Were police spies behind mass arrest of activists?

By Jerome Taylor

More than 100 people detained before power plant protest. Direct action group vows campaign will go on

April 14, 2009

The Residents of Sneinton could have been forgiven for thinking that a mass jail-break had just occurred in their normally quiet red-brick suburb of Nottingham when they looked out of their windows in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Shortly after midnight more than 20 riot vans disgorged scores of police officers, backed by dogs, who charged into the car park of a privately owned school off Sneinton Dale, the main thoroughfare running through the suburb.

Over the next three hours police rounded up more than 100 people, bundling them en masse into the vans before eventually driving them down to police stations around the city.

But yesterday's dramatic raid was not sparked by a mass breakout or a terror alert. It was the latest in a long line of running battles between police and direct action climate change campaigners.

Except this time there was one startling difference. Police had finally managed to infiltrate a direct action group and for once actually knew where a protest would happen before it took place, prompting the first mass pre-emptive arrest of environmental campaigners.

Last night activists who specialise in direct action admitted that they might have been penetrated by police agents after years of running rings around law enforcement with bold publicity stunts and meticulously planned operations of their own.

"This is pretty much the first time that the police have been able to pre-empt a mass demonstration and it does raise the prospect that they have used spies," said one veteran activist. "As the anti-coal movement gathers momentum the police reaction seems to be getting stronger and more aggressive. The same thing happened with the anti-road movement in the 1990s."

Nottinghamshire Police have released few details about exactly what took place in the early hours of Monday morning other than to say that they arrested more than 100 people who were allegedly planning some form of direct action on the nearby Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station.

A spokesman for the force said "specialist equipment" had been found in the school and that 114 people had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.

It is thought the demonstration was being organised by activists linked to the Climate Camp group, which organised the attempted blockade of Kingsnorth power station in Kent, where large groups of environmental activists were able to defy heavy security to stage publicity demonstrations against some of Britain's most polluting industries. Over the past 12 months direct action groups have stepped up their campaigns against the coal industry. In June last year, 29 protesters stopped a coal train from entering Drax power station in Yorkshire while last year's Climate Camp was held at Kingsnorth power station to highlight opposition to any increased use of fossil fuels.

Sources inside the environmentalist movement have told The Independent that Ratcliffe-on-Soar was being targeted because it is owned by Eon, the same energy company that is hoping to build a second generation coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth.

One activist, who asked not to be named, said: "This is all part of a wider movement against coal and Eon specifically. This protest may have been busted but there will be many more."

For many of the residents of Sneinton, the sheer number of police officers involved made many of them suspect that there was an anti-terrorism operation in their neighbourhood.

Mark Hill, 44, was walking back from town to his home near the school when he noticed a convoy of police cars and vans rush by.

"There were no sirens or anything," he said. "The first thing I thought was that it must be terrorism. I couldn't think of anything else that would need so many police. They brought people out from the school and put them into vans. I could hear them singing as they were led away but I don't know what they were saying."

Susan Lawson, 56, who lives opposite the school, said she had seen lots of people going in and out of the school over the weekend before the police arrived.

"Last night I heard car doors banging and I looked out and there were all the police – I have never seen so many police," she said. "I would say about 20 vans, plus cars. They had dogs with them as well. The vans kept coming back to pick up more of them."

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station has been targeted by protesters before. In April 2007 the East Side Climate Action group managed to slip through the security cordon allowing activists to lock themselves to essential coal machinery and conveyor belts for five hours.

Leading article: Mass arrests have no place in a democratic country

The police must use their pre-emptive powers with extreme care

April 14, 2009

There are times, and they seem to be growing more frequent, when the civil liberties we still associate with life in Britain suddenly start to look dangerously fragile. Yesterday was one such occasion. We woke up to the news that 114 people had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage. This deserves to be spelled out. More than 100 people were arrested in the Sneinton Dale area of Nottingham not for committing an offence, but for allegedly planning to do so. In other words, they were arrested pre-emptively.

Now pre-emptive arrests may sometimes be justified: for instance, if there is evidence that an act of terrorism or other major life-threatening crime is nearing execution. But the evidence has to be persuasive, and it is often hard to convince a jury that a conspiracy to commit a crime existed, as acquittals under such circumstances show. People tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that someone can be arrested before a crime has been committed – and rightly so. It smacks of totalitarian regimes and the thought police.

The full facts of the Nottingham case have not been easy to assemble. But what is not disputed is that a large number of officers swooped on school premises where a meeting was in progress after midnight. A police spokesman said they found "specialist equipment" at the site and believed there was a serious threat to the coal-fired power station at Radcliffe-on-Soar.

An early assumption was that the school was the rendezvous point for a protest planned by climate change activists. The police described the operation as "intelligence-led", fuelling suspicions that the group might have been infiltrated. A city councillor said that if police had information that there was some kind of danger to the East Midlands power supply, then they needed to take action.

Yet however the raid came about, it should prompt questions. There is in this country, as in most democratic states, a right – express or implied – to free assembly. The mass arrest of more than 100 people gathered in the same place comes perilously close to infringing on that freedom.

There is also, and always must be, freedom to protest. The police made their arrests, citing conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage. The councillor hazarded that the planned action might have endangered the power supply across the region. The reference to equipment doubtless had a purpose, too.

But, if we have learned anything in recent months and years, it is that early accounts by police spokesmen to justify particular actions are not always to be relied upon. We saw this only 10 days ago after the death of Ian Tomlinson during the 1 April protests in the City of London. The police account of what happened in Nottingham in the early hours of Monday morning needs to be treated with similar rigour. Simply planning, or engaging in, a protest is not, and should never be, a reason for arrest.

The policing of climate change protests has often left a bitter taste. A Liberal Democrat report on the policing of last year's climate camp, at Kingsnorth power station in Kent, condemned the vast police operation for tactics designed to intimidate and provoke. At power stations, as at airports, conflicting rights and interests converge: the commercial rights of the owners and operators, the rights of the paying customer, and the right of protesters to make their case. If our civil liberties are to be preserved, the right to protest is as important as the other two.