Report from Land and Marine demo and demo announcement

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!