If I were to tell you that the largest scale police operation in Yorkshire in over ten years took place in the first week of August 2024, you would probably guess that this operation was trying to stop race rioters from terrorising British towns and cities. You would be wrong. Of far greater concern to the British state were climate activists planning to peacefully protest on a field nearby the Drax power station, the largest carbon emitter in the UK. Despite the legal right to protest, twenty-four activists were arrested preemptively, under suspicion that they might proceed to do something else illegal, under newly created charges of conspiracy to lock-on or to disrupt infrastructure. These arrests led to the distress of the arrestees, the seizing of fire safety and accessibility equipment and the complete quelling of the camp planned to protest Drax. How have the police become so authoritarian in their organization? And what does it mean for the future of free speech in the U.K.?

Who are Drax?

‘Drax Group is a renewable energy company engaged in renewable power generation, the production of sustainable biomass and the sale of renewable electricity to businesses.’

This is how Drax describes themself, but let’s see if this description holds up against the slightest of scrutiny.

Their first method of avoiding accountability has been outsourcing it abroad to primarily harm already vulnerable communities, committing air pollution violations when sourcing wood pellets in the U.S.A, making conditions difficult to breathe in surrounding areas for residents who are mostly black and impoverished. In 2021 and 2022 it was forced to pay a combined $5.7 million to these communities on account of these violations. It has also begun to log in Canada’s boreal forest, threatening many already imperiled species, damaging the ancestral home to over 600 indigenous communities and destroying one of earth’s most critical carbon stores. Drax’s self-description is already not adding up.

An annual ranking of carbon emissions in 2023 from UK Emissions Trading Scheme Reporting found Drax to be the largest single source of carbon emissions in the UK and the largest polluter out of any company in 2023, yet it still claims to be renewable because it is burning trees and so is a ‘Biomass’ plant. This makes no sense, because burning wood pellets typically emits more CO2 than even coal or gas given it is less energy dense and so burnt at higher volumes. The Emissions Trading Scheme also makes the baseless assumption that forest regrowth offsets the carbon emissions from biomass plants, making Drax eligible for public subsidies. Meaning in the same year that Drax polluted our planet’s atmosphere more than any other company in the UK and made over £1 billion in profit from our energy bills, they also received £539 million in subsidies, paid for by the taxpayer. This is the same company that chose not to produce electricity for weeks during the European gas crisis in 2022, when British people were under extreme financial pressure from skyrocketing energy bills, because they found it more profitable to sell their imported wood pellets on the British market due to inflated demand, than to actually produce energy. Ember, the global energy think tank, estimated that this cost consumers in the UK £639 million in cost reductions withheld for the sake of Drax’s profit. The British public subsidises this company with approximately £2 million a day and given its complete disdain for the livelihoods of the British public in return, something Drax thought Britons ought to know before they make another government contract.

Who are Reclaim the Power?

‘Reclaim the Power is a UK based direct action network fighting for social, environmental and economic justice.’

Considering Drax’s chart-topping pollution numbers and thus unjustified public subsidies for being a renewable energy source, they would seem to be the perfect target for anyone fighting for social, environmental and climate justice. Drax’s contract with the government to receive said subsidies, however, is almost up and its renewal soon to be discussed and decided. This likely explains why a group of campaigners exposing the publicly subsidised company’s deceitful and destructive methods would be such cause for concern. The protest was planned to be a peaceful protest on a field near the Drax site to do exactly that, expose Drax. Yet those newly created police powers meant that over twenty people were arrested under suspicion of planning to disrupt key infrastructure, whilst tents, food, disability ramps and more were seized as being potentially used to ‘lock-on’ leading one arrestee to comment in a statement to Netpol: 

“I don’t think any of the arresting officers knew what locking on was, let alone what equipment might be needed for it.”

What followed for the peaceful protesters, which included Leeds students, was an undoubted abuse of police powers, with the operation requesting special permission to hold arrestees for longer than the 24-hour limit, at least five homes being raided, and essential equipment still being held by the police now.

Who do the Police think they are?

Keir Starmer had told the British public that his government was doing “everything we can” for the police to contain the riots and that all possible efforts were being made to keep communities safe. However, resources and officers from the Wiltshire Police force, Metropolitan police force, and even from Wales, were taken away from keeping communities safe to instead stamp out peaceful protest against a private company; “Operation Infusion” as it was so called involved hundreds of police officers from eleven different police forces. This illustrates a very concerning truth about the British police system and its priorities: that its purpose has less to do with protecting people, and more to do with protecting power. It seems the British public is aware of the police state’s increasing powers over the past few years of Conservative government, and are not happy about it, but perhaps don’t know quite the extent to which individual liberties and civil rights are under threat. Back when Boris Johnson tried to pass the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in 2022, it was met with some of the largest protests in recent British history, proportionate to the proposed bills being the largest increase of state powers in living memory. Protesters were specifically worried by the increase of maximum prison sentences for damaging memorials from three months to ten years. Or the police power to impose “conditions” on, which meant to essentially stamp out any protest that causes “serious annoyance” expressed with purposeful vagueness to allow the subjective selection and suppression of any form of dissent. This of course begs the question, what is a protest if it cannot annoy, if it cannot disrupt, if it cannot draw attention? And further, why do the home secretary or the police state judge the legitimacy of peaceful protest, a long-cherished right of the British citizen? Hence at the time, leading barrister Chris Daw stated:

“The bill hands over the power of deciding whether a protest is justified or should be allowed – decisions we as citizens have had for generations — directly to the Home Secretary”

The government was told by human rights lawyers that this bill would “clearly violate human rights standards” but it seemed even the pretense of upholding liberty and justice had long passed as a priority for the Conservative government. So, after over a month of ping ponging back and forth between the House of Lords and Commons, specifically due to the draconian nature of the protest restrictions, the Bill was finally passed in April 2022 with some of the more radically authoritarian components watered down or removed. Those rights we managed to maintain, however, would not be safe for long. Only a year later, Rishi Sunak’s unelected government responded to the expanding public demonstrations of discontent and environmental concern, not by listening to the public but by strengthening police powers to silence the public, to silence those voices of discontent once again. The Public Order Act of 2023 introduced new offences for crimes like ‘locking-on’ and disrupting key infrastructure and importantly gave the police new stop and search powers to prevent such protests, even without suspicion, measures previously rejected for being too severe. This was crucial in enabling the arrest of those Reclaim the Power protesters, arrests that would have been unlawful only a few years ago. And even still, the attacks on our civil liberties would follow activists from arrests to the courts. Over the past two years protesters have lost nearly every possible legal defense in court, such as the human right to protest defense that permits the acquittal of defendants if the jury believes that the protest was proportional to the cause for which they are protesting, an old and proud human right held in British courts. The courts have embarked on an undisclosed agenda to make this defense unavailable in secret rulings in the absence of juries, across a number of small court cases and offences. Slowly and silently, British citizens have lost the right to defend themselves in court. So extreme were these rulings that they even banned saying ‘fuel poverty’, ‘climate change’, ‘Martin Luther King’ and the ‘US civil rights movements’ in court because these terms were seen to invoke said human rights defense that was ruled as no longer available. The British public have been having their rights to freedom of speech, unknowingly and insidiously ripped away from them.

This summer’s arrest of those taking environmental action was not one terrifying outlier, instead it would appear to be the setting of a new precedent. The British state will not hear the cries of popular resistance, instead it will crush them; it will not accept criticism and acknowledge what needs to change, instead it will silence any opposition, any call for change; it will not hold corporations to account, instead it will protect their private profits with our public money.

Words by Rory O’Dwyer