“I’ve always known that it was the right thing to do, and paying this price is the right thing to do as well. It had to be done,” one ex-prisoner tells Josiah Mortimer
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Insulate Britain protesters locked up for defying a judge’s ban from speaking about climate change and fuel poverty have told Byline Times they have no regrets and would do it again.
Labour councillor and Insulate Britain activist Giovanna Lewis, from Dorset, and Amy Pritchard from London, came out of HMP Bronzefield women’s prison in Surrey on Monday having served three and a half weeks of a seven week sentence.
Their release comes in the same week as the publication of a damning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report showing there is still a brief window of time to avoid the very worst of climate disaster. Over 40% of the global population are “highly vulnerable” to climate change, the study found.
The two activists had been charged with causing a public nuisance by gluing themselves to a road in Bishopsgate, City of London, in October 2021, the Dorset Echo reported. It formed part of Insulate Britain’s efforts to highlight the need for a mass insulation programme to tackle fuel poverty and CO2 emissions. They was put on trial in the Inner London Crown Court.
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They and several other protesters were then slapped with a gagging order from the judge, ordering them not to mention climate change or fuel poverty as the causes of their protests – with the judge deeming it irrelevant to the issue of criminality.
Cllr Lewis and Amy Pritchard were sentenced to prison last month for disobeying the judge’s order.
Cllr Lewis told Byline Times outside the prison that she had no regrets “at all”: “I’ve always known that it was the right thing to do, and paying this price is the right thing to do as well. It had to be done.”
She speculated that Judge Silas Reid would now have to “hold” on to his ruling. “He denied us the opportunity to speak about fuel poverty. That’s personally one of the biggies for me, because that’s the immediate problem for most people.
“Not to be able to talk to the jury in a British court of law about why you’re there and what you were aiming to achieve is pretty horrendous. It shocked us right from the start, and so I knew I had to do something about that. I wasn’t going to be silenced.”
Cllr Lewis and several others are expected to find out this Friday 31st if their public nuisance case will go back to trial, after it resulted in a hung jury. “It will be such a shocking waste of resources to send us back in front of a jury who spent nine days listening to this very long, lengthy, protracted thing,” the climate activist told Byline Times.
Insulate Britain supporters who were recently sentenced were asked to pay £20,000 costs, which is likely to correspond with what the case cost the public purse.
She claimed that HMP Bronzefield was “half full” of women waiting for trials or on remand. “They’re thinking about taking us back to trial when they couldn’t get a guilty conviction the first time. It’s absolutely shocking. And it costs about £1000 a day to keep somebody in there.”
The Insulate Britain activist estimated that around half of the prisoners at HMP Bronzefield were there because of drug-related crimes.
Prison Experience
Amy Pritchard, who took part in the same 2021 London protest as Cllr Lewis, came out of prison shaken. “It’s been chaos. Ther