On Roger's release - my speech at the appeal for the Whole Truth Five

My friend Roger Hallam is out of prison, but the work to build new democratic institutions continues.

Roger on a previous protest against air pollution!

Yesterday my friend Roger Hallam was released from prison. He was there on an initial five year sentence for conspiring to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the M25.

After seeing how quickly the newspapers printed the Met Police press releases about last weekend’s We Do Not Comply protests against the proscription of Palestine Action, it is worth remembering that Roger was grassed up from an open zoom call by a smug tabloid reporter, Scarlet Howes, who was ‘undercover’ on the same call.

Smug, because at the time that paper openly bragged about collaborating with the Met Police in order to get “invited” to the raid on Roger’s flat. It was a photo shoot for them and it made them money. Clicks equal cash, fuck the people of conscience, fuck the Daniel Morgan report, fuck the planet, fuck the children, fuck the global poor.

That’s The Sun newspaper for you. (Same one Keir Starmer’s been so keen to write for, and the paper that Keir’s new Communications chief used to edit.)

For those who don’t know the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report, it is basically this: the investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan in 1987 was not conducted properly due to cover-ups and corruption in the Met Police — and especially in their “inappropriate relationships with private investigators and journalists”. The independent report from 2021 and then also the government response in 2023 found the Met still “has work to do to ensure that these types of conflicts of interests are properly investigated”.

Where was that “work to do” when The Sun and Scarlet were smugly taking part in the Met Police raid that led to Roger being imprisoned? This is wot The Sun said at the time:

Hallam’s arrest came after we infiltrated a meeting on Wednesday and passed on recordings to police of the hardline green campaigners’ plot.

We were then invited to join the Met’s Territorial Support Group as officers smashed through Hallam’s front door at his flat in Kennington, South London.

Why would The Met Police “invite” The Sun to smash through the front door of anyone’s home? Just more of the Met Police’s “inappropriate relationships with private investigators and journalists”?

In March earlier this year, there was an appeal against the harsh and excessive prison sentences handed down to Roger and other people of conscience who acted to shake us out of our torpor on the climate. We’re facing collapse by 2040, according to some working inside this very government. Two degrees increase and up to 4 billion deaths by 2050 according to the actuaries — they’re the accountants! Uninsurable business and property will cost us the possibility of a functioning global economy, says the insurance industry.

The appeal in March was partially successful — the sentences were reduced. Roger’s sentence was reduced from five to four years. (Some would have said the appeal itself was completely illegitimate by virtue of the circumstances we stand in today. It was not the case that these sentences were simply a bit too harsh. They needed to be reviewed totally in light of facts.) It should be the main purpose of every institution at this point to help people to come to terms with reality and to shift our culture, politics and economy accordingly. If they do, we might move into what many have termed an emergency mode for the climate. That’s not whats happening though, we’re systemically compounding the crises instead.

Is it a surprise, then, that our feelings towards institutions like the media, the Met Police, the government, and the court system, are tattered? Some of us thought the justice system might help us save our world. No such luck.

On the morning of the opening day of the appeal against their sentences, I gave a speech outside The Royal Courts of Justice. Here’s the video and the text of my speech. The work is not over, sadly.

Anyway, Roger is free! And I hear on grapevine that he’s been busy in prison, working out how to help us save ourselves from disaster. Good old Roger. x

---

My speech from outside The Royal Courts of Justice, March 2025

---

Text of speech (tidied up!)

It is often said in the environmental community that those in resistance are in fact nature defending itself. If this is true, we are also Love defending Love.

The people brought to court for this appeal this morning are some of the best of us. They have seen clearly the circumstances they refuse, the complicity of participation in everyday life. The struggle to make it or climb the ladder, elbowing people out of the way, competing for more and more resources. They said no to all this. We say no with them. Out of love.

But we also know that a human sense of dominion and control over nature contradicts this love. A wrong belief that we might call The Problem.

The problem: a feeling of superiority and supremacy, a sense that we are cunning, almighty, powerful, in control and creating order.

On the surface it appears to be something humans innately seek. But this desire for control and order has created awful systems, so many systems, such as our criminal justice system.

In these current times, our systems are not administering justice on behalf of all life, or even all human beings. They are self-replicating and self-serving, doing nothing but keeping things moving, the machinery of the mass death project that is the carbon intensive industry.

Our legal system is part of this self-serving industry. Unfit and incapable of addressing the greatest injustice in human history: the undermining of life itself. The termination of civilization, potentially even human extinction as part of the mass extinction crisis.

What’s even worse is we have a legal system that actively fights the changes needed to prevent this atrocity from taking place, becoming enmeshed in the bigger system. Although you can sometimes work within the system to some effect, you cannot counter the system on its own terms and succeed. It is designed not to allow it.

On a simple level, when we launched Extinction Rebellion, we said that we were willing to be jailed if that was what it would take. To create the awareness and the rapid change necessary to avoid destroying order altogether…. And these good people are doing that work, and I very much hope they might be released as soon as possible

It seems pointless to stand here and repeat all the statistics I could quote about how much more quickly you are likely to be arrested as a protester in this country than many others. Or about the extraordinary disproportionality of these sentences compared to the recent past, where non-violent direct action would pretty much never lead to a custodial sentence.

Never mind that; now it’s five years custodial time for being on a zoom call just talking about the need for action.

The cases are forgotten by the reframe on sentencing. We should be talking about the innocence, justice, intention and integrity of the defendants. or even the way the court process has been manipulated by politicians, who hate it when the public side with us. Because we are right and the establishment is wrong. When we win cases, as I did with a group of women in 2023, they move the goalposts so that future rules favour their side, so you can never find a legal route to resist or protest.

Roger was grassed up by a smug Sun journalist who lives in the tradition of the red tops - speaking to the common person whilst totally undermining them.

The Met had Roger remanded without prosecution for well over 100 days and then kept on tag and house curfew for over two years. He had served more than a two year sentence by the time he was able to meet a jury in a law court. What kind of system does that? So they had to give him an enormous sentence, otherwise he would have walked free and everyone would notice the extreme treatment of these activists.

Context is everything. We must remember this. Our context is a system self-terminating, and taking us with it. Which is why this politics of spectacle and politics of bullshit pantomime seeks to destroy context. We’re on course to totally terminate organised life on earth. Billions of death lie ahead and nothing seems to be done. You can’t argue with this. But then who can govern in this context? Nobody. They know their system will collapse. So they deny everything about their context… and yours.

It is the case that we still live in a society with unaccountable leadership across the board who refuse to accept the very basic facts about their own circumstances, and ours.

As a result, they pursue strategies, which aren’t really strategies at all, but empty ideas that just keep moving things around, such as growth growth and growth at any cost. Someone needs to remind us how to break this escalatory dynamic. You can. I can.

These defendants do every day with their bravery, courage and determined approach to love.

All of our political prisoners have my full love, support, gratitude and solidarity. I hope the sentences are recognised as outrageous and an embarrassment for the nation, but I do not want to miss an opportunity to put squarely on the record that prosecutions of this kind should not be necessary and should not be happening in the first place.

Somebody once said that the cost of liberty was eternal vigilance, and these prisoners are not unfree. Because they are vigilant. They have the decency of moral spirit to do what they know is right. Perhaps this is the cost of a real democracy.

Until we break the dynamic of escalation, until we move out of the mode of permanent competition, we will be unable to divert from the direction of travel that we're headed. To save the lives of the people that we love and the world family yet to be born, the ecologies of living beings we share this planet with.

Maybe there is nothing left for us, apart from the faith we might have in each other and in our ability to see the systems for what they are. Apart from the hard work we need to do together. With an unwavering commitment to solidarity, and most importantly to love itself, because without love, we will definitely fail.

We make compromises for love.
We will make costly decisions for love.
We will work hard for love.
These prisoners embody love in action.
They have paid a high enough price.
We call for their freedom.
Freedom for the best of us, now.

From when Roger and I did a hunger strike together.

Clare Farrell was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and is now a free speech and democracy campaigner.

Subscribe to Clare Farrell.