The past weekend saw numbers swell at the Mainshill Solidarity Camp, with people travelling from far and wide to support the ongoing struggle to stop Scottish Coal opencasting Mainshill Wood. The number of people occupying the site reached numbers seen at Mainshill when the Camp for Climate Action set up on the site in August, showing how this issue is not going away.
Community Walk
On Saturday afternoon as the sun shone down on the Douglas Valley, residents of the camp, supporters and activists from local communities came together to witness the changes that Mainshill Wood has seen over the past few months. The tour took in the parts of the site that have been occupied, defended and heavily fortified for nearly 5 months, leading up to areas that have been most recently felled and cleared.
The walk then went down to the far corner of the site where Scottish Coal and various contractors have set up a compound, surrounding machinery in fencing, floodlighting and security guards. The walk then passed through the huge area of clearfell, and down through the field on which the Camp for Climate Action took place, past more defences, treehouses and tunnels. The tour ended with tea and biscuits in the communal, and discussions on where the campaign is going, and how the camp and communities can continue to support each other in their struggle to stop Scottish Coal.
Workshops
After the walk, a group from the camp walked into the clearfell to plant native trees, in a symbolic effort to reforest the area, with indigenous tree species. Although Scottish Coal flout their plans to restore the site using native species after coaling, history and common sense tells us that the site will not be restored. Take a walk across the valley to Dalquandy, which was Europe’s largest mine at 20 million tonnes and stopped producing years ago. It has been left as it was, a dangerous moonscape, leaking toxics into groundwater and polluting surrounding environments.
Other workshops skill-shared on tree-climbing, tree-house building, lock-on building and generally resisting Scottish Coal’s plans for the area.
Sabotage
A report posted on Indymedia Scotland reads:
Activists sabotaged a specialist drilling rig and other machinery in Mainshill Wood on Saturday night.
Cables were cut, controls damaged, levers busted, locks glued, windows broken, lights smashed. There were no injuries or arrests.
The specialist drilling rig, owned by Apex Drilling Services, is performing an essential role for Scottish Coal. This action may stop their work for a considerable time while repairs are made.
The drilling rig takes core samples of the rocks under the woods, to determine rock types and amounts of minerals present. This is work that needs to be completed before coal can be excavated from Mainshill.
Scottish Coal have agreed to pay for any damage to the contractors expensive machinery while working at the Mainshill site.
This action to stop the work carried out by Scottish Coal or its contractors is one of many acts of sabotage at Mainshill over recent weeks.
Lock-ons
No work took place on the site throughout the weekend, and the harvesting machine had been taken off-site on the back of a flatbed lorry on Friday, probably so that it couldn’t get damaged over the weekend as has happened in the past. So a large group decided to stop the harvester from being brought on-site on Monday morning.
Using New Mains Home Farm as its access to the site and compound, the flatbed drove in with the harvester at around 7am, quickly followed by people from the camp. The harvester was just off the flatbed when it was chased and surrounded, with people climbing on it.
The driver put up quite a fight in an effort to get his machine on site, putting lives at risk by recklessly driving the machine and then violently trying to remove people from it. However, a camper managed to scale the crane-like arm of the harvester, and locked-on to it with a bicycle D-lock.
Violent responses from the workers is becoming an all too common reaction to actions at Mainshill where people try to peacefully used their bodies to stop machinery – people have been pushed, kicked in the head, grabbed, nearly run over, and had their campers taken off them and thrown into the mud.
Although a lot of this has been documented and definitely constitutes assault, even attempted murder in some instances, the fight of the Mainshill Solidarity Camp is with the bosses, landlords and decision-makers. The Scottish Coal and Scottish Woodlands executives sit in their offices, drive their fancy company cars to their fancy homes, and tell the contractors or subcontractors they employ that they wont get any trouble from the Solidarity Camp. They tell them that they won’t be given any more work until they have finished at Mainshill Wood. They put working people, with families to feed and no choice but to carry out the contracts they’ve been given, in between themselves and the community and Solidarity Camp activists.
We say that these bosses act cowardly, paying others with blood money to carry out their dirty work. We appeal to contractors to stand in solidarity with the camp and community and not accept contracts for work at Mainshill. We appeal to the Scottish Coal technical directors, the Estates Manager, the Scottish Woodlands directors, the councillors responsible for passing this project and Lord Home to come do the work themselves, get their overalls dirty for a change and see how long they last.
The action lasted for five hours, with the camper locked-on at the neck throughout that time. Eventually a V-division support unit from Glasgow with the Mountain Rescue team arrived, and in true V-division style rigged up a pallet on a farm tractor as a “makeshift cherry-picker”. Earlier in the day the Inspector present had said that Health and Safety rules for how close machinery can operate to people on site were “guidelines” – it must be the same for removing people from lock-ons!
The camper was removed from the harvester arm, arrested for a Breach of the Peace, held over night at Bellshill police station and then taken to court in Lanark the next morning, where she plead guilty and will be sentenced in six months, pending good behaviour.
This action was a victory for the camp and took the resistance into New Mains Home Farm, where the Douglas and Angus Estates Office is, and where a community of people will live only some two hundred metres from the excavation works. The action also saw a down-scaled police response. Where at previous actions some 25 officers had been in attendance, this time there were only 4 for the most part, and support was only moved away right at the end. Is Strathclyde Police getting sick of being used as Scottish Coal’s private security force?
In Conclusion…
As well as some superb evening entertainment, the weekend’s events and the people that came through and saw the camp has strengthened the resistance to the ongoing work at Mainshill, and given people new energy to fight these corrupt councillors, fat-cat land-owners and greedy corporate types with everything we’ve got.
mainshill@riseup.net
http://mainshill.noflag.org.uk/