Restore the right to protest, says BYM
Recording clerk Paul Parker has written to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper calling for the right to protest to be restored
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is calling on the government to restore the right to protest and freedom of speech.
In a letter to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, Paul Parker, recording clerk of BYM, said people’s rights and civil liberties were being undermined by legislation such as the Public Order Act, and the government must work to restore them.
BYM also recently signed a joint letter to the attorney general, convened by Defend Our Juries, challenging the lengthy sentences given to the Just Stop Oil protesters called the ‘Whole Truth Five’.
The group includes Gaie Delap, a Quaker from Bristol, who has recently begun a jail sentence of twenty months for scaling an M25 gantry in November 2022. Her family have described the sentence as unreasonably harsh. Gaie’s brother, Mick, has requested that individual Quakers, and others, support her by writing to: her MP Carla Denyer; their own MP; and the attorney general, to highlight her case. Carla Denyer, Green MP for Bristol Central, who is a former member of Young Friends General Meeting, also wrote to the government calling the sentence disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources. In a letter to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, she called the imprisonment ‘an example of an ongoing and serious problem with disproportionate sentencing for climate activists’.
The letter also said: ‘As you will be aware, your government has rightly opted not to issue new [oil and gas] licences, meaning that Gaie and her fellow protesters have been jailed for advocating for a position aligning with Labour’s own plans.’
The letter added: ‘At a time when government departments are facing further cuts and the prison estate is so overcrowded that some offenders are being released early, imprisoning a peaceful climate protester such as Gaie represents an unnecessary drain on public funds and ill-judged use of limited prison capacity.’
An article on the Quakers in Britain website also highlighted Gaie Delap’s case. ‘Her family describes how the judge noted a series of mitigating circumstances but chose to ignore them completely in his sentencing,’ says the article. ‘These include that she is 77 years old with declining health, a regular carer for a single mother daughter with three children under 14 and a son with twins just one year old, and a regular carer for her 97-year-old mother-in-law.’
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