👮 They Came For Us and Soon They Will Come For You
A Letter to the British Left on why we must unite against the encroaching fascism of collapse.
Note: This letter was written from Wayland prison and originally published in The Morning Star.
I was wrong. When the recent trial started for what is now called the Whole Truth Five (#WTF), I naively thought I would walk free, that I would not be found guilty. My crime was a 20-minute speech on why people should join a Just Stop Oil non-violent Civil Disobedience campaign. Or if I was found guilty, I reasoned the jail term would be no more than two years. I had already spent four months in prison on remand followed by a year and a half on a curfew tag so a two-year custodial sentence would be no big deal.
Three weeks later, after I had been dragged out of the Court and into the cells several times for speaking to the jury, about evidence the judge deemed “irrelevant” I was sentenced to five years in prison. Repression is not a gradual process, it leaps out at you and takes you off guard. Do you remember the Solidarity leaders in Poland? They were invited into talks with the Polish government but when they got to the meeting, they were arrested in one fell swoop and imprisoned for years. You don't think it will happen to you and then it does.
Just Stop Oil has had an uncomfortable relationship with the Left. There is a pretence that it can be ignored, but Just Stop Oil reminds us that the future will not be like the past. In a decade or so societies will be falling apart as we pass 2C of heating and experience extreme weather events which will push hundreds of millions of people into destitution and migration. It is going to be an Almighty shitshow, and it will not stop. You can't negotiate with physics, with a thousand peer-reviewed articles. Just Stop Oil reminds us what resistance, that far-off folk memory relegated to Netflix, actually looks like in the present moment. Thousands of arrests, hundreds of imprisonments and a 5-year sentence for making a speech.
It foreshadows what will happen to the left, soon enough. As Trotsky says “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you”. There is not going to be a bright sunny Green New Deal, the neoliberal fantasy of the Labour Party. There's going to be a rupture, and then a rapid descent into poverty and starvation. Along the way the ruling class will have the police knock on your door and have you put away for half a decade. Capitalism is not just destroying our prosperity, it is destroying our very means of existence. To take just one example, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This is the earth system which warms the British Isles, delivering warm water from the equator to gently warm our shores. It will collapse at some point before 2050, most likely around the mid-2030s. This will reduce temperatures in the UK by between 10 and 30°C and end arable agriculture.
What will that mean for British workers? For British farmers? For Europe, for the rains in Africa and Asia? Just Stop Oil is not a sideshow it's raising the alarm about the biggest fucking disaster in human history.
What needs to be done? It's time to unite the non-Labour left and the climate resistance space, to fuse. We have a lot to learn from each other and millions of people are crying out for initiative and leadership. A program for decency, compassion and survival. A massive reduction in inequality to fund the reduction in emissions and earth system repair. Anything less and we will have nothing but fascism and mass death.
I wish to thank the Trade Union leaders who along with 1,200 others signed a public letter to protest the sentences of the #WTF. This must be a beginning. We need a series of joint meetings, a national tour and a new politics using assemblies and dual power. Get in touch with me in prison at rogerremanded@gmail.com
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally.
