The £5.9m bill to police the climate camp at Kingsnorth is not only a colossal waste of money, but yet another example of the increasingly aggressive and authoritarian attitude the police are taking to peaceful green protests. Clearly, in the eyes of the police, playing board games and dressing up as climate clowns are now classified as criminal acts.
And why, rather than being straight with the public, did the truth about police "injuries" have to be dragged out of the government by a freedom of information request? At the time of the police operation at the power station in the summer, ministers justified the police's action by claiming that 70 officers had been injured in the course of their duties. Now we know there were in fact only 12 reportable injuries – ranging from wasp stings to backache from sitting too long in a police car. But more ominously, the 1,500 police who descended on the camp in August have been accused of using unnecessarily aggressive tactics against the protesters.
Unfortunately, heavy handed policing of green groups is nothing new. When I was a campaigner with Greenpeace the police regularly took the law into their own hands. On a peaceful protest I took part in against genetically modified crops at Liverpool docks in 1998, I was arrested while up a crane and spent the night in jail before being charged with aggravated trespass and released on bail just after dawn. However, we were soon re-arrested by CID who – court trial papers subsequently showed – were furious that the local police had let us go. Instead they wanted to charge us with the far more serious offence of criminal damage for "putting up a banner and damaging the crane". Being arrested twice for the same offence is still illegal in this country as far as I know.
Of course, the police have a difficult job to do and not all of them are, by any means, anti green protesters. I was on one occasion arrested by an officer who cheerfully told me that he was a family member of Greenpeace and personally supported non-violent direct action because the political system has failed us. But there are those higher up in the police who seem to think that peaceful protests are somehow a threat to law and order rather than an inherent, democratic right. And to justify their actions they are using increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, claiming environmental protesters are criminals – or terrorists who are a threat to national security.
Yet most environmentalists abhor violence and only a few groups, such as Greenpeace or Plane Stupid, are prepared to break the law. The vast majority, such as like Friends of the Earth, stay well within it. And even when groups do break the law it is usually as a last resort aimed at generating maximum publicity for a cause, rather than trying to force their views on the law abiding majority.
In the case of Kingsnorth the government and police had already suffered the acute embarrassment of seeing Greenpeace activists who had scaled the chimney of the coal-fired power station spectacularly win their September court case after using climate change as a legal defence. Again the police tried to charge the protestors with criminal damage for writing "Gordon" down the chimney, somewhat spuriously claiming this had resulted in £30,000 worth of damage. John Price, prosecuting, argued that the protesters' actions were "not capable of being lawful". He said: "There are things you can lawfully do in making a protest but there's a line which has to be drawn. When the defendants caused damage to that chimney, it's the line that they crossed."
But to many the policing of the Kingsnorth camp shows that it is the police, not the protestors, who now have crossed that line. The Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who attended the week-long event, said: "The police seem to be trying to stop Kingsnorth climate camp going ahead and if this is the intention it is illegal and I will be drawing it to the attention of the European Commission as well as the UK authorities."
Yet what Kingsnorth really draws attention to is the fact that the policing of environmental protests, where once merely bad, is now ridiculous.