I have signed a letter calling for Attorney General Richard Hermer KC to meet with Chris Packham and Dale Vince to discuss the jailing of 5 environmental activists, otherwise known as the “Whole Truth Five”.

These sentences have been made using the Tories’ draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. So extreme is this law and its impact on environmental defenders, that earlier this year UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst “seriously question[ed] the necessity and proportionality of such conditions for persons engaging in peaceful protest” and was “distressed to see how environmental defenders are derided by some of the mainstream UK media and in the political sphere“.

The ability to peacefully protest is integral to a healthy and robust democracy. Its criminalisation speaks to a deeper malaise. One that calls into question the health of some fundamental democratic cornerstones. The last Conservative government was one of the most authoritarian we have ever seen in this country. It changed the law to deny defendants the right to use as a defence their concern about the climate crisis and in so doing to speak truth to power. That power is oil corporations and the big business interests that benefit from its continued extraction. Extraction that will cost us all dearly.

It is why I spoke in solidarity with the five climate protestors. I back their calls for a meeting between campaigners, scientists and the Attorney General to discuss their case and the laws which saw them imprisoned.

Read my full statement in response to the sentencing of the Whole Truth Five here.