Extreme police tactics targeting campaigners exposed by counter-espionage by Plane Stupid activist

Over the past few months the police have been approaching climate activists with offers of cash for inside information. Tilly Gifford from Plane Stupid Scotland last night exposed police tactics used by the “community intelligence unit.” Using a hidden camera and skype phone she recorded two officers suggesting tens of thousands of pounds could be exchanged in return for weekly meetings to inform the police on Plane Stupid’s activities.

Evidence of high levels of police activity regarding climate activists is not only clearly a miss-spending of tax payer’s money but also a blatant breach of the right for peaceful protest. This couldn’t have come at a more apt time; the persistent and often aggressive interrogation of Plane Stupid highlights how the state is placing the interests of powerful corporations over those of the public and the environment. This comes in the wake of a long list of extreme and over the top policing towards climate activists recently including Climate Camp last August, violence towards campaigners during the G20 protests and police infiltration of coal activists in Nottingham. The police are treating peaceful protesters as criminals, when they are simply campaigning to protect the destruction of the environment from runaway climate change.

The police maintain it wasn’t Plane Stupid they were “worried about, but individuals within Plane Stupid”; individuals, they claimed, who may be planning acts of violence in the name of our cause. We've heard it all before. At the Climate Camps, it was the elusive “hardcore of trouble-makers” intent on provoking violence, and in the case of the Nottingham conspiracy, “those arrested posed a serious threat to the safe running of the site." EON, the owners of the alleged target of the alleged protest, gave us a helpful clue about what is going here in their statement following the arrests: “While we understand that everyone has a right to protest peacefully and lawfully, this was clearly neither of those things.”

In a country with a long history of peaceful protest and direct action, heavy policing is threatening our democracy and right to protest. Activists have been at the forefront of productive change from the road movements of the 1990’s to the rent strikes in Glasgow and recent occupations of schools. “It’s dangerous to lock people up for thinking about action,” commented Geraint Bevan, coordinator of NO2ID Scotland. “You cannot have pre-emptive justice and people have the right to say “we want change”.” Police interrogation and pay-offs cannot be allowed to get in the way of climate action to prevent carbon heavy businesses reaping huge profit at the expense of our communities and planet. Non-violent direct action represents an expression of the need for change, and offers a vital outlet for representation of public interests in the face of unjust laws and major corporations. We must ask ourselves whose interests are really being served by devoting such extravagant police resources to preventing peaceful disruption to major polluters whose core activities are driving us ever closer to the precipice of catastrophic, runaway global warming.

List to the tapes and read the transcripts  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/audio/2009/apr/24/police-surveillance-intelligence-1