Delap was among several dozen Just Stop Oil supporters who, during a four-day campaign, climbed gantries over the M25, which encircles London, forcing police to stop traffic and leaving an estimated 709,000 drivers stuck in tailbacks.
You block one road and there’s 709k drivers stuck, and probably not much more people than this as most people are alone in their cars.
But yeah we shouldn’t touch cars infrastructure for something more efficient!
It also blocks routes for emergency services, and a significant chunk of those 709k people would include sick people, elderly people, people even on their way to hospital themselves - all stuck in their cars, without easy access to food or water if it had lasted the days the protestor wanted it to. Even if the police had somehow managed to find a way to clear the traffic people could easily have been harmed.
This was not just some little traffic jam and a 5 min delay on the way home, it was a complete stoppage of traffic moving with a potential for people to have been stuck in their cars for hours to days due to gridlock.
However people may feel about cars or the environment, what they did was dangerous and could easily have killed people.
“Conspiracy to cause public nuisance”, as far as I recall. With emphasis on conspiracy. Causing public nuisance without a conspiracy would not have been a criminal offense at all.
Disclaimer: I’m an anarchist and I don’t consider that a crime.
Interesting! Sending a 77 year old woman to prison just because she blocked a road seems quite over the top. On Christmas nonetheless. Good for the Guardian to stand up for her.
What was her criminal offence?
You block one road and there’s 709k drivers stuck, and probably not much more people than this as most people are alone in their cars. But yeah we shouldn’t touch cars infrastructure for something more efficient!
It also blocks routes for emergency services, and a significant chunk of those 709k people would include sick people, elderly people, people even on their way to hospital themselves - all stuck in their cars, without easy access to food or water if it had lasted the days the protestor wanted it to. Even if the police had somehow managed to find a way to clear the traffic people could easily have been harmed.
This was not just some little traffic jam and a 5 min delay on the way home, it was a complete stoppage of traffic moving with a potential for people to have been stuck in their cars for hours to days due to gridlock.
However people may feel about cars or the environment, what they did was dangerous and could easily have killed people.
“Conspiracy to cause public nuisance”, as far as I recall. With emphasis on conspiracy. Causing public nuisance without a conspiracy would not have been a criminal offense at all.
Disclaimer: I’m an anarchist and I don’t consider that a crime.
Blocking a motorway deliberately. We can debate whether the sentence is just or not, but that is orthogonal to debate about the tag.
Interesting! Sending a 77 year old woman to prison just because she blocked a road seems quite over the top. On Christmas nonetheless. Good for the Guardian to stand up for her.
Calling the M25 a road is like calling the Thames a stream. I can see which community we’re in here, but it’s being deliberately obtuse.