Slonecki continued by issuing a threat to those who intended to do so, stating the Met will “have no choice but to use the powers available to us.”
The organisers published a statement condemning the ban, signed by more than 150 signatories, including organisations such as Liberty, Amnesty International UK and Greenpeace, MPs, actors, musicians, community leaders, journalists and more — (I am honoured to be amongst this number).
I spoke to organisers on Friday evening who told me they would remain steadfast and not backdown. They continue to urge supporters to lobby their MPs, complain to the police and the BBC as the days count down to the demonstration.
This is just another in a string of alarming attacks on the right to protest by the Met which include the arrests of activists en masse over the last year for ‘conspiracy’ public order offences (i.e. detaining people for thinking or talking about doing something, but not actually committing that crime). It comes after the Met tried to use the Public Order Act to completely ban Extinction Rebellion protests across the city in 2019 before being roundly smacked down by the courts. This of course, before we even consider the antagonistic, dangerous and inflammatory way the Met have policed demonstrations for decades.
The run up to this demonstration marks a key battle in the continued fight against increasingly draconian policing of protest and I will of course make sure you are all furnished with any and all significant updates as the week progresses. Either way, I hope to see many of you in central London on Saturday.
Listings:
Monday 13th January
London: Palestine, Poetry & Political Prisoners, 6pm, WC1E 7LE
A poetry night to amplify the voices of incredible Palestine Action political prisoners who have been falsely accused and held on remand without trial after having their homes raided and arrests done under the terrorism act.
SOAS Palestine Society say: “Their wonderful loved ones will be at the event to read the incredible poetry they have been writing on the inside as they continue to resist against injustice, and sharing stories. We will also amplify poetry to link the prisoners struggle everywhere across all oppressed peoples and to continue to centre the people of Gaza and Palestine.”
SOAS liberated zone for Gaza at 6pm! (1 Byng Place, WC1E 7LE)
Tuesday 14th January
Bristol: Smashing the genocide-industrial complex talk, 6pm for a 6:30pm start, BS2 8JT
Bristol Transformed are hosting a pay what you can discussion with a leading Palestine Action ‘actionist’ to discover what we might learn about direct action that doesn't rely on mass engagement, whether it should be encouraged and how it fits into a broader movement.
Hosted by the wonderful Narzanin Massoumi, this is sure to be an engaging, useful and necessary conversation against the backdrop of ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ramping up of state crackdown on those who seek to resist it. Tickets are available here.
Friday 17th January
London: Solidarity with the Filton 18, 9:30am, EC4M 7EH
Eighteen people are now held in a prison awaiting their trial after an abuse of counter terror legislation that allowed the state to hold them in solitary confinement for up to a week without charge. They have now been charged with non terror offences and accused of costing Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons firm, over 1 million in damages and are being held in remand.
Come down and show your support for the prisoners and their families in this unprecedented case. Bring banners and your voices. Mobilise from 9.30am.
Saturday 18th January
London: National Demonstration for Palestine, details TBC
The first national march for Palestine is scheduled to take place this Saturday in central London. As I explained towards the top of this email, rhe original route (from outside the BBC on Portland Place to Whitehall) has been banned by the police so details are TBC but keep an eye on the socials of the organisers (Stop the War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, and Muslim Association of Britain) for updates!
London: BOOBLESS Cyro & Richard's Top Surgery Fundraiser Event, 3 - late, E17 4RQ
Drag icons and power couple Cyro and Richard are holding an all day event at Walthamstow Trades Hall to raise money for their gender affirmation treatment. With day time set to include DJs, workshops, stalls and more and the evening featuring raucous cabaret and drag performances and dancing into the night with Queer House Party, this is not to be missed!
Tickets and more information can be found here.
Sunday 19th January
England: Avanti Train managers strikes
Avanti Train managers continue their weekly strikes over pay and conditions this Sunday. You can find your local picket on STRIKEMAP and find out more about the dispute from the RMT here.
Dates for your diary:
Tuesday 21st January
Bristol: bell hooks: Confronting Class in the Classroom, 6pm for a 6:30pm start, BS2 8JT
Bristol Transformed say, “How is the classroom shaped by middle-class norms? How can we create spaces which genuinely suit people from all backgrounds? How important are class distinctions when we try to understand inequality in the education system today?
bell hooks was an influential educator and social critic, famous for her works on love, racism, sexism and pedagogy. In this session, we will discuss a chapter of her work on class from the legendary collection Teaching to Transgress and see if we can make any use of it for our own practice as educators and learners.”
Pay what you can tickets available here!
Sunday 25th January
Wakefield: Solidarity Demo with imprisoned Palestine Action ‘actionist’, WF4 4AX
Palestine Action say, “On Saturday 25th January, friends and supporters of Palestine Action political prisoner, Francesca Nadin, will demonstrate in support of her, and to mark her 39th birthday, a few days before.
Francesca, who has still not been convicted of any charge, has been held at New Hall prison, near Wakefield, since June 2024. By the time she faces trial on criminal damage charges, relating to an attack on a Barclay's Bank branch in Leeds, she will have already spent nine months in prison.”
Saturday 1st February
London: National Demonstration to stop the far right
Stand up to Racism say, “Elon Musk is fast becoming the leading far right figure globally and the biggest defender of Robinson.
Robinson is again calling on his racist supporters to take the streets of London. Last time we mobilised 20,000 to oppose him. We can do it again. Join us on Sat 1 Feb ✊🏽
Details TBC, follow us for updates”
Thanks so much for reading. As ever if you would like your event, protest, fundraiser etc. included here or if you have any tips, press releases or save the dates please do drop me a line! I’m still working out how to best do these emails so any feedback, thoughts, reactions, vibes are very welcome!
Hope to see you all on the streets!
ben x
P.S. A few people have got in contact saying you have had issues subscribing. If this is you and you would like to subscribe firstly thank you! Secondly, if you drop me a note on one of the links above with your email I can manually add you in the backend (oh matron etc).