U.K. Climate Activists Spied on for Years, Trial Dropped

This is a fun one—could be turned into a film.

I reported last week on the 20 UK climate activists who were spared jail time despite planning to shut down one of the nation's largest coal-fired power plants, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in the summer of 2009.

Well, it turns out that in the midst of the 114 activists arrested in the middle of the night was an undercover cop. Mark Kennedy, living under the fake name Mark Stone (yes, passport and all), had been infiltrating activist groups for 7 years by that time. As The Guardian notes, he attended almost every major demonstration in the U.K. up to the G20 protests in London.

But at some point, Kennedy changed teams.

He was an instrumental player in actually making numerous actions happen, coverage by the BBC indicates. And when the six remaining climate activists being prosecuted for the direct action were preparing for trial, which was supposed to start this week, Kennedy was intending to testify on their behalf. (He backed out of that offer three weeks ago due to concern for his and his family's safety.)

Kennedy was discovered to be a spy in October when some of his friends became suspicious and found his real passport, which helped discover he had been a police officer since 1994. Kennedy confessed. "I'll just say I'm sorry, for everything," Kennedy said. "It really hurts." He has said that his infiltration of their group was "really wrong" and has now resigned from the police force.

Leading up to the this week's planned trial, the defense demanded that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) reveal information about Kennedy. This is what is widely believed to be the reason for the trial collapsing at the last minute.

Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing catastrophic accelerated climate change, it is no surprise that an outsider spending a lot of time learning about the matter (spy or not) would also feel compelled to protect the world by joining in the climate movement.

But the fact that the police were using extreme measures to spy on and set up civil protesters is concerning, to say the least.

“I was arrested despite having made no decision to take part in the conspiracy, having only learnt of the planned action an hour or two before the police raid," Oliver Knowles, one of the defendants in the collapsed trial, commented. "The police knew this full well as one of their number was present in the room. Despite this they went ahead with my arrest and subsequent prosecution. This raises serious questions about the police operation.”

Furthermore, early on in the planning of this action, the police could have stopped it from moving forward. Instead, they spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on the largest-ever preemptive arrest in UK history, which wasn't a pleasant one for the activists.

Danny Chivers, another defendant in the collapsed trial noted:

The pre-emptive arrest was controversial enough at the time, but we now know it was even worse than we realised. The police appear to have waited for the opportunity to arrest over a hundred people, hold them for 24 hours, and take their DNA, before releasing them onto the streets of Nottingham in the middle of night with money and phones confiscated. Political protest of the kind being planned that day presents no risk to the public, yet the police consistently resort to the most extreme tactics they can muster. Hopefully the collapse of our trial will rule out the pre-emptive arrest of protesters for good.

Is this what our world has become? Those trying to protect the planet from imminent disaster are treated like this.

To read more from the activists about the story above, visit the Ratcliffe-on-Trial blog, read one of the activists personal accounts and reflections on Just Do It, or go to their Facebook page.

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Photo Credit: Ratcliffe on trial