⚖️ The British State is Committing Treason – My Appeal

Originally recorded from Wayland Prison - listen to the audio version here.

Today is the Appeal Court hearing for my sentence, along with around 20 others who have received multi-year terms for non-violently resisting this mass-death project. No doubt, somewhere in the judge’s subconscious, the words of Thomas Hobbes will be ringing out as they consider the appeal—his description of life without the state as "nasty, brutish, and short."

In my court case last July, the judge endlessly reiterated the Hobbesian proposition underlying UK law on what he described as “protest”—namely, that the state exists to maintain order, and to do this, it must protect the public from those who create disruption. “Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” is the legal term.

There is a closed and circular reasoning here: the state protects the public, and so it prosecutes those who disrupt, and so it protects the public. However, there is a fatal weakness in this logic. The state is not some abstract entity outside time and space. It is embedded in history, populated by people with their own interests and prejudices—who, as a matter of historical fact, have regularly taken control of "real existing states" and used them to destroy the public rather than protect them.

Then, there is what is called "the exception." When this state of affairs comes about, Hobbesian logic reverses itself; it eats itself up. Those who disrupt in order to protect the public interest become the real state, while those who control the state become the disruptors. Hobbes, then, was a realist about human nature but naively idealist about the state.

In the present situation, is that “At 3°C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths.” The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries are in the business of making accurate insurance judgements. The question is whether Britain’s judiciary is similarly capable of making accurate legal judgements on the prospect of 4 billion avoidable deaths over the coming decades.

The objective reality is that real existing states, including the historically situated individuals running the British state in the 2020s, are in full scientific knowledge of the consequences.

By refusing to prevent the continued emission of carbon, they are actively facilitating the destruction of the British state and society. In other words, they are knowingly condemning our younger citizens to lives that will be nasty, brutish, and short—with the added horror of this hell being locked in for the next hundred thousand years.

To the extent that the British judiciary insist on the rightness of Hobbesian logic in these protest cases, they are, in fact, proving themselves completely wrong. Those running the British state are engaged in a level of disruption that is not just finite but total—the destruction of the country itself, far worse than any so-called “public nuisance.” What they are doing is an act of treason.

There is nothing complicated here. The reality is clear. Two conclusions follow:

First, there is absolutely no legal case—Hobbesian or otherwise—against those resisting a regime complicit in 4 billion avoidable deaths.

Second, those in power will insist that such a case exists. In other words: first, facts are facts; and second, the establishment only accepts facts when it is in their short-term interest to do so. Elites rise to power by correctly assessing facts to take control of states. They fall from power when they can no longer correctly assess those facts.

In other words, power makes them stupid. Such is the course of history. The difference this time is that the elites will not just destroy themselves through their stupidity—they will destroy everyone and everything, forever.

Hobbes would not be impressed. Will the appeal judges feel the same?

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