Slavery, Climate, Stolen Goods & Santas: on Saturday 8th December 2018 I began with a march against African migrants being enslaved in Libya, photographed Buddhists meditating against climate change, went to the British Museum for a call to them to return indigenous Australian cultural objects and finally met hundreds of people in Santa costumes in Covent Garden.
Protest Slavery in Libya
There had been large protests a year earlier about slave auctions in Libya where many African migrants trying to reach Europe are captured by bandits, terrorists and jihadists – often funded by the EU and other outside countries – and sold as slaves.
The replacement of Gadaffi and his replacement by Western-backed puppets was a part of a continuing neo-colonialist attempt to control Africa’s natural resources which has led to the instability and mass migration from African countries to the south. Libya had begun a process of de-Africanisation and elimination of Black Libyans and the slave auctions are a simple extension of this policy.
Like many other issues, this had simply dropped out of the news despite the UK and other countries failing to take any action, perhaps why this protest was only by a small group. They met for a short rally outside the EU offices Europe House as the deals and actions of the EU to prevent migrants reaching Europe means many more of them are detained in Libya.
They then marched to protest outside the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, saying the UK had failed to do anything to help because the victims were African, then stopped briefly at the gates to Downing Street before marching on to the Libyan Embassy. I left them at Trafalgar Square
A small group from the Dharma Action Network meditated in Trafalgar Square as a call for people to take action, suggesting people move their money out of banks which invest in fossil fuels, get informed by reading the IPCC report on global warming and join them and other groups including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and take direct action with Extinction Rebellion.
I joined Indigenous Australian campaigner Rodney Kelly and others on the tour organised by BP or not BP? in the Kings Library of the British Museum in front of the glass case displaying the Gweagal shield stolen from his ancestor by Captain Cook at Botany Bay. Kelly is a 6th generation direct descendant of Cooman, whose Gweagal shield was taken when Captain Cook’s men on first landing in Australia opened fire with muskets, and the shield has a small hole caused by a musket round.
BP or not BP? activists came dressed as burglars in striped jumpers and black masks with sacks for swag.
Another, dressed as a ‘BP Executive’ explained how their sponsorship of art including exhibitions at the British Museum helps to clean up their reputation, tarnished by oil spills, the exploitation of oil fields around the globe with its associated environmental damage, the sale of climate change producing fossil fuels and more. It all looks much better with the nice glossy image of exhibitions such as those at the museum.
They then introduce Kelly who began (and ended) his talk by playing his didgeridoo, and then talked about how the British Museum had dismissed his earlier attempts to return the shield and other items, and had refused to take seriously the oral tradition of his people as it could not be confirmed by written records.
After retelling the story of how it was stolen and how the museum came to acquire it, he told the crowd now packing the room how the shield which few people stop to look at in the museum would reinvigorate the traditions of his people back in Australia and would be both the centrepiece of a museum of indigenous Australia and revive a great interest in traditional crafts.
The crowd then moved on to sit on the floor in front of the then current BP-sponsored Assyrian exhibition, where an Iraqi woman spoke, telling us that objects looted from Iraq during the invasion in 2003 and bought by the British Museum were on show which clearly should be returned to Iraq. Looting of cultural artifacts was considered respectable and normal back in the days of the British Empire (or at least by the British) but is no longer acceptable.
We moved on to a room devoted to objects taken from Polynesia where we heard about looted objects from the region and a statement from the Rapa Nui Pioneers on Easter Island calling for the return of their stolen Moai Head.
It was now time to visit the huge room containing the Parthenon Marbles, which Elgin claimed to have taken them with the permission of the Ottoman Empire, then rulers of Greece, but this now seems unlikely – and the marbles in any case surely belonged to the Greeks rather than thier occupiers.
Here one of the BP or Not BP? burglars, Danny Chivers, revealed himself to be part-Greek and talked about a recent visit to the Acropolis Museum, close to the Parthenon, where a room containing the marbles that Elgin left in Athens are displayed, complete with gaps in the appropriate places for those currently on display in the British Museum.
It seems clear that they should be returned to Athens, and it would now be possible – if expensive – to make a set of visually identical replicas to continue to display here. Perhaps in return for sending them back, the BM could receive replicas of those that remained in Athens – and so both cities could have a full set.
Finally I met Santacon in Covent Garden, with crowds of people dressed in Santa costumes, together with the odd elf and reindeer making their way to Trafalgar Square, spreading glad tidings as darkness fell, some following hand-pulled sound systems and dancing on the streets, though many groups were diverted into pubs and food shops on the way. This year the charity event was supporting ‘Christmas for Kids’ as well as having a great deal of fun.
COP29 March For Global Climate Justice: When this march was taking place on Saturday 16th November 2024, COP19 was just beginning in Baku, and there was still some small room for optimism, even though it seemed to be dominated by fossil fuel lobbyists, from its president Mukhtar Babayev, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan Republic and previously been Vice-President for Ecology at Azerbaijan’s national oil company SOCAR, down.
London, UK. 16 Nov 2024. The start of the march.
But now we know the agreement reached after many hours of argument at the end of the meeting we can only conclude ‘TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE’. Even in the unlikely event of the wealthier countries actually keeping their promises we will see dramatic catastrophes in much of the Global South in the coming years.
And of course we in the wealthier countries whose industrialisation created the mess the world is in as we burnt coal and oil resulting in a huge increase in carbon dioxide levels blanketing the world will also suffer.
Increasingly chaotic weather patterns, more and more serious storms with more floods and greater wind damage. Greater droughts too and more forest fires. More disruption of agricultural production and higher food prices.
More loss of species too, aided by other of the ‘benefits’ of industrial production with new insecticides coming to support those currently decimating pollinating insects such as bees.
As many of the marchers pointed out with their placards and flags, war and militarisation are huge drivers of climate change, both from the production of weapons and their use. One poster pointed out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2023 produced roughly half as much CO2 as the UK’s emissions in the same year. War doesn’t just kill people but also is ecocide on a grand scale.
The continuing attacks by Israel on Gaza and Lebanon have also added huge amounts of carbon dioxide as well as killing many thousands of civilians both through direct bombing of homes, schools and hospitals but also through a deliberate policy of destroying infrastructure and preventing humanitarian supplies of food and medicines – for which the International Criminal Court recently issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallan.
Banners, posters and placards on the march rejected militarisation and called for an end to arming Israel. ‘THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT STANDS WITH PALESTINE – STOP FUELLING GENOCIDE AND CLIMATE BREAKDOWN’.
But however hopeless the world situation seems now, the election of Trump as US Pesident seems certainly to make things worse – already he has chosen Chris Wright, the CEO of Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy as Energy Secretary to lead his promise of increasing US fossil fuel production under his campaign pledge “Drill, Baby, drill”.
The current world political system dominated by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank and by Western governments increasingly seems unable to come up with any effective solutions to the climate crisis – as COP 19 and the previous 28 UN climate Change Conferences have shown. As the placards carried by many of the marchers stated, we need system change.
XR Zombie System Collapse Action: On Wednesday 30th October I returned to Trinity Square Garden to cover the third day and final day of Extinction Rebellion’s actions demanding the insurance industry end their support of new fossil fuel projects – part of a week of world-wide action, including protests the following two days in other UK cities. I’d missed Day 2 where they had marched with a giant potato.
XR had posted: “We Predict a Riot – mass action…..a zombie apocalypse! A wide range of creative actions will highlight what social collapse will look like in the UK as the population begins to panic in the face of repeated floods and food shortages over the next decade.”
And we had been promised a “Zombie die-in with flashmob, zombie insurers stumbling around” as well as a “Zombie Mass Dance Discobedience – This is the undead dance for life! – wear business suits with a zombie twist. We are the undead, dancing our way through the halls of power to expose the profiteers of destruction!”
I arrived to find a group of around 20 people practising the Zombie dance in Trinity Square, and a giant bomb of CO2 with protesters in business suits holding red boxes with the words WAR, FAMINE, EXTINCTION and FLOOD and a man reading a special copy of the ‘Daily Fail’.
Eventually the several hundred protesters set off on a march heading to Tower Palce, the home of insurers MarshMcLennan, where there was loud music from the Samba band, a short speech calling on them to end the insuring of new fossil fuel projects, a die-in, a few zombies runnning around and then the Zombie Mass Dance Discobedience.
Reading The Crimes outside insurers MarshMcLennan
Next stop was insurers AIG where a small group went inside the building to deliver a letter, but were soon ushered out.
The march continued around the City, before stopping for a lunch break outside the Howden Group offices on the corner with Bevis Marks.
After lunch the march continued, going back past Lloyds and on to the Sky Garden building in Fenchurch St, home to home to insurers Ascot, Talbot, Chaucer, Markel, Allied World, CNA Hardy, Tokio Marine Kiln, Sirius International and Lancashire Syndicates.
Here a small group had arrived before us to poster the windows with large signs, ‘INSURING FOSSIL FUELS = CLIMATE CHAOS’ and three campaigners were perched on top of the main entrance porch.
I’d been on my feet too long and things seemed to be at an end, so I sloped off for a pint of Brains (it was Halloween) in the Crosse Keys before making my way home. You can read about the protest in a press release from XR, and see more of my pictures here.
XR Floods Are Here – Don’t Insure Fossil Fuels: On Monday 28th Oct 2024 Extinction Rebellion began three days of action in London demanding that insurers end supplying insurance to fossil fuel projects. This was a part of a week of action with protests taking place around the country and of a global campaign, ‘Insure Our Future‘.
Gail Bradbrook is interviewed.
On October 14th XR sent an ultimatum to senior executives at all the UK-based insurance companies who insure climate breakdown telling them that unless they made “a pledge to get out of new oil, coal and gas” they would face non-violent direct action and protests.
“Insure Our Survival spokesperson Steve Tooze said: “The insurance industry has the power to stop the fossil fuel industry in its tracks by withdrawing the insurance that protects them from huge financial losses when things go wrong in a high-risk industry.
“Currently, insurers are refusing to use that power. Instead, they are choosing to bet on profits from underwriting oil, gas and coal projects that are accelerating the climate crisis to levels that could destroy our civilisation in our lifetimes.
“In effect, Insurers are insuring the worst people in the world to dig up more fossil fuels that cause extreme weather and flood our homes. Then they are charging us more and more to insure our homes against the increasing risk of flooding. “
The letter, also published online, pointed out that one of the most respected climate research institutions in the world the Potsdam Institute had just issued a damning report which made clear we were facing a global emergency and “very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled.” They point out that global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of the carbon dioxide and “and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change.”
Without insurance, new fossil fuel projects could not go ahead. At least one insurance company, Zurich Insurance, immediately announced that hey would no longer insure new oil and gas projects.
Monday’s protest theme was ‘The floods are here!‘ and this protest came the day before it was sadly demonstrated how true this was when “torrential rain … brought over a year’s worth of precipitation to several areas in southeastern Spain, including the Valencian Community, Castilla–La Mancha, and Andalusia.”
Several hundred XR protesters met at Tower Hill at 11am and set off to march around the City of London to stage protests outside insurance offices. Some wore southwesters and were carrying a pink inflatable boat, with others wore white hazard suits and held ‘CLIMATE CRIME SCENE’ police tapes.
Among the insurers the march targeted were Allianz and Lloyds and there were smaller groups picketing Hiscox which is supporting the the EACOP East Africa Crude Oil ‘carbon bomb’ pipeline and AXA.
Away from the march supporters Scientists for XR entered the lobby of the insurance industry’s regulatory body, the Prudential Regulation Authority. The march ended with a die-in in the open area next to St Mary Axe, facing Lloyds and next to the Leadenhall Building.
Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US: The headline I wrote for the events of Wednesday 7th November 2012 could well have been written for this year’s US elections where Trump’s whole career in politics has been supported by fossil fuel companies.
Huge lobbying by these companies and a deliberate campaign of misinformation and pseudoscience, financing studies which cast doubt or contradict the scientific consensus of global warming happening because of fossil fuel use has resulted in US governments not taking effective action against these polluters.
According to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, the Republican Party is controlled by the fossil fuel industry and as well as huge subsidies also gets “the license to pollute for free.”
Under the Democrats the US has finally taken some limited action with promises to phase out fossil fuel use but the government in 2022 still supplied around $15 billion a year in subsidies to the industry.
The protest in 2012 was calling on President Obama “to stand up against the lobbying, dirty money and media lies funded by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies.” He didn’t.
You can read more about the protest, which began outside the London offices of the Koch Brothers, Koch International in Fenchurch St at the heart of the City of London with a huge banner ‘KOCH BROTHERS – DIRTY MONEY – FUNDING CLIMATE DENIAL’ on My London Diary.
A high wind made it difficult to hold up the banner while the protest continued with speeches. But the big banner certainly attracted a great deal of attention, though soon they had to take it down as it became impossible to hold. But there were plenty of placards showing heads of prominent US right wing politicians and media commentators, each with their names and some ridiculous quotations related to climate change, as well as those of Obama and Romney and the two Koch brothers, along with some smaller banners.
There was another big banner of the side of the open-top bus which the Campaign Against Climate Change had hired to take the protesters to the US Embassy.
I went with them for what was probably the most uncomfortable bus journey of my life. It was cold in the strong icy wind and the bus bumped and lurched ridiculously.
It was hard to keep standing as I took pictures and I had to hold on with one hand all the time, using the other to take pictures. There wasn’t a great deal of light and getting sharp pictures at 1/30 f4 (full aperture for my wideangle zoom) was difficult with the bouncing and vibration of the bus.
Somehow I managed, and Phil Thornhill managed to to use the megaphone, at least during some of the halts in traffic. But I was very pleased (and very frozen) when we arrived and got off the bus in Grosvenor Square.
Police at Grosvenor Square tried to herd the protesters into a small pen in a dark corner, but they refused and were finally allowed to go in front of the locked main entrance gates, with those faces and their quotations peering over the hedge from the gardens behind the main actors and speakers.
Fair Fares, Kobane and Biomass: Ten years ago on Tuesday 28th October 2014 I photographed protests calling for fairer fares on our railways, an end to the Turkish backed Islamic state invasion of Kobane in Kurdish Syria and finally calling on the Green Investment Bank to end funding for hugely climate wrecking investments in using biomass for power generation.
Fair Fares Petition – Westminster
The Campaign for Better Transport, including their director Stephen Joseph OBE protested at the Dept of Transport before walking to Portcullis Hous to hand a petition with over 4000 signatures to Rail Minister Claire Perry MP calling on the recent increase in Northern Rail evening peak rail fares to be scrapped. My own rail fares also increased by around a third if I need to return from London between 4pm and 7pm, though the evening peak only really begins around 5pm.
We have the most expensive rail travel in the world, largely thanks to privatisation, as well as lower levels of service than many companies, and a hugely complex system of ticketing which often results in passengers paying more than necessary.
Labours Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill should eventually bring in a simpler more uniform structure for the railways and we can hope that it might make fares simpler to understand – and perhaps even less costly. Currently it is often cheaper to travel by less green modes of transport, even by air.
We also need to move away from the companies which lease trains and pay out huge dividends to their shareholders to a more sensible system in which the railways actually own trains and ensure that they provide more carriages on services which are now heavily overcrowded – which seem to include almost all CrossCountry trains. Their franchise ends in October 2027.
Kobane – Unite against Isis Drawing – Trafalgar Square
Kurds stood around a giant chalk drawing on the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square including the Statue of Liberty and the message ‘KOBANE Unite against ISIS‘ hold small posters “support progressive and left forces against ISIS” and “Support Kobani Struggle“.
The ISIS forces attacking Kobane, close to the Turkish border in a Kurdish region of Syria were being supported by Turkey as a part of their fight against the Kurds,
The main opposition to ISIS is provided by Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), who were being supported by US air strikes.
Biofuel picket Green Investment Bank Birthday – King Edward Street
Protesters from Biofuelwatch and London Biomassive, some dressed as wise owls, picketed the second birthday celebrations of the Green Investment Bank at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London against their funding of environmentally disastrous biomass and incineration projects.
These are more polluting than coal, producing more climate-wrecking carbon dioxide than coal, and protesters urged the GIB to finance “low carbon sustainable solutions” instead of these “high-carbon destructive delusions.”
The protest took place as many city workers were walking past on their way home and many took leaflets and some stopped to talk with the protesters.
There was live music, some short speeches and couple of birthday cakes for the GIB, one edible and the other rather larger with two ‘oil palms’ on top and a banner with the message ‘GIB No Biomass’ strung between them.
Windrush & Climate – On Saturday 8th September 2018 after photographing a protest against the continuing hounding of Windrush generation migrants to the UK in Brixton I went to a Climate Change protest outside Tate Modern.
Justice for Windrush descendants – Brixton
A rally and march hosted by Movement for Justice called for the Windrush scheme to be widened to include all families and descendants of the Windrush Generation and for an end to the racist hostile environment for all immigrants.
The Windrush scandal first came to public attention in 2017 and 2018 when we heard that hundreds of migrants including those who had been urged to come and help Britain rebuild after the Second World War and who were then given the right to live and work in this country permanently where being hounded by the Home Office and some had already been deported.
Much of the information came from the work of Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman publishing the experiences of these people. The Home Office in 2012 under Theresa May had introduced a ‘Hostile Environment’ law which required people to produce at least one official document from every year they had lived in the UK to prove they had the right to stay here.
Many were of course unable to do this, and the Home Office itself had destroyed many of the official records which would have proved their case. Many were declared to be ‘undocumented migrants’ (or as the politicians and press racistly and inaccurately labelled them, ‘illegal immigrants’.
They “began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.“
The government promised to correct the matter and in May 2018 the then Home Secretary Saji Javid set up a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ under Wendy Williams. When published in 2020 it showed that the Windrush scandal was the deliberate and inevitable result of Tory government policies.
Home Secretary Priti Patel then said she accepted the reports recommendations but in 2023 Suella Braverman decided to ditch three of of them. In June 2024 the High Court ruled that her actions in abandoning the promise to establish a migrants’ commssioner and to increase the powers of the independent chief examiner of borders and immigration was unlawful.
The scandal continues, and the replacement by 2025 of physical residence permits by digital e-visas for the roughly half a million non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK seems almost certain to generate a similar scandal.
After a rally in Windrush Square which included Eulalee, a Jamaican grandmother who has been fighting for 17 years to stay in the UK with her Windrush generation husband, daughter and grandchildren as well as others affected by the scandal there was a march around the centre of Brixton, with several stops for short speeches in the more crowded parts.
Eulalee and Michael Groce on the march
Also on the march was Michael Groce, poet, community worker and Green Party candidate as councillor in Brixton, holds a poster ‘Yes, It’s Racist’. The 1985 Brixton riots began after police shot and seriously wounded his mother, putting her in hospital for a year. Later they paid her over £500,000 in damages without admitting any liability.
On the railway bridge across Brixton Road was the graffitied message ‘CLAPHAM THAT WAY YOU 2D FLAT WHITE TEPID COLONIALIST WANKER”, with Brixton gentrification now taking away much of the unique character of the area where many who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 settled after having been initially housed in a giant wartime underground shelter on Clapham Common.
After marching around the centre of Brixton spreading their message with megaphones and posters the campaigners returned for a further rally in Windrush Square.
Climate Reality, a global and diverse group of activists, community leaders, organisers, scientists, storytellers and others united to act over global warming was supported by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change, Fossil Free UK and the Green Party in one of thousands of rallies around the world demanding urgent action by government leaders to leaders commit to a fossil free world that works for all of us.
They called for people to take personal actions to reduce their own contribution to climate change but more importantly to join together to press for action at local, national and international level.
In particular they called for the government to end its support for fracking and for local authorities to divest from fracking and fossil fuels.
Climate Camp at Blackheath – Wednesday 26th August 2009
On Wednesday 26 August 2009 I joined Climate Campers who were meeting at several locations around London to go to an as yet unspecified location for that year’s Climate Camp.
I’d chosen to go with the Blue Group who were meeting at Stockwell Underground Station in south London, chosen as one of the starting points because of the events of 22 July 2005.
As I wrote back then, on “the escalator at Stockwell station it’s hard not to shiver at the memory of those videos showing Jean Charles de Menezes strolling down to catch his last train, and police coming though the gates in pursuit. There is a memorial to him outside the station, including a great deal of information about the event and the misinformation and covering up by police.“
Arriving there I found around 80 Climate Campers and half a dozen police being filmed and photographed by around 30 media and nothing very much happening. It was like that for the next couple of hours, during which we all went to a local park to have our sandwiches and some played games.
Eventually around 2pm we were called back to the station where we followed the leader who had a blue flag onto a train and off at Bank, where all trooped to the DLR, alighting at Greenwich. From here we trudged up the hill to Blackheath Common. Police were keeping a low profile, watching from a distance.
When we arrived the site on the common was still being secured and some people were hard at work erecting fences and vital resources – such as toilets. Legal observers were holding a meeting, but others were just making use of some comfortable furniture on the site or listening to singers.
I tried to photograph as many of these activities as I could.
In earlier years I’d had problems with Climate Camp and in particular their media policy. As I wrote “Press photographers visiting the site will be required to sign a media policy that most of us would find unacceptable and to be accompanied while on the site by a minder. (It can’t of course apply to the police photographers in their helicopter or cherry picker.) The policy appears to be driven by a few individuals with paranoid ideas about privacy and a totally irrational fear of being photographed. It really does not steal your soul!“
On the Wednesday the camp was still being set up and everyone had unfettered access. But this year in any case I’d actually been invited to take part as part of the media team for the camp – and on my later visit was provided with a sash to identify me as such – though I did still come across a little of that paranoia even when wearing it.
But there were also so many people I knew and others who recognised me from from other events that I felt very much at home walking around the site. The main problem I had was trying to keep moving rather than being drawn into lengthy conversations.
There was a meeting to welcome us all to the Climate Camp, after which the preparations for the camp continued, with water supplies being laid on, even baths plumbed in, various larger tents being erected as well as a large banner CAPITALISM IS CRISIS.
I had other things to do on the Friday and Saturday, but was able to return for a day at the camp on the Saturday, to make a record of the camp’s activities and of the campers at work and play, as well as some of the visitors who came to see what was happening. You can see my accounts and pictures from both days on My London Diary.
The Future For Aviation: The protest at London City Airport on Monday 21st July 2014 by ‘The Future‘, a campaigning group set up to fight climate change and ecological devastation by non-violent protest along with some local residents addressed specific issues related to that airport, but also wider questions about the future of aviation, both still very much with us. A decision is expected shortly by our new Labour government on further expansion plans for the airport following a public inquiry which closed in February.
The group used a painted circle around one eye as a symbol that the people are watching those in power, calling on politicians and others to take action rather than let themselves be bought by corporate interests. And they stated “we will judge them if they choose the toxicity of London City Airport over the health of local people and of London.”
Ten years later, ‘The Future’ are forgotten, and while there has been nothing like enough action the growing signs of the coming catastrophe are just perhaps beginning to get some movement, though still too little and too late.
It should now be clear to every thinking person that we have to find ways to reverse the growth in the aviation industry. To end airport expansion and increasing numbers of flights. Not ideas like changing to bio-fuels or specious calculations over planting trees to compensate for the CO2 generated by flights, nor on the pipe-dream of electric aircraft but quite simply reducing the number of flights.
Quite how this can be done is a matter for discussion, but some measures, such as removing the subsidies for aviation and banning incentive schemes with air miles and discounts could be simply implemented.
Heathrow and London City Airport also pose other problems, generating pollution and noise pollution both from their flight and from the traffic and congestion they generate in urban areas of our heavily polluted city.
The history of London City Airport is a case-study in how the aviation industry has operated by deception. When set up it was to be a low traffic site providing limited services between European capitals for business travellers from the nearby Canary Wharf and the City of London using small, quiet aircraft specially built for short take-off and landing.
Even so the Greater London Council opposed its setting up in the former Royal Docks in Newham, surrounded by densely populated areas but were overruled by central government.
Those initial promises have been long been superseded and by 2014 passenger numbers were 25 times as great with the airport no a a major commercial airport, its runway extended to allow use by larger and far more noisy aircraft, including some scheduled trans-Atlantic flights. From a handful of flights a day there were by then around 15 per hour in its allowed operation times. And more new housing in the surrounding areas had made the airport’s site even less tenable.
The airport was then about to make a planning application for further expansion. Then London Mayor Boris Johnson directed Newham Council to turn this down, but in 2016 transport secretary Chris Grayling and communities secretary Sajid Javid overrode the decision and gave the £344 million scheme the go-ahead.
In 2023, Newham Council again turned down further expansion plans but the airport again appealed. A public inquiry took place in December 2023 to February 2024, and a decision was expected by 23rd July 2024. But the general election means that the decision will now be made by our new Labour government. It will be a key indicator in demonstrating if our new government is really serious in its announced intentions to combat climate change and pollution.
Axe the Draxosaurus – On Wedesday 20th April 2016 environmental activists protested outside the AGM of Drax Plc at Grocer’s Hall next to the Bank of England in the heart of the City of London. Drax power station near Selby in Yorkshire used to be the UK’s biggest coal-fired power station, but since 2012 has become the world’s biggest wood-burning plant, and the company Drax Plc has become the second largest producer of wood pellets in the world
Drax power station now emits more CO2 than any other plant in the UK, and it does so with the aid of a huge subsidy from our UK electricity bills, almost £1 billion in 2021.
It get subsidised by the UK Government as part of the plan to decarbonise electricity generation despite the evidence from scientists around the world that the burning of forest wood for energy increases carbon emissions and is incompatible with the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
The subsidies that Drax receives increase our electricity bills and should be going to expand truly renewable energy sources such as wind, wave and solar energy. Instead they are paying Drax to pollute and pay out large dividends to their shareholders.
Sourcing the wood to burn at Drax – and for them to sell to other wood-burning plants is also a social and environmental disaster. Much of the wood comes from Drax’s pellet mills using large mmonoculture pine plantations in Southeastern USA, large sterile forest areas with little or no wildlife which have been expanded greatly in area, in part by the total clearance of areas of ancient forest.
Also in the USA, Drax buys pellets from Enviva, the world’s largest pellet producer which has come under criticism for its clearcut felling of US coastal hardwood forests.
Drax has also been criticised by environmentalists for its clear cutting of ancient forests in Canada, and its Portuguese supplier of pellets has been found to have sourced trees from nature reserves. And logging for wood pellets for Drax is also destroying ancient forests in Estonia and Latvia.
The amount of wood burned at Drax is huge – 6.4 million tonnes in 2022 – and will have involved the cutting down of twice that mass of trees. It is more than the entire UK wood production – but only supplies less than one hundredth of our energy needs.
Drax is now attempting to claim further subsidies for its BECCS (Bioenergy With Carbon Capture And Storage) project which seems very unlikely to be able to capture any significant amount of its huge annual CO2 output. It would obviously be far better simply to stop burning wood and turn to truly renewable power sources.
The protest in 2016 was organised by Biofuelwatch on whose web site you can find more a detailed briefing about Drax and why it is vital to end the subsidies for its polluting and environmentally destructive activities.
You can find information on the Axe Drax page about the trial of the #DRAX2 arrested after paint was sprayed on the government department supporting the subisdies to Drax – it begins at Southwark Crown Court on April 22nd 2024. And on August 8-13th 2024 Reclaim the Power is holding a mass protest camp for climate justice “targeting Drax – the biggest emitter in the UK, the world’s biggest burner of trees and a key driver of environmental racism.”
