Manchester Five – is justice in a wig and gown or in orange paint?

Their crime, if you can call it that, was planning to glue themselves to a runway at Manchester Airport. It was not sophisticated in the planning or in its process; they had bolt cutters to get through the outer fence, and security would likely have found them long before they stopped any flights. But, instead of this, they were arrested before they left their shared house early one morning in August 2024.

One of the basic tenets of moral justice is you can’t charge people with thought-crime. It has to actually have been committed to punish them for it – otherwise you are essentially punishing someone for something they thought of doing, but didn’t do. If that policy begins, a slippery slope is opened up for the law to punish people for words instead of actions, and indeed thoughts before we even come to the words.

LINK: Criminal Conspiracy Offences Explained

Justice is meant to be just, but what I saw on Friday – with four queer people, three of whom are non-binary and will definitely be placed in binary prison accommodation, almost certainly getting heavy prison sentences – is not just. Everything about it reeks of injustice. Especially when Margaret, Ella, Daniel and Indi were trying so hard to warn people about a genuine danger. Maybe gluing yourself to a runway isn’t the best way to get the danger of climate change across. But what is? Nothing has worked. We are lobsters in a pot, literally and figuratively boiling alive as the temperature creeps up, and we aren’t even beginning to take notice.

The tsunami of 2004 wasn’t justice. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t justice. The famine in Yemen wasn’t justice. None of those things were man-made, but the environment sent warning signs that we have gone too far, pushed at the planet too hard, and now it’s pushing back with its own implosions. Climate change is happening, and across the globe, scientists are frantically trying to warn us, even joining Just Stop Oil and similar organisations in order to get their messages out.

Justice would be fixing the damage we’ve done. That would be just. Justice would be rapists getting longer sentences than climate experts who talk on Zoom calls about non-violent resistance (see Roger Hallam’s sentence by Judge Hehir).

I get that the average person thinks climate protesters are extreme and disruptive. So are snowstorms and heatwaves. It is never made clear enough – Just Stop Oil are not kids running around trying to spoil your day. They are grandmas, climate experts, students, parents, adults – one of the Manchester Five is in their 50s – who are genuinely scared for your children’s futures. Maybe you should be too. Both in the sense of climate change, and in the growing authoritarianism we’re seeing in government and in the courts in the way protest groups are treated, especially Just Stop Oil.

Maybe you just want a peaceful drive to work. I want my kid to see their grandkids. So my flag is firmly orange.

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Featured image: Just Stop Oil