Despite massive over-policing and the eviction of Bath Climate Camp, actions are continuing as scheduled, so if you were thinking of coming down for saturdays demo, starting at 12 at Bath Abbey, please do so to show that their repression will not make us go away! – here is a report of the Land and Marine demo –
Friday 20th April, at 8 am, a group of 7 protesters approached the Land and Marine office, to leaflet and banner drop, as part of the advertised blockade, and were faced by a huge police presence. The cops demanded that the protestors move about 30 meters away from L&M, making the protest invisible. The group refused, and after negotiations and a couple of tense moments, were able to stay in front of the offices, although the cops put a restriction on the number of protesters to 6 (they counting skills should be called into questions, as by this point, there were 8 protestors!), forbidding any additional protesters from joining the demo and also imposed a time limit, restricting the demo to two hours. Twice the time limit was passes, and twice re-negotiated until protester voluntarily left at 12.30. The office was shut all day and no workers entered the premises. Also, L&M shelled out on a double row of fencing around their property and a large number of security guards who have been there in various numbers for a couple of weeks… Result! Our congratulations to Inspector Adam Jenners.
Also, the activists were all searched under a proposed modification to Section 1 of the PACE 1984 Act, for items to be used in connection with criminal damage. It may well be that this proposed modification to the law hasn’t yet came in to power by the time they tried to use it, so there may well be a lawsuit in the works…
Police also confirmed their use of phone tapping to one activist: “Acording to your phone calls, you only expected 10 people at your meeting, but when we there you had 100.” It seems that the police had confused our camp with that of the coming national Climate Camp, this summer – and wasted 100,000s of pounds in the process. The head of this over-zealous policing operation is probably sweating round about now.
Overkill police tactics failed to intimidate us and hopefully the day long closure of L&M will be another setback in the construction of the pipeline.
To find out the facts, and get involved in the anti-pipeline campaign, check out www.risingtide.org.uk/bristol/pipeline
Intimidation and repression will not beat us or make us go away!