Climate Camp and Mass Action
This summer saw the well-publicised camp for climate action. Locals, adults and children alike camped in a field just a few hundred metres from the BAA headquarters and Heathrow airport. BAA, or course, the company who owns Heathrow and who tried to take out an injunction against 5 million people. What a spectacular failure on their part! Not only did they fail to injunct most of
The aim of the camp was to educate and bring together people in mass action. I think the educational aspect was sensational – workshops and discussions on a wide range of topics. And the organisation was beyond belief with regional neighbourhoods, compost toilets showers and amazing food. For me the real disappointment was the mass action. Not only did it take most of the week to decide where we were going to target, leaving very little time to plan what and how we were going to act, I fear that the insistence on consensus decision making between 1000 people on every decision tainted people’s perception of non-violent direct action (NVDA). Not that it turned out to be particularly non-violent, especially (but it has to be said not only) on the police side. After deciding one plan we all seemed to charge off in a different direction at the whim of an unknown minority. We then proceeded to break down the fence and trample a farmer’s field of crops, and on the way I heard several cries for violence against the police. All this, however, cannot excuse the heavy-handedness the police were so quick to dole out. More than a dozen police vans full of riled up riot police turned up with batons drawn and horses charging. Several people sustained head-wounds and more had other injuries. One cop couldn’t keep control over his horse (who was bolting before we left camp) and they blamed it on the campers. I also overheard a report over the radio that protesters were throwing knives at the police. Now I can assure everyone that there weren’t enough knives to cook and eat with let alone waste on throwing at the police but hey ho.
Anyway after being ‘kettled’ (held in pockets of protesters by police) we were all escorted back to camp, having not got further than a couple of hundred meters. What a failure. In the end people just walked to the BAA headquarters, as they should have done in the first place, and took part in the far more successful car park sit-in there.
I think the lesson learnt is that we should not attempt to get consensus between residents who have never done direct action before and just want to protect their homes, and hardcore full-time anarchists who were out for some police blood. Also, it seemed to be ignored that the camp itself was a form of NVDA, as it was illegal, so maybe that should have been the mass actions and smaller, more effective actions such as those in Sizewell and
