Reflections on Climate Camp 2008

2006 and the very first Climate Camp was located near the power station at Drax in Yorkshire. 2007 saw it at Heathrow, the campers uniting with local protest groups to oppose the plans for airport expansion.
Such phenomenal interest did that Camp awaken, with the eyes of the world on it for a while, that some folk were concerned that another Camp, for the third year running, could prove to be an anticlimax.

Their concern has been shown to have been misplaced.

This year Kingsnorth in Kent was selected as the "target", following an announcement by e.on (the energy giant) of its intention to construct a coal-fired power station there.

Stop & Search

I'd spent the previous couple of days re-assembling my camping kit (have I really not used it for a year?), ensuring it was all in good repair, and attending to a seemingly endless string of last-minute chores.
Then set off for the Camp, arriving there about half-eleven on the Sunday morning (3rd August).
Calls I'd received from friends who'd arrived there on the Saturday had forewarned me to expect a rigorous "stop & search". In their words, it was "brutal".
The cops appeared to have commandeered a car park that they'd converted into a sort of "stop & search compound" adjoining the lane some hundreds of yards from the main entrance to the Camp. The procedure was to get searched at the compound, receive your pink ticket, which then had to be produced to the bevy of cops lurking outside the main gate. No pink ticket... get searched there.

However, my own experience of this procedure wasn't nearly as traumatic as I'd been anticipating. In fact, the cop who checked over my stuff was actually - dare I say it? - quite pleasant, and apologetic throughout so that, for me, the whole thing was little more than a mild inconvenience. (This of course is to completely disregard the question of why it should have been considered necessary to search everyone at that stage of the Camp's life, but that's another matter entirely.)

But, according to feedback we subsequently started receiving, that wasn't the experience of others later the same day, or indeed throughout the rest of the week. From those reports it certainly seemed that the cops were way over the top in their "stop & search" methods, heavy-handedness presumably being part of their standing orders for the duration of the Camp.
Folk were kept queuing and waiting (far longer, in my opinion, than the "reasonable time" stipulated in the legislation under which the cops claimed to be acting... in some cases up to four hours! As far as I can determine the relevant wording is as follows: "The time for which a person or vehicle may be detained for the purposes of such a search is such time as is reasonably required to permit a search to be carried out either at the place where the person or vehicle was first detained or nearby."); some were forcibly pushed to the ground or had their hands held behind their backs; others were forbidden from photographing (documenting) the proceedings... and so on.
In fact, at one point a rather savvy camper challenged the procedure on legal grounds and was consequently allowed through unhindered... taking a party of others along with him, equally unhindered.
But the cops soon decided they weren't interested in listening to legal arguments (nothing unusual there then) and reverted to their intimidatory tactics.
(As they decided to change the statutory powers under which these "stop & searches" were supposedly being conducted... halfway through the week! According to the pink slip that I received the power they were using for the first part of the week was Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), whereas I was told that later in the week they were invoking Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.)

Heavy-handed, intimidatory, possibly illegal, certainly repressive, and most definitely unreasonable, not to say nonsensical... the latter no more clearly demonstrated than in the restrictions the cops were applying to what they'd allow on-site (after their brutish search routine of course).

Vehicles for example. Many vehicles were simply not allowed on-site, even just to unload. Consequently lots of folk had to ferry their kit to the site using such things as kids' pushchairs, wheelie bins, and the like. And frequently in pouring rain! Supplies for the Camp's kitchens (equipment... even food!) had to be similarly ferried in.

Thus, of necessity, many vehicles were parked on the roadside along the access road to the village of Hoo. Which, unsurprisingly, led to some irritation on the part of local residents. And prompted the cops to threaten treating the vehicles as "abandoned" and/or remove them... unless they were promptly re-parked elsewhere... though not on the campsite of course... which is where their owners were living. How perverse is that?
But the perversity didn't stop there.

Quite a few people coming to the Camp had arrived on bicycles (or had brought cycles with them). And of course many of them were equipped with that almost mandatory bit of cycle kit... the cycle lock (be it a padlock and chain or whatever). Best defence there is against having one's bike nicked.
Unfortunately cycle locks also happen to be a favoured bit of kit in direct action circles... locking oneself to fences and suchlike, locking things together that aren't meant to be locked together, and so on.
Naturally the cops are fully aware of this so inevitably things such as D-locks were on their list of things to seize. Rather than run that risk some of the cyclists locked their bikes to a railing (located, I believe, near or part of the "stop & search compound"... though I could be wrong) and left them there in the tender care of the cops.
Then, later in the week, the cops proceeded to cut off all the locks and sent a notice to the Camp that they had been removed and consequently all Camp cyclists were "advised" by the cops to return to the entrance.
Now, given that the bikes (and their accompanying locks) were already under the watchful gaze of the cops, I have to ask myself whether that was really necessary. Or just one more example of the cops being... well... cops? (Or do I mean control freaks?) Crazy!



Entering the Camp



My main role at this year's Camp (as indeed it had been at last year's) was as one of the Camp Photographers Pool... a half-dozen or so photographers whose principal mission, or so I understood it, was to photographically document Camp life. Not just the sensational "newsy" type things like actions and stuff, but aspects of the day-to-day running of the Camp and so forth.
However, for a variety of reasons, things didn't work out quite as straightforwardly as that. And, certainly in the case of a couple of us, had we not exercised considerable self-restraint we could easily have spent virtually the entire week photographing nothing but cops and "cop encounters".

When I'd arrived at the Camp there was a mobile police station set up just inside the main entrance, and pairs of cops (each pair accompanied by a camper) were "patrolling" the site. Aside from the "stop & search" routine everything appeared relatively laid back and folk were going about getting themselves established and working hard to get the Camp infrastructure up and running (notwithstanding the setbacks occasioned by the cops' seizure of materials intended specifically for that purpose).
But during the afternoon, suddenly, all the cops withdrew! The spotlights were taken down. The mobile police station moved off-site. Cops on "camp patrol", and at the rear and main gates, departed. All very sudden. All very strange. And all with a smug knowing look on their faces.
There was little rejoicing at this turn of events. Rather, a mystification and sense of deep suspicion pervaded the Camp... a suspicion well-merited as it turned out.

The Riot Gate

First indications of what the rest of the week was to be like occurred early on the Monday morning.
Well, perhaps that isn't strictly true. Let's not forget the police raid on the site before the Camp officially opened, a raid that led to the seizure by the cops of such things as pipes for the plumbing, crayons, and board games! It seems the cops also seized many of the nuts and bolts required to assemble the Camp's compost toilets, thereby creating a situation that could so easily have led to a serious public health hazard. That entire episode could probably be seen as the first real indication of what things were to be like.

However, around half-four on the Monday morning campers were aroused by shouts of "cops on site" whereupon there was a mad dash for what seemed to be the location of the intrusion... what I thought of as the "rear gate", that later came to be called (by the protesters who'd bravely spent considerable time there facing off the cops) the "Riot Gate".



Perhaps the name's slightly overstating the reality, yet not by too much. Though the rioting appeared to be all from the police side. Yes, there was aggression. Yes, there was violence. And yes, weapons were used. The aggression and the violence came from the cops. And the weapons were being wielded by those same cops.

I was overawed by the sight of booted, helmeted, spray- and baton-wielding cops being pushed back by a ragtag bunch of campers dressed in little more than sandals and (in some cases) pyjamas, and then the cops being held at bay by these same campers initially holding hands aloft to demonstrate peaceful intent, then simply sitting down and singing!



Punches were thrown (by the cops), kicks were delivered (by the cops), batons descended (by the cops), spray (pepper? CS? or some combination thereof?) was... um... sprayed (by the cops). Yet the campers' response was without exception non-violent... one of them had even helped a cop regain his footing after having clumsily fallen down!

"Heavy-handed" really isn't the term to describe the spectacle. "Over the top" yes; "thugishness" yes; "State-backed violence and repression" certainly. Why is it that images of 1930s Germany spring so readily to my mind?



But now let us descend into the realms of fantasy, into Alice-in-Wonderland madness, perhaps even into a Monty Pythonesque sketch were it not so damned sinister, and traumatic for those campers on the "front line".

For what was the cause of this sudden and completely unwarranted violence?

An allegedly "abandoned" vehicle (and, subsequently, vehicles)!

It was a red van. It was parked just inside the rear gate. The owner was on-site (a story I heard later had it that the owner was actually sleeping in the van, but had then been arrested and "removed" by the cops). And the cops claimed it was "abandoned". And tried to remove it. (They made a number of attempts at this, at one point even smashing the van's side windows with their batons). And failed miserably on every occasion.



To my knowledge the van was still parked in the same spot when I finally departed the Camp on Sunday 10th. All achieved by the use of peaceful resistance that reclaimed ground from the cops inch by inch.

The thing that really struck me about this whole affair was the simple fact that, even if the vehicle had been abandoned (which it quite obviously hadn't) it wasn't on the public highway anyway... so where the justification for its urgent removal... and the criminal damage inflicted upon the vehicle by the cops?

This alleged "abandonment" of vehicles later extended to a car that, similarly, was parked just inside the rear gate. The cops claimed it was abandoned... even when being shown the car keys by the car's owner, standing next to the car!

However, cops being cops they just had to change their story. First they justified their attempted intrusion onto the site by this farcical claim of abandoned vehicles.
Then they used the justification that the vehicle was causing an obstruction and had to be removed.
Then (a refinement of the foregoing) that the vehicle could obstruct easy access by emergency vehicles (fire engine, ambulance etc) and had to be removed (this latter in total disregard of the fact that such emergency vehicles would inevitably and as a matter of course access the site via the main gate, not the rear gate that would entail huge detours through country lanes and suchlike!).

So, the deployment of all that manpower (at public expense need I add), the violence, the use of riot cops... was all to remove an abandoned vehicle that wasn't!

Um... did I just say "riot cops"? Well, beg my pardon. When, a few days after the momentous Monday events, a cop was asked why riot cops were being used he smugly replied that there's no such thing as "riot cops" in this country. Oh no. We simply don't use them.
So who're those guys with helmets, and boots, and shields, and batons, and a free hand with the spray. Oh them? They're "Public Order" units. Well, excuse me, but if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, behaves like a duck, then as far as I'm concerned... etc.
So either the cop was being particularly (and probably deliberately) obtuse or... he was just plain bloody stupid. Either way, his ridiculous pedantry neatly sidestepped the question.



And the thing is, had the cops not decided to invade the Camp on such a slim pretext in the first place there would have been no need for "Public Order" police! So all the nonsense that subsequently happened at the rear gate can be fairly and squarely laid at the cops' doorstep.

Anyway, the events of early Monday morning were repeated throughout much of the rest of the week (though with a lesser degree of cop-violence)... in the early hours of course, interrupting much-needed sleep and guaranteed to tax the patience of even the most forgiving of souls.
That most of the subsequent "call-outs" proved to be false alarms (in the sense that the cops didn't make determined efforts to re-enter the site again) is neither here nor there. There's no doubt in my mind that had the turn-out not been as prompt and numerous as it was in response to every call-out then the cops would have taken advantage of the situation and attempted to once more regain total control of the rear gate.

Interestingly (and revealingly) few of these attempted intrusions happened during daytime.

However, if their strategy was to disrupt the Camp to the extent that Saturday's actions (the day designated as the "day of mass action") would fall flat on their face then they failed miserably.
And if not that, then what other possible reason could there have been for their constant harassment and obvious attempts at intimidation?

Anyone who's familiar with previous cop-related ramblings of mine will be cognisant of the fact that I'm conscientious in pointing out I'm not anti-police per se. Not until now, anyway. But were I to witness many more situations like the one that seemed to prevail at this year's Climate Camp then I may just begin to review that position. For this was a far remove from what I believed British policing was all about. Sufficient in fact to cause me to finally begin to doubt my mum's constant refrain (when I was a kid) that "if you ever need help you should always trust a policeman". Yeah. Right.
And then they wonder why the police don't command the respect they used to. Is it any surprise?

But before we abandon all hope that there may be at least some taint of conscience or humanity left in the officers of Britain's various police forces, a lighter note...

In the quieter moments of the rear gate standoff (the interludes between the cops getting up to their usual tricks) the atmosphere there was actually quite relaxed. Folk were just sitting around chilling out. Others were singing. At one point there was even a mobile p.a. system (mounted on the back of a bike) playing music.
Some of the "defenders" even managed to engage several of the cops in halfway decent conversations such that (thinking optimistically) at least some of the cops may have begun to realise that those sat in front of them weren't hardened and vicious criminals, or radical extremists intent on bringing about the overthrow of the West, but simply folk who are passionately caring about the world we all occupy, and the sort of world we want our children to inherit. And not just the children of protesters, but the children of cops too!
For my part, I'd sooner trust my future to any one of these protesters than an entire roomful of politicians with their empty rhetoric and meaningless promises... and obligations to look after the interests of big business rather than the interests of the people they claim to represent.

And, during one of these interludes, a particular scene happened to catch my eye.
Not long after an attempted (and violent) incursion by the cops, all the protesters were sat peacefully on the ground attempting to defuse the situation with a "singalong".
And slowly but surely, some of the riot cops began to pick up the beat... and actually respond to it. Hey, music rules! And there... was that a smile I suddenly saw break out on some cops' face (possibly to their own embarrassment, and the bemusement of their colleagues)?...



PsyOps

Yet despite all the hassles the campers managed to retain their composure. Even, in many cases, their good humour; refusing to be provoked into an aggressive or confrontational mode which, quite clearly, is what the cops were seeking to achieve.

Either that, or to so deplete the protesters' resources, physically, mentally, and emotionally, that no-one would be up for doing anything at all come the day of mass action. Well, the cops failed in that also.

In fact, taking an overview of the entire police strategy for the week it struck me as being little other than a typical PsyOps exercise.

The physical harassment and intimidation. All the threatened incursions (principally at night, in the wee small hours) that materialised into nothing at all. The frequent sound of the police helicopter buzzing the Camp intermittently throughout day and night.



A daytime incursion launched at two different gates simultaneously... at the rear gate and two lines of riot cops entering via a small gate some hundreds of yards along the hedgerow from the main gate. An incursion incidentally that seemed completely pointless for, the two lines having been stopped dead in their tracks by larger numbers of campers, all standing peacefully with hands held high in gesture of non-violence, nevertheless not just holding ground but pushing the cops back, the cops simply retreated off-site.
That the exercise may have been a diversionary tactic is not inconceivable for the twin thrust on the cops' part enabled them to get another bunch of cops right into the centre of the camp from yet another entry point. Yet, having achieved that, they then departed after having conversed relatively peacefully with some of the assembled campers. Bizarre!

One may justifiably get the idea that some of the cops' antics were completely farcical, and this was no more in evidence than with a scene that could have been lifted straight out of a Tom Sharpe novel.
Unfortunately, and quite amazingly, I slept through the entire episode, but it was later reported to me by a number of different trustworthy sources, generally prefaced with a remark along the lines "You ain't gonna believe this but..."
Apparently one paticular night, in a build-up to what could have been yet another false alarm call-out, the cops came belting along the lane in their vehicles, lights ablaze, with "Ride of the Valkyries" blaring out over some sort of p.a. system they'd rigged up! Clearly someone had been watching "Apocalypse Now" far too many times.

And of course the inevitable rumour mill got wound up into top gear. Rumours that the cops were going to invade at such and such a time. An "overheard remark" between cops that "it'll be a bad day for the hippies today", and so on, ad infinitum.
None of which came to anything, naturally.
This tends to happen at a lot of protest-related events at some point or another, and one can't help speculate that such rumours are probably started by undercover cops planted on the inside, hoping to cause uncertainty, confusion and panic. They must be really disappointed that there are so many level heads amongst the protesters.

If ever the cops should be called to account for their despicable behaviour in that Climate Camp week of 3rd - 10th August (some hope!) then I don't doubt we'd hear all the old familiar excuses... sorry - "reasons"... trotted out. Conflicting orders; unclear chain of command; breakdown in communications; misunderstandings; errors in judgement; and so on, and so on. Of course, the word they never use, but which accurately summarises all these various "reasons", is incompetence! What? The organisation charged with protecting life, limb and property is self-confessedly incompetent? Surely not.

Yet there will be those who will readily accept these sort of reasons, attributing the cops' unacceptable behaviour to a top-heavy bureaucracy where the left hand doesn't know what the right's doing.
No overall strategy; no clearly defined tactics; just predefined and reactive moves responding to changing situations on the ground.

Well, for my part I simply don't buy into that. Too many "incidents" were too-well orchestrated and, distancing oneself from events "on the ground" an emerging overall pattern was quite apparent.
So I envy those with the naivete to believe it was all some sort of huge error, random unplanned acts and failures to communicate between different shifts. Hmph!

Camp Life

There's much more to Climate Camp than run-ins with cops though... just wish I could have seen some of it!
The cinema, the workshops, the meetings... all with so much to offer. Yet it seems to me (with this, as indeed with previous Climate Camps) that when one's involved with some sort of "working group" there's precious little time left to broaden one's activities. And our little group (not precisely a working group as such, more a sort of sub-group of Media) had its own problems to deal with... a bottleneck in the processing of photos; technical difficulties with uploading and getting images online in real-time; website problems; and other issues that remained unresolved even at the end of Camp.

But, work and other activities aside, a couple of things really do stick out in my mind...

Food! Ahh, the food.

The Camp itself was organised on a "neighbourhood" basis, each neighbourhood roughly corresponding to an area of the country. Thus there was Scotland & Newcastle, South Coast, South West, North West and so on. And whilst folk are free to self-cater if they wish, on-site catering has customarily been largely undertaken by kitchens located in each neighbourhood which folk are encouraged to use.
The thing is though, all on-site food prepared by these kitchens is vegetarian (may indeed even be vegan... not sure)... and I'm not a vegetarian! And generally I don't much care for vegetarian/vegan food. Or at least, not the examples of it that I've tasted.
Consequently, at any of this type of event food's always a bit of an issue for me, and what's tended to happen at previous Camps is that a couple of mates and I have located nearby pubs and had our meals at such establishments in the evenings.
But we were aware that with Kingsnorth the local community wasn't particularly sympathetic to the Camp so, rather than further antagonise the locals it seemed sensible to stay on-site for meals.

Now I'd attached myself to the Eastside neighbourhood... and jolly glad I did! For the food produced by the Eastside kitchen was simply superb... with one particular meal I was even tempted to go back for "seconds". So, to the entire crew who worked in the Eastside kitchen a huge thankyou, and congratulations on producing such wonderful meals.


 

The other big thing that sticks in my mind is the weather.

There we were... first full week of August. Height of summer. So its not unreasonable to expect hot sunny days and balmy evenings. Even a prolonged heatwave wouldn't have been unusual. So what did we get? A few hours of sunshine, then rain, then more rain. Then some wind. A bit more sunshine. Thunderstorm. Pouring rain. Showers. Overcast skys. And a bit more sunshine. And an incredibly strong wind during the night of the last Saturday.
The upside of all this was some fantastic skies and cloud formations which, as a photographer, had me drooling. But typical August weather? Not a chance.



I suppose it was only fitting though, as if the heavens themselves wanted to reinforce one of the messages the Camp was seeking to get across... that climate change is happening. Here. And now!

The other topic I simply have to touch upon is the day of mass action, Saturday 9th.
Despite all police efforts to intimidate the protesters and prevent the various announced actions from going ahead, they all happened. And with a remarkable degree of success given the circumstances.
But whilst some of the Camp Photographers Pool had managed to get off-site and record the events, myself and a mate had, at the last moment, decided the Camp couldn't be left with such depleted numbers and no photographers present... just in case any "incidents" occurred. So, much to the relief of some of the campers left behind, we remained on-site.
Which was a bad move as very little happened... but we can only know that with hindsight. Nevertheless we did at least manage to get a few shots of the "Orange Block" (the "legal" protest march) departing the Camp.



And simply out of courtesy I must necessarily refer to one of the photographers who hardly had a chance to get his camera out of its bag so occupied was he with sorting out a multitude of technical issues that had arisen.

Wrap-up

Now there are some (indeed, maybe the majority) of campers who would wish to downplay the (what they would perceive as) "negative" aspects of the Camp. By which I mean the hassles with the cops.

They would claim it conveys the wrong image, and may deter folk from getting involved in future similar events.

In other words, they'd want to "spin" the facts. Well, I'll have none of it. It happened. It needs to be reported, to be documented. It needs to be described. At the very least it needs to be mentioned. If for no other reason than considerable numbers of people spent virtually their entire time at the Camp wondering if they, or their kit, was going to get trashed by the cops. If for no other reason than huge numbers of campers began getting really pissed off at the number of "false alarms"... alarms that were called in good faith by alert campers who'd observed the cops behaving in ways that suggested an imminent incursion.
If for no other reason than that it all actually happened, and used up a considerable amount of the time the Camp was in existence. Time that could have been productively spent addressing the real issues.

But let's put it all into context. Admittedly it had been announced before the start of the Camp that the intention was to "shut Kingsnorth down". Admittedly "direct action" was on the agenda for a number of people. And those two facts alone go a long way toward explaining the over-the-top policing.
(Such a shame really that the cops can't make the same effort to tackle the more mundane things like vandalism, theft, burglary, drug-dealing, rape, and murder. But then they'd be up against real criminals wouldn't they, rather than a bunch of folk who've simply been criminalised by the State because of their political dissent and their determination to stop the politicians and big business from committing further destruction of the planet.)
But they're not the only facts, and perhaps not even the most significant.

For the Camp also attracted large numbers of people who weren't into direct action. Folk who came to the Camp because they wanted to take part in the many workshops. Because they were concerned by climate change and wanted to find out more. Because they wanted to learn... about climate change, about sustainable living, about "eco-friendliness". And because they wanted to be part of a community that actually cared about the issues.

Disabled folk. Elderly folk. Folk with kids. Folk with no thought other than to share in something inspirational and, in its own way, quite magnificent.

These folk, just ordinary people, middle-of-the-roaders, not activists, not extremists, not political dissidents, came to be informed, to learn, and to share.



And it is this latter, this sharing, which for me is the hallmark of Climate Camp and similar such events.
I'm reminded of one particular incident which, for me, summed up the whole spirit of Climate Camp. My one regret is that I didn't photograph it!

There was I, up at the rear gate, camera at ready to photographically record whatever further violence or harassment the cops might choose to inflict. I'd been there quite a few hours, along with the stalwart protesters who'd been there far longer, acting in role of guardian for the interests of the Camp as a whole. Without nourishment or sustenance of any sort.
When suddenly there appeared food, prepared unasked by one of the Camp's kitchens, and delivered in pots via wheelbarrow. Massive cooking pots full of food, ladled out onto plates, three forks stuck into each, and brought to all those sat in rows at the feet of lines of stern-faced cops.
Then some complete stranger, laden with a plate of food and two vacant forks, approaches me and invites me to share. And we're joined by another complete stranger who, taking the third fork, tucks into the plate of food now held between the three of us. And suddenly, we three strangers are all community, all family, sharing food. United by a common and deeply-held concern. That's Climate Camp!



Links to further info...

About Climate Camp
The Issues
Why Kingsnorth?
An Environment of Repression - Guardian article by Richard George
UK Climate Camp - More than just a Protest - a personal viewpoint by Nicole Sorochan of envirospeak.tv
Climate Camp 08 on EnviroSpeak.tv

Photos...

On Flickr
also at
EnviroSpeak.tv

This article also posted on TawNews