Britain Criminalised Its Climate Protesters Then Handed the Blueprint to the Far Right's Targets

Human Rights Watch published a report this month with a title that reads like an admission: Silencing the Streets. It documents, in careful legal language, what has been obvious to anyone watching British courts since 2022 — that a state facing a climate movement willing to sit in roads chose prison over policy. Five-year sentences for a Zoom call. Jail time for holding a sign about jurors' rights. A courts system converted into a deterrent machine aimed not at violence but at inconvenience.

The legal architecture is Conservative in origin — the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 — but it is Labour that chose to defend it in court after the High Court ruled Suella Braverman had acted unlawfully lowering the threshold for police intervention from "serious disruption" to "more than minor" disruption. The Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in 2025. Parts of the law are void. The government has not repealed anything, and a new Crime and Policing Bill now proposes a blanket ban on protest face coverings. Losing in court has changed nothing about the direction of travel.

What makes this more than a story about overreach is the comparison Global Witness pulled from the Metropolitan Police's own Freedom of Information disclosures: since 2022, three-quarters of the roughly 2,200 climate protesters arrested in London were charged. Far-right protesters arrested in the same period — despite being more frequently implicated in actual violence — were charged less than a quarter of the time. That is not a gap in enforcement. It is a declared hierarchy of who gets to disrupt public life and who gets locked up for it. Slow marches earn multi-year sentences; the milieu that firebombed synagogues and organized racist riots gets treated as an occasional public order nuisance.

This is the same state logic antifascists have been naming for years: the criminal-legal system is not neutral infrastructure that occasionally misfires, it is a sorting mechanism that protects property and the far right's freedom of movement while treating disruption to capital as the gravest offense in the book. The fact that these charge-rate gaps widened precisely when the new laws came into force in 2022 and 2023 isn't a coincidence — it's the laws working as designed. When police get expansive discretion over vague categories like "serious annoyance," that discretion gets pointed at whoever is inconveniencing the people the discretion serves.

Just Stop Oil folded its direct-action wing this year, citing exhaustion after years of arrests and multi-year prison terms for actions that used to draw fines. That is the chilling effect working exactly as intended — and it's worth remembering as similar laws get proposed or copied elsewhere. The lesson from Britain isn't just about climate activists. It's a preview of what any protest movement — anti-fascist, anti-deportation, pro-Palestine — faces once a state decides disruption itself, not violence, is the crime that matters. The courts occasionally rule the machine unlawful. It keeps running anyway.

Sources

Human Rights Watch: Silencing the Streets (Jan 2026)
Global Witness: UK climate activists charged at three times the rate of far-right agitators
Garden Court Chambers: Climate protest and conscientious motivation after R v Hallam