Lecturer tells jury Drax power station threat is ‘deadly and urgent’
Climate change protesters accused of hijacking a power station coal train managed to address a jury on political issues today after a judge relaxed repeated warnings to give them some leeway.
Judge Spencer had earlier repeatedly told Leeds University lecturer Paul Chatterton, who is leading the defence of 22 activists, that the jury was only concerned with whether they had stopped and boarded the train and not with their reasons for doing so.
But after almost an hour’s adjournment he allowed Chatterton and a second protester, 26-year-old film-maker Alison Stratford, wider scope before finally intervening to cut them short.
Chatterton, who has lectured on geography for 11 years, said that he had acted because of “passion and terror at the implications of coal-burning power stations for global warning”.
He told the jury that he did not consider the train hijack to be an illegal act, because United Nations statistics suggested that the amount of carbon produced by Drax was responsible for 180 deaths a year. He said: “The threat is deadly and it is urgent …” The judge then interrupted him again, saying: “I’ve let you go on – please remember the legal restraints.”
Stratford was allowed to show the jury photographs of houses under water in her home town of Louth, Lincolnshire, which she said had roused her fears about climate change. She choked and had to recover in the witness box as she described how her four-year-old nephew had told her: “Don’t worry, we can fix it.”
“I was on the train to show him that I had done everything I could,” she said. But when she got on to Arctic ice melt and polar bears, the judge again asked: “Could you talk about the train?”
The court heard that the protesters had lined up academic witnesses and a scientist from Nasa to address the jury, but this had been ruled inadmissible. Adjourning for lunch, the judge warned that he would show less patience if defendants insisted on talking about their “genuine and deeply held feelings about climate change” rather than the nuts and bolts of the train hijack.
The defendants, aged between 43 and 21, have pleaded not guilty to obstructing a railway engine contrary to the Malicious Damage Act of 1861. But Chatterton admitted as soon as he began his defence that he had been on the train and had “intended to stay on it as long as possible”.
Earlier he told the jury that the prosecution case, which began and ended yesterday, had been “incredibly partial” about the incident on 13 June last year. Addressing the seven women and five men directly across the crowded courtroom at Leeds crown court, he said: “They said what went on there but did not deal with why.”
Yesterday, Richard Mansell QC, prosecuting, told the jury that the defendants “preparing a misuse of the court process to continue the protest action which they started when they boarded that train just over a year ago”.
The accused are Theo Bard, 24; Amy Clancy, 24; Brian Farelly, 32; Grainne Gannon, 26; Bryn Hoskins, 24; Jasmin Karalis, 25; Ellen Potts, 33; Bertie Russell, 24; Alison Stratford, 26; Jonathan Stevenson, 27 and Felix Wight, all of London; Melanie Evans, 25; Matthew Fawcette, 34; Robin Gillett, 23; Kristina Jones, 22; Oliver Rodker, 40 and Thomas Spencer, 23, all of Manchester; Paul Chatterton, 36, and Louise Hemmerman, 31, of Leeds; Melanie Evans, 25, of Stockport; Paul Morozzo, 42, of Hebden Bridge; Christopher Ward, 38, of Newport Pagnell, and Elizabeth Whelan, of Glasgow.
Nationalised banks must go green
Environmental groups are suing the Treasury in an effort to ensure that RBS invests only in sustainable and ethical projects
Since the banking crisis last year, RBS has remained firmly in the public eye as the most controversial bank in the UK. Beyond the populist pillorying of Fred Goodwin’s undeserved pension bonanza and the most recent wave of outrage over the size of the new boss’s pay packet, lay more fundamental questions over the relationship between public money, climate change and the role of finance in fuelling the expansion of coal, oil and gas around the world. Because the Treasury didn’t provide any satisfactory answers when we asked them these questions, Platform, the World Development Movement and People & Planet are today filing an application for a judicial review over the lack of environmental and human rights considerations in the recapitalisation of RBS.
For some years, RBS has been targeted by NGOs and climate activists as being the UK high-street bank most associated with pumping billions into fossil fuel projects across the globe. Until it recently wised up to the need for a greener public image, it even went as far as promoting itself on the www.oilandgasbank.com website that it set up. Before the recapitalisation, it had financed companies that were not only disastrous in terms of spewing out countless tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, but that were also accused of human rights abuses – companies such as Lundin Petroleum, which is active in Sudan and listed by the Sudan Divestment Task Force in its “Top Five Highest Offenders”.
Before the recapitalisation, such instances of questionable finance were a scandal because they helped trash the climate and often human rights too. Since November last year, they are even more outrageous because RBS is now using public money to do it. In March the Guardian reported that in the six months following the initial bailout of the banks, RBS had been involved in financing loans to coal, oil and gas companies worth nearly £10bn (£9,941m) – over a quarter the amount the bank had received from taxpayers at that point. These companies included finance (or assistance in obtaining finance) to oil companies to expand their operations in controversial or politically sensitive regions (such as Tullow Oil in Uganda, and Cairn Energy in arctic Greenland) as well as to energy giant E.ON, which has received a great deal of bad press over its efforts to construct a new coal-fired plant in Kingsnorth, Kent.
The Green Book requires “central government to undertake a comprehensive and proportionate assessment of all new policies, programme and projects so as to best promote the public interest when using government resources”. We felt that using public money to finance new fossil fuel in the face of the threat of climate change flies in the face of public interest. In a letter that was sent in April from the Treasury to our legal council, we were told that “the environmental and human rights records of the individual banks were of no relevance to the decision and therefore the appraisal of the decision that was carried out did not consider the environmental or human rights records or policies of the individual banks”.
We think that if the increasingly climate-conscious UK taxpayer was aware of the type of projects that their money was financing, they would beg to differ. We are not suggesting that the banking bailout shouldn’t have happened. We are saying that now that it has happened, the government has a responsibility, especially given its posturing in the international political arena as being a “global leader on climate change”, to ensure that the public isn’t paying to expand further fossil fuel developments.
On 2 March, 2008, the Treasury established the framework for the management of public investment in recapitalised banks via UK Financial Investments. The framework sets out the basis for how the board of UKFI should manage government shares in the banks, but makes no reference to the need to consider social and environmental criteria, nor to support or even be consistent with other public policy objectives. This is what we are applying to challenge in court.
This isn’t a particularly radical demand, it’s just common sense. The cross-party environmental audit committee has already made the recommendation that the Treasury should “look at the benefits and practicalities of imposing some form of environmental criteria on the investment strategies of those banks in which the state had a controlling stake” while an early day motion tabled by Lib Dem shadow environment minister Martin Horwood proposes the same.
The Treasury has claimed it needs to take an “arm’s-length” approach to the management of RBS to maximise the financial return for the taxpayer. In reality, it already showed that it could get more “hands on” when it intervened over the issue of capping executive bonuses. We need to ask if the interests of the taxpayer would be better served by ensuring that RBS was not actively involved in making huge carbon emissions increases all over the world. This important decision should be made in a transparent and accountable fashion, rather than left to the whims of individuals in the banking sector, especially given the appalling mess that these individuals have already left us in.
With enough political will, RBS could even go further by not only committing to stop financing the “bad stuff” but also taking on an investment mandate of providing much-needed capital to Britain’s cash-starved renewables industry, providing microloans for households to install proper insulation and providing career development loans for the retraining of workers involved in carbon-intensive industries. There are numerous possibilities for transforming a beleaguered financial institution whose name has been dragged through the mud into the Royal Bank of Sustainability.