 Welcome, we'll try to start more at some time, I'm delighted to introduce Dr. Shawth who talked to us about fracking which has been advising local groups against fighting against fracking as far as I understand, so it might be a one sided presentation, you don't know. Otherwise he's a leader in human rights and the co-director of the Human Rights Consortium at the School of Advanced Studies. London's latest book is The Defining Genocide, Central Colonialism, Social Death and Ecoside. It's a very cheery book. I'm sure which is also directly related to what he's going to talk to us about. Otherwise he's the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Rights in the Commonwealth. He's worked with a variety of NGOs, both environmental and human rights and he's published extensively in various Indigenous People's Rights, Environment, Human Rights, all the things that you mentioned. Welcome and thank you for coming. Thank you Philippe. Cheers, thanks. How long have I got? In definite. Okay, hopefully won't take that long. Right, okay, thanks for coming everyone. So what I'll talk about today is not genocide but it's basically one of the other fields of research I've been working on which is pretty much looking at the policing of environmental protests, in particular the anti-fracking protests. Some of it is actually covered in a book on genocide but looking at it more from Indigenous People's Perspectives. So it's come out of this initiative we set up a few years ago and we're just literally over the road so we're in the other part of Senate House so not the so-us, probably the other side. And this extreme energy initiative we set up to look at the social and environmental harms that have come out of extreme energy production. I'll explain what we mean by that in a few slides time but basically that's the sort of front-facing element of the research project. This particular work stemmed from a chance meeting with some academics who were looking at protest policing in Barton Moss, north of England. And my work on the social harm and this collective trauma as we've called it has been experienced by the people opposing fracking in Lancashire. And their study was called Keep Moving and that was the expression the police used to the protesters to stop them slow walking. So they wanted to speed up one of their protests. So that was something that protesters often hear the police saying. This report is freely available. It was written by these three academics who I now work with. And the idea was that we wanted to bring their interests and my interests together and produce a national study to see whether there was any national picture to the policing strategy. You can Google that. It's a fantastic report. They're really, really are excellent people. And I've studied more and more working with critical criminologists in this field. So the human right side of my work and their criminology sort of coming together to look at the status of the right to protest and how it's been affected by the policing strategies. So let's start then with looking at what happened post this rather infamous case of Ian Tomlinson's death in the G20 protests in London in 2009. So following that high profile unfortunate death, you had a shift in attitudes in terms of the rhetoric at least of the policing policy to what they wanted to call a new human rights compliant strategy. So what do we mean by human rights compliant strategy for police? Basically it was a policing strategy that saw to be based on dialogue, communication and the commitment to this. Facilitating peaceful protest. So it was a shift in ideology in a sense towards facilitating peaceful protest. To help the police service adapt, they said to the modern day demands of public order policing in a country that has a human rights act, of course. So recent research then has seen a substantive shift since 2009 to this human rights based model. And working with the criminologists they basically said, well, you're starting to see a lot of academic research that's saying, yes, this has happened. You have seen the shift in attitudes. And yet those that were looking at the anti-fragging movement would disagree. So there was this interest in what's underneath the rhetoric and whether in fact the police were adopting a more human rights based approach. Then there was this other strand of academic scholarship that looked at what they called the security element of policing in response to terrorist attacks and such. And there was this notion in the literature that there were certain suspect populations that required more attention for information gathering and more attention when it comes to things like protests. So the concern in the anti-fragging movement is there's been a shift from what we've seen in the evidence to the anti-fragging movement now being considered to be a so-called suspect population. So that's where the sort of research kicked off in a sense. So what I'd like to do now before we get into the data that came out of the research project is look at some of the issues surrounding fracking and why people are protesting about it. So I'll assume no prior knowledge on this. So we'll go back to the beginning. So in effect what you've had is countries like Australia and the US have got mature, what we call mature fracking industries. And there's been over the last 10 or so years more and more data coming out of those countries that's publicly available and people in countries like the UK that's got a new industry are reading it. They're becoming more aware of the related issues. And consequently what we've seen and a few slides time I'll show you how it shifted that anti-fragging movement now is considered to be one of the, oh it's not the biggest growing social movement in the UK. So we also have this other backdrop and the resource implications of what we would call extreme energy initiatives or techniques and climate change. So in other words more and more people are now aware that keep it in the ground has to be a little bit more than just words and that new exploration may not be the best thing to be doing at this point in time. And then you've got this other element where the police responses to the anti-fragging protests in particular have been seen to be deeply problematic. So you've got all of these, all this negativity in the mix. So that's sort of backdrop to it. So in my early work on this I worked with a couple of really interesting scientists and we came up with this idea that extreme energy or unconventional energy needs to be looked at as a process. And it's quite a simple process in the sense that it's fairly obvious that the rational thing for human beings to do is to just go for the easy stuff first. And historically that's in effect what we've seen with energy production. You go for the staff that's easy to extract, has a massive return in terms of the energy you put into it compared to the energy you get out. And then over time as that starts to run out, you go for the more difficult to extract, the resources. And that's in effect the process of extreme energy. But for social scientists one of the most important elements is this bit here. The process is driven by unsustainable energy consumption and it's important because extraction effort, that's the key, is strongly correlated with damage to both society and the environment. So higher than much energy it takes to get the stuff out, there's a strong correlation then with damage to both environment and society. So understood in this fashion you can see the history of extreme energy in gathering sea cold from British beaches for example as opposed to exploration underground. Natural oil sleeps, getting the easy stuff first. And now we're in a world where you have deep water drilling, you've got the sort of post the childhood extreme energy which is the tar sands in Alberta and if none of you have seen that or if you haven't had a chance to look at it, there's amazing footage where you can see the tar sands from up on high in Alberta and the images are quite astonishing, the sort of scale and the destruction to the environment that comes with that particular extreme energy process. And then you've got fracking. So one of the most important things to understand in this is this picture and how it changes. So the energy return on energy invested is one of the least well discussed elements of this process where we're looking at the more unconventional energy extraction techniques now. So the more you get about a red line in a growth driven capitalist economy, the less we get to use for society. So it's vital to understand this picture because we're in a sort of capitalist society whereby you're looking at minimum 3% growth is what countries want. Well basically if you're spending more of your energy your valuable energy getting the stuff out of the ground it means there's less for society to use. And you can see the bigger the red, the smaller the bloom. And in the end then you're in a position where society is simply using a hell of a lot less so it has a less energy to use because most of it is used in the extraction process itself. Now there's lots of discussion about the most accurate figures but in a ballpark sense to compare something like the tar sands with conventional oil extraction. So in conventional oil extraction one barrel of energy in would produce between something like 60 to 80 barrels of usable energy out. Now the tar sands by some measures is one to three or one to six. So it's grossly inefficient compared to conventional energy extraction. So in many respects extreme energy is being caused of scraping the bottom of the fossil fuel barrel. Things are running out. And you can even get the International Energy Agency saying this it's just not made public in a palatable fashion. But things are running out the easier to extract stuff is running out. Now whether you've got peak resources or not depends on your understanding of conventional or unconventional. I think most of the literature will now see we've reached peak conventional resources. We might not have reached peak conventional resources. But what that means for society is that we can't hit the same growth targets because what we dependant on is just less efficient. So that's a major major issue. A major element of the background of the story. Now this is a very simple picture but even this has become intensely political. Okay. What you tend to see is when industry puts these pictures up this line tends to be rather long. Okay. And then when anti-fraggers put it up it tends to be a bit shorter. Okay. Largely because what people tend to be worried about is what happens with the groundwater. Okay. So one of the dangers is that these fissures here can allow some of the pollutants that pass the fracking fluid to reach the groundwater. But actually the data suggests this is the most important bit. How the well integrity is maintained over time. So one of the most important things to worry about when earthquakes is not really what it does to houses and things on the surface is what it does to the well casing. So if this cracks then the groundwater is much more easily contaminated. So water is a huge issue. We just written a paper on the human right to water and looking at water as a resource. So in other words this very heavily intensive water industry means that local environments will have less water to use. So you're plowing water into this industry it means that in sort of water stress regions it really is a very silly thing to be doing. And in the UK when corduola just had its file given go ahead to go ahead and frack at the same time in the summer as a hose pipe bang in the same area. So what you're getting is a shift of the resource from society to industry. So water is an element of it too. So why are people worried about it in the UK? Well the sort of data that you get from the US often involves pictures which are quite emotional and quite obviously demonstrating environmental destruction. So they're alarming. You've got documentaries. People are watching these things, people are reading it, people are getting informed and consequently becoming concerned. So these are just some photos of our partners who are working with them, who work with us in the extreme energy initiative. They're called the Frack Tracker Alliance from the US. They're a big data gathering organization. And one of the things that fracking does in particular when it clusters together is produce a larger environmental footprint. Okay? There's plenty of images of Texas in particular where you can see frack pags clustered in this fashion. If they are to extract what they'd like to extract from the UK, it may be that you'd look at a picture similar to this if it were possible in an as densely populated island like the UK. So that's another big if. But people are worried about regulation and the fact that there's no current regulation which gives proximity distances, limits should I say between human habitation and well sites. Okay? In parts of the US they don't have that either. These are some photos from the US which is particularly alarmed people. So you've got a wastewater there literally within throwing distance of someone's house. Again these aren't that exceptional. Then you get the corporate social responsibility side of it where if it's near a school or something like that the company will say we'll build you a new playground in compensation for having a frack pad within the school grounds. It's had a big impact on farming. There's a number of scientific papers that have looked at the impact on cows in particular. The data is out there and people are looking at it. So in short, the horror stories that you see coming out of the US and Australia having an impact on people's attitudes in the UK. Another major, major issue which again gets people worried about the sort of state of the roads in the UK compared to some places like Australia and the US where there's a bit more space is on average if the infrastructure and the pipes aren't there, each frack will take about 4,000 truck journeys. For wastewater and to bring water in and that means grossly increased traffic and also then you get greater chances of spills and crashes and all the other stuff that comes with it. So in many ways what we've looked at and we've looked at the lived experience of people in the US and Australia around this, a lot of the time they're not really worried so much about what goes on underground because what goes on on the surface is so obviously impacting on their lives, especially things like road traffic. And near where I live in Surrey we've got a couple of current applications that have traffic or sort of what they call data, traffic management plans trying to cope with the fact that they are single track roads. So you'll have lorries like this trying to drive up the single track road. At the moment you've got two cars, can't even do it. So it's huge issues like that are getting people seriously concerned. So they haven't done an updated one but a frack off the network that helps coordinated lots of the anti-fracking activity produced this map in 2013 which demonstrated the current level of activity with anti-fracking groups and then within a year you have that. And then since then we're now looking at about 300 anti-fracking groups that are all very active. So I think it's fair to say it is the biggest social movement, growing social movement in the UK and they're very very well informed. And consequently then going back to this study in many respects that's why the protests around this particular area the Barton Moss campaign were so controversial because the police were having to deal with numbers they hadn't dealt with for some time and they were dealing with something which had a lot of public sympathy. So the year after the police decided to produce a national strategy to cope with this new issue of protests around anti-fracking. So what they wanted was a consistent approach to the policing of onshore oil and gas operations and this particular document provides an insight into the public order policing policy in the UK and the police's strategy and in particular what's really interesting from a criminology point of view and social scientists more generally is they outline what they consider to be a structure of protest. So they analysed the way in which people were organising the type of people they put into categories in order to demonstrate at what points they need a higher level of policing etc. So in the next slide we'll see their structure of protest and they were interested in the basic positioning they said of individuals within protest and the levels of actions attributable to each category. So they came up with categories and then they came up with ideas about what each category of protestor would engage with. So we'll see here the diagram so I'll let you digest that for a second. So what is it to be an activist? Basically you have a sense of activism equal in criminality. And this is in an official document it's basically meant to be guiding police's attitudes towards policing of onshore oil and gas. So this is the structural protest that the police have been told to deal with. And then you've got here, so the dotted line of criminality, so have a read of that. The definition of activist probably include all of my students. If I'm lucky. So from a human rights perspective that's deeply worrying for the police to be instructed in that sense. The next element we've got not what we'll come to in a minute is this notion that the suspect population I mentioned at the beginning is now being seen as, quote, domestic extremists. It's a sort of new category. Amazingly, this label was given by the chair of the Committee on Climate Change. So anti-fracking protestors by the chair of the Committee on Climate Change are now seen as domestic extremists. Which is quite astonishing but that person's obviously bought the argument which the industry likes to put forward that it's a bridge fuel to a cleaner utopia at some point. So yes, it's obviously not as clean as it could be but it'll help get us to a carbon neutral economy is sort of the argument they put forward. So he's obviously persuaded by that. So they're now seen by some as domestic extremists and plenty of the data we've seen has highlighted this sort of attitude amongst the police officers. Now I presume most of you have heard of the prevent strategy. The government's counter-terrorism strategy where people like yourself have to report on what recent tendencies we may see in our student cohort. The prevent strategy has led to qualified officers going around the country and trying to educate people about what we need to look for and what we need to be worried about. And this was leaked from a six-form college school in the UK. This is a quotation from a person that was giving the instruction at present, the person said, the greatest resource we have is devoted to preventing people from joining or supporting the so-called Islamic State group. It's affiliates and related groups. More locally, East Riding's main priority is a far-right extremism, animal rights, whatever he means by that, and antifrakin. So ISIS, animal rights and antifrakin are all lumped into the same category. I mean, what does he mean by animal rights? Not like animal rights protesters, just animal rights. It doesn't even make sense. But this is the sort of stuff that you're getting now, and it's absolutely incredible. So, and it's just one example. There'll be plenty more, I'm afraid. So the key national findings we've got so far. So we've looked at the data from the Barton Moss and my wonderful colleagues that produced that report said, look, we'll use this as a model and we'll see what other aspects are evident around the UK. So we're building up a Soviet national picture. We'll hopefully have a report out after Christmas. But most of the activities are still in the north of England. The south of England in the sort of Tory heartland still has some activities, just not on the same scale as the north of England. But basically, the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful, but they are very disruptive to the corporate activities. That is their point. By design, that's what they're looking to do. The nation's scale of the policing operations has, however, had the effect of undermining, not facilitating, which was their policy shift, apparently, but basically we've seen that it's undermining the right to peacefully protest. The communication strategies focus primarily on justifying the policing operation and questioning the legitimacy of the protest. The domestic extremism bit fits into an undermining of the legitimacy of the protest in many respects. And this has come out of a lot of the interviews. One of the other elements that's meant to be part of a human rights-based approach is this effective dialogue between the police and the protesters, but there's so much distrust between them that effective dialogue is just simply not happening. We've got plenty of people who are complaining about the surveillance. There's a lot of collusion between private security firms and the police to share surveillance information with the corporations. It's becoming a very, very murky area, unfortunately. These police liaison officers are meant to be those that facilitate the communication. But from the interviews, there's a deep distrust of them. Actually, they seem more as intelligence gatherers. The PLO's are a bit of a misnomer to me, said one respondent, a bit of a non-starter. They have preset limits as to where they can let the perceptions go. They have to keep up the company line. We're facilitating a peaceful protest, even when evidently they aren't. I'll read out some example quotations. So for a long period after we arrived, we had something like nearly three weeks where the only form of protest available to us was to stand by the side of the road, sometimes waving a placard, more often by being pinned up against the hedge with two, three, four, probably containment, either two or three, four policemen holding them against the hedge or an individual officer physically restraining that person. So it was very repressive. Another one said, I find myself thinking, well, okay, our lawful right to protest is not being facilitated, it's being suppressed. I have to think about protesting probably in a more radical fashion. I'm up to the stage where I would be happy to engage in some form of what could be termed direct action. I'd be quite happy and confident that I could go then before a judge, present to him a case that convinced him that I was left with no other choice. So people were feeling that they had to do something more radical. So perversely in many respects, it might have been encouraging more radical direct action. But perhaps one of the most worrying elements was not that they were just failing to facilitate protest, but actually a lot of their police behaviour was quite violent. There was violent behaviour and harassment reported. These were central features across all of the interview sites. Okay, these weren't rare occurrences, all sites reported violent police behaviour. Another quote, one day we could actually just peacefully and calmly be walking down the road and be allowed to walk down the road. At times we'd just be shoved, pushed, beaten, and we'd just never know what kind of day it was going to be. Partly because they didn't have a relationship with the officers, they would change, officers would come in from other locations, but basically there was an experience across every single site that we studied of violence. And then there was also this sort of sexualised violence too, and the Barton Moss report highlighted this, and we're also seeing this across other sites as well, where women were targeted by male police officers. I'll read out another quote. A lot of the time it is women on the front line, but not only that, we've noticed officers specifically target women for violence. They've inappropriately touched them, I've been inappropriately touched, every single woman on the front line has had some kind of inappropriate physical contact with an officer. Sometimes their hands will just go up way too high. Somebody had their breast growth for example, and this isn't just one, we've seen this across other sites, it's another deeply varying element of the policing. And then looking more broadly, why is this happening? What's the point? Well the overwhelming majority, 98% of arrests are from non-violent offences. That's a very important element to understand. And then this, two thirds of the cases were dropped, dismissed or people were found not guilty. Two thirds of arrested protesters whose cases have been concluded, had their cases dropped, dismissed or been found not guilty by the court. The ultimate outcome you'd have thought would be a very, very bad set of figures for the police. So is it about securing convictions or is it about something else? Now given the low conviction rates, arrests don't appear to be carried out with a view to securing convictions. If they were, they'd want a much higher level of evidence for example, and a much more likely chance of success. So what is it about? Now that we've basically come to the conclusion of the behaviour of the officers policing antifracking protests across the UK, currently has the effect of prioritising commercial interests over the right of local interests and supporters to exercise their right to protest. So the question we led with, is this the sole intention? Is this the main intention of the policing strategy? And it's an important question given the figures. Now, to contextualise this with some theoretical insights from other contexts, to try and explain the trajectory of the policing and the government's attitude towards the industry and towards people who don't like it and don't want it, we can draw now on a small body of literature, but some that have come up with very important insights. So in the Australian context, Kim DeRique who writes very interesting work has made this argument and I tend to concur. The extraordinary expansion, he said, of the unconventional gas industry, has led to questions about social power and the rights of individuals and local communities, the role of multinational corporations in politics and rural service provision. And this is very important. The close relationship between governments and powerful multinational corporations brings to the fore, he said, questions about political influence and human rights. At the beginning of our research, I thought, well, I'm seeing a lot of this already. Now, one of our wonderful environmental consultants put together this picture for us after years of meticulous research. Deeply, deeply concerned, this was during the time of the coalition government that started the austerity programme. Now, he's since done an update, which is just too big, too complicated to get on one slide, highlights even more worrying connections. Now, there's lots of worrying connections here that demonstrate business, corporate influence over government, but the most concerning, given the topic I'm talking about now, is that one at the top here? So, Lord Brown was the lead unelected, okay, non-executive director in the Cabinet office. Every single energy meeting would be invited directly into the Cabinet, the heart of government to advise on energy policy. While simultaneously being, and you can see that black line go into the blue square, simultaneously being the chairman of the UK's main fracking company. Now, I'd say if this was like a developing country, it'd be called what it is. Quite possibly. UK, we don't use the word corruption. But, you know, this is meant to be a democratic unbiased decision making process. The heart of government, okay, and this person's allowed to be in minimally a conflict of interest position. And it's not really controversial, and obviously it really should be. So there's a systemic issue here. And then you've got not just this close relationship, but a lack of empowerment in the community. In Lancashire in particular, where the local council was convinced by the evidence they had, and I gave evidence at Lancashire, along with a number of other people about the potential impacts of it, and ultimately the county council rejected the applications. But the government, through its own shift in policy to allow them to overrule such decisions, overruled it. And you now have local democracy being overruled by central government decision making. And then when you see those sort of political connections, the local populations are becoming more and more worried. So, okay, they're also worried about a lack of evidence-based policy. They're worried about misinformation, about the hard sell of the industry without an appreciation of the negative impacts. And they're very worried about the proximity and the manner in which the Department of Energy and Climate Change works with industry. So you could say, that's just business working with government. Or you could look at it as a bit more concerning. So, the Guardian, along with Greenpeace did a couple of freedom information requests, which really highlights that notion that Kim Duri came up with, the close relationship between government and industry. And they make for fascinating and somewhat extraordinary reading. One of the most important things that came out of this exposure of email exchanges was that what Noam Chomsky would call the manufacturing of consent was overtly in evidence. Managing national attitudes was something the government and the industry worked together on. So, could you imagine the Department of Energy and Climate Change having such cosy email exchanges with friends of the earth, or Greenpeace as this? I'll let you read that for a second. It's just worth appreciating the tone, the nature of the correspondence. So, these are all the big players in the unconventional energy field. Okay. And there are probably about 50 of these types of emails. And then the next one, which is really extraordinary. So, you're going to have the next day a report from Public Health England release which did not paint fracking in a particularly favourable light. So, the government and the industry quickly got together which lines to take. What's that propaganda? PR? Okay. So, basically agreeing this is what we'll say. The report is welcome and we consider its findings. We're confident there's robust and appropriate regulation in the UK, blah, blah, blah. And look at this. Also here the details of our press officer. So, the government's offering their own press officer to be used by the corporation. Okay. So, we're going to spin out this line. You know? That's more than just close relationships. Working together to manipulate the public perception. It's quite astonishing. So, it was fantastic and you can I think you can still find all of the emails on the Guardian's websites but it was from a freedom of information request. But anyway, it just highlights that, you know, those close relationships are there and it's no longer really a sort of open... corridor between industry and government. So, to bring you up to date a bit, the sort of recent developments we've seen which add another layer to this. I don't know if any of you have seen in the press about a month or so ago. We had the first three environmental protesters to be jailed since 1932. Okay. They were basically lorry surfing. Direct action techniques to slow down the lorries going into the sites so they stand on them to make it more difficult to go fast without causing them serious injury. And they were sentenced to 16 months in prison. 15 months and then a 12 month suspended sentence. But there was considerable uproar when it was discovered not only were these particularly harsh sentences for, you know, a simple environmental protest but also there was concern that the judge in charge of the case had family with connections in the oil and gas industry. So there was a concern that he had a conflict of interest. Ultimately, very quickly the decision was overturned on appeal and the Lord Chief Justice said, we have concluded that an immediate custodial sentence in the case of these defendants was a strong language, manifestly excessive. Okay, so in a sense, prevailed, but your deal these people went through for a peaceful protest was quite astonishing. And then we come to the other major, major issue, relatively new development, the use of injunctions. So traditionally injunctions tend to name people to stop them from doing something. And here you've got this new notion or relatively new notion of persons unknown to can apply to anybody and these were the restrictive requirements of this Ineos injunction that was granted. It's a long standing one now. If you trespass on Ineos' land unlawful interference with access. So basically a lot of the direct action is about slowing down access to the site, okay, to make it more costly for them to do the fracking. So slowing it down is now seen as unlawful interference, obstruction of the highway and they literally say it. It's the first time they've put that in writing. So they're naming forms of protest now. So these are now part of the injunction terrain in the UK. So they say slow walking. And previous to Barth and Moss the police were tolerant of slow walking. The idea is that everyone's entitled to walk on the road. We don't have to walk on a certain speed on road. You know, it's public highway. So that was the sort of logic to that form of protest but now it's becoming technically illegal in that sense. And it's seriously worrying people because, you know, if you breach the injunction you could be in contempt of court, etc. and a lot of people are fearing for the consequences and whether they could be in fact imprisoned for contempt of court. And what's particularly concerning here is on the freedom of information request it was divulged that in this particular instance it was the police themselves that advised the company to take out the injunctions. So quite the opposite to facilitating protest they are making sure they are manipulating a massage in the circumstances such that protest is less likely. So it completely goes counter to the rhetoric that they are putting forward since the Ian Tomlinson death. So just sort of sum up some of the conclusions we're making when we release this report. These are our sort of tentative fairly obvious conclusions. So obviously we say that these rights to peace for the assembly and freedom of speech which combined to form an effective right to protest need to genuinely be facilitated by the police. The police are conducting a review. We were meant to have done an interim report for them about four months ago but it keeps putting push back and push back and push back so I'm now slightly concerned that it may never happen. It was just a tick box exercise but we'll see. So we would like a fully independent external review of the policing and obviously we'll make all of our data available if such a review actually were to happen. And this needs to be a fully independent process with a genuine police complaints because the numbers involved are considerable. A lot of people are suffering from this. And then genuine transparency and a justification for some of the sources used. Why are they categorising people as activists, as criminals for example. And then desist from making those instructions to the corporations to encourage them to go for these injunctions. So they're fairly obvious right to protest recommendations. But if we don't get them, we'll end up with more of the same. And as Anthony Ladwarns, we may end up in a situation where we're going to have lots of localised fracking wars as he calls it. And what you're seeing there, that picture at the top is particularly interesting because the police are acting as a sort of arrow head to get the vehicles on to the sites. So it's facilitating the industry, basically government funded police force, rather than facilitating the process of protesting. So it's considerably different to the rhetoric that the police have put out from what we've seen so far. And that's a basic summary of where we are with a research project at the moment. I'm involved in another project which is looking at the social and environmental impacts across the UK. The government put some money into the research councils to fund this. Social scientists had the smallest pot as usual. But it'll be interesting to see after I think it's two and a half years now of what the other successful bids come up with. But the policing element we will argue is a major social impact because people are feeling they can't protest and when they do protest they get this sort of treatment. Okay, I'll finish there. Any questions? Given the like the fact that the government is so driven to this happening and it's publicly like saying like this is a good thing and this regarding all arguments science based or whatever could you find or did you look at like what happened before or above the police department because it all started with the guidelines, right? So do you know if there was like somebody at Central Government that's the big question. Is it possible to access that information? No. I don't think so and you're never likely to get people at that level to talk off the record. So you can just assume but it may be a false assumption. It's hard to know how exactly it works. In my other fields I've occasionally been lucky enough to have an off the record discussion with a state representative or something. In this field the police can't talk and the politicians won't talk either. To the moment I can't answer their questions just guess. Because I'm not from the UK and I don't understand completely how the legal system works I'm from a civil law jurisdiction where every institution has a law that dictates what they can and what they can't do and how to exercise those powers. So here the police can just take guidelines anything Well they have various structures within it right? So let's go back to those slides. You've got like policy makers within the service but what point they'll be doing the bidding of the government is a major issue. So you've got this you know things like this. So national strategies briefing papers high level policy discussions but who then says who feeds into that? These are the questions that are very hard to get concrete answers to right? I'm sure there are answers it's just a question of getting them it's not easy. I think our collaborator on it is an NGO called Netpol that sort of monitors police behaviour and they are our sort of go to for questions like this and they don't get it's a question to answers like that. It's very very hard but you can make it relatively easy to be equation with it. The government is driving it it's got this sort of attitude and then when you look at police behaviour you know and it's just so closely aligned I don't think it's an unreasonable supposition that there is a strong steer. Perhaps a steer is the best word. Hard to name. Talking to some of the police officers on the protest front lines you may occasionally get someone that has an appreciation of climate science by and large the attitudes are that they are hippies standing in the way of progress etc etc it's not an easy one to answer but you can just guess. Two quick questions for you the first one is do you think there would be scope for prosecution or suit on the basis of ultra virus behaviour for writing a local council's decision to reject an application to conduct fracking and the other question is in terms of you kind of explained obviously the negative social impact of fracking and the associated policing conduct etc I'd really like for you to comment on potentially the positive social impact that's generated by creating all these grassroots movements of people that are confronted with a lot of mechanisms that might usually be quite invisible in our system if that can give us any comfort. On the first point I think perhaps there's a number of us that sort of looked at what the next steps were legally because they feel some of the communities like the Lancer one feel that they've done everything they can do and exhausted but you've got more councils now as public authorities having to think about climate change commitments legal commitments to reducing carbon emissions at the same time as being told under the national planning framework to prioritise development so it's a clash right if that development itself is carbon intensive you know so I'm not sure but the best next legal step is actually it's a guy I work with Roger Cox from the Netherlands who's this argument that only the law can save us now revolution justified was the book and it was about using existing legal frameworks to do similar things to what you're suggesting and I think perhaps that contradiction in the UK had a legal commitment to reduce carbon emissions at the same time as promoting an industry that is carbon intensive may be a viable avenue I'm not sure I'm more of a socio legal scholar so I tend to go to my lawyerly friends for such questions but the next step is the big thing what is the next legal step because the community is feeling they've run out of legal options now it's a tough one what's your second question again the positive side of it is really summarised as there's a much greater environmental awareness now and there's a much greater desire to work together and to mobilise and to engage in publicly visible direct action and things like that and I've seen I mean where I live is literally like a Tory half land of the UK and you're getting a lot of people now who are much more radical in their overall attitudes and they're looking at even their own consumption patterns for example as being driven by sources like oil and gas etc and in short a greater awareness of the problems we're all faced with I'm sure sorry what's the next one is it the end yes I'm a number of points police surveillance detail given what we know about especially in this activity is there any kind of information that you've uncovered that suggests that they have a new equivalent of that that's actually in development that's what the committee even applied about in any which way and the second point would be that you mentioned this kind of prototype seemingly about how they explain the regulation and their kind of standards that they commit to when they're faced with what is clear evidence of the conflict it's kind of a piece to be the case that this is the kind of government state line across the board and we noticed this in so many cases like the Khashoggi affair whenever being interviewed on the world of one you would find the government ministers finding the amount of standards that are in play the highest standards in the world and all the rest of it really something otherwise is taken away so given that fact shouldn't you be focusing more really about the framework within which the media is outlaying this information because I feel you know if there's some kind of situation going on with national security then the secret services will be conforming like that how come the secret services don't get involved with this to allocate where the actual culpability lies I mean if the crime has been committed by a police officer it's really entitled to expect as members of the public but that crime should go through normal so to us in particular the media that they're perhaps not scrutinizing this in anything like the way it ought to be done well I'll start with your first question there are lots of people very very worried about surveillance a lot of fear about infiltration which is partly why it's quite effective it gets people to worry about their best friends in the movement etc distrust people and you've had you know lots of interview data where people have explained that they're an independent journalist some of them so you talk about the media too where they've gone they've watched a protest at a particularly controversial site they haven't been arrested they've gone home and then they had a visit okay from a relatively secret type of police unit the names have changed and varied but from memory I think it had an extremism element to the title but again it changes it's a fairly murky affair often connected to the met actually and the questions they've asked are like why were you there what were you doing and basically sort of a trawl for information but the question this person had in particular I'm thinking of is how on earth did they find my home address right and there was suggested you get a collusion between private security firms and the police to gather information and the police are given the job to follow it up so there's that going on there's what they call forward intelligence gathering units at the protests so no one's come up with any particularly concrete description but it's more of like a shadowy network type of feeling that people are getting they all feel they monitor they're all feeling very vulnerable about surveillance and monitoring and in some of the communities down south we've had police go to visit land owners in advance to gather intelligence about whether the landowners would make their land available to protesters so there's a big evidence gathering trawl that goes on before new sites are granted planning permission and stuff so the short answer is I'm not certain but there are strong suspicions of considerable levels of intelligence gathering and surveillance and how that data is used then is obviously problematic on the media side of it the media in the UK on this topic is pretty useless the independent media is actually reasonably good the best website for this is run by a single lady it's called Drill or Drop Ruth Hayhurst is an independent journalist and social media is the main avenue that people are getting around the apathy or the intentional disinterest of the mass media on this topic and having researched it for a good few years now when it is reported in the mass media it's miserably inaccurate it's not based on the huge amount of evidence they'll say things like oh it may cause earthquakes but it does cause earthquake and they'll have language which is always quite equivocal they won't tell it like it is a lot of the time and the data from the US and Australia is much much stronger they get relayed in the mainstream media but thankfully one of the plus sides of the social media side of it is that information is shared much more quickly and more effectively the downside is a lot of the early surveillance goes on on social media so one of the main issues with the injunctions was that the company were using Facebook to serve the injunctions which is nuts they were basically just posting the injunction up and saying look you guys everyone who's reading this is a person unknown and you know wherever the legal likelihood of that working it striked fear into people and it reduced quite quickly the levels of the sites that I was working on in Surrey and Sussex people were instantly worried and the only people who were less worried about it were those who've already so hardcore they've already got rid of all their assets and they have them there are people who try and take extreme measures but that's not a significant number so in effect it's another way of reducing the protests so the media's had a miserable record thus far unfortunately so there was one other question was it Renka? I was going to ask that obviously this has happened with other protests for other social injustices but the specific formalized structure have you come across a lot of structures of protest for other types of like social movements besides specifically the environment like these formal graphs and tables of how to treat protesters? I think this is pretty new in the UK we've had some major ones in the past in the 80s we had the mindless strike we've had the motorway protests and things like that and I think the police have sort of built on their experiences but it's not been as structured and you haven't had specific training I think it's partly going back to what I said about it being the biggest social movement I think it's seen now as sort of the front line of protest policing across the whole UK and with environmental awareness growing and with people gradually becoming more interested in actually thinking about what keep it in the ground really should mean not just words but actually at some point we have to stop digging up more fossil fuels and the thing with this is it's so grossly inefficient compared to conventional energy if we are to move to renewables we need to be using the more efficient energy rather than this stuff so the argument about being a bridge fuel for example a lot of the local communities that I'm talking to are all quite aware that that's just it's not a valid argument so consequently I think the increase in the local resistance has meant the police have had to respond in some fashion so I think this is more of a product of that I'm not saying it's entirely unique there's lots of similar tactics like the Kettling is still used for example people are seeing a lot of the tactics that you've seen with much more violent protest I suppose that's the big difference as well they're being treated as if they're violent protestors a lot of the time and actually the violence is coming more from the police side so the moral dimension is also massively challenging because people are talking about the ecological crisis and this industry's role in going in the wrong direction in effect so I think it's more of a challenge whereas things like the mining strike I think the rhetoric from both sides was a little bit more even in terms of the morality of it I think with this one it's a more difficult proposition I'm very needy I don't even think it's university but I've kind of got what an incredible question under which I've got two other questions the big question is why is this such a big deal the first my two questions underneath that are for the activists why is this an issue of all the other environmental issues that are happening with them and why is this something which has been sent to people so much to take action in the way that you've just mentioned the other part of why is it a big deal is what you're describing almost sounds like a huge conspiracy it's massive and your government is involved with that in relation to what you were saying earlier about the energy return on investment if fracking is so low or has such a poor return on investment why what's the big deal with fracking absolutely really good questions to start with that one I think in many respects the whole thing is not evidence based so if I go back to this picture here a lot of those working on this issue from where's my graph gone a lot of the people who are working with evidence are basically saying the evidence doesn't work on any level there are some that are considered to be like a Ponzi scheme so basically the explanation to that question is these lobbying voices are sufficiently loud to make us ignore the evidence including the energy return on energy invested it's not a logical step so it makes you I'm not saying conspiracy I think it's instrumentally rational in my earlier work when I worked on Indigenous peoples for example in the UN the UK would constantly argue against the notion that groups should have rights Indigenous people should have rights to land and they would make philosophical arguments about that rights for the individualistic idea so first of all you're going to accept the fact that governments give two hoots about philosophy you know that's not obviously the reason that's the argument they're using and ultimately someone off the record gave me an interview and they said that's quite simply BP so basically he was just saying that BP lobbyists were sufficiently loud in their ear compared to the Indigenous caucus so it doesn't necessarily have to be particularly rational it's about whose voice is the loudest in terms of policy in that sense so there's that interpretation I'm not saying I buy it 100% it may be a bit more complicated than that but in terms of the background energy arguments the other thing I've been doing is reading these international energy reports and one of the things that you'll see is the conventional reserves are dropping between 6 and 9% a year so peak of the efficient stuff was reached some time ago so in a growth driven capitalist economy that's 6 to 9% it's going to be made up just to reach 0 and where are you going to get it from so the other way of looking at it is the best stuff is now diminishing at such a rate that we have to replace it with something and they're not currently replacing it with renewables to the level that is needed by a growth driven economy so it has to come from unconventional stuff so on some economic level there is sense being made of this poor energy return on energy invested because there are no alternatives or the alternatives are dropping at such a rate so there's lots of elements to an interpretation that could give you an adequate answer but I think that one's quite a persuasive one because the economy does simply require it it requires it for the way in which we live so it's a massive change so even those who are aware of climate science and the need to keep it in the ground the other massive crisis to answer your other question about why this topic is that on some levels people see it as tantamount to sprinting in the wrong direction so they see it as so dangerous a lot of these people that work in the anti-fracking movement came from the climate camp movement so partly they're seeing it as pouring petrol on a fire because it's so grossly inefficient and the other thing that makes it so inefficient is what they call fugitive emissions as this expression we use in the US basically this means leaking pipes and when they leak they leak methane which is an exceptionally bad greenhouse gas so the whole thing can get accelerated so if you're looking at this because it also has quite a big surface footprint I mean the tar sands in particular with good reason it's the poster child of extreme energy because it's so surface intensive and it can be seen from space and if you see the photographs and some people call it Canada's Mordor it's an incredible devastated environment so there's that argument for why people are so worried about it but also you've got the other argument whereby you could look at it in terms of the global energy supply and if we are running out at the extent that people who run the post-carbon institute for example and the International Energy Agency reports suggest we are running out what's happening now is that people like in the UK are starting to see the necessary production coming home to Roost it's no longer over there it's now happening here out of so-called necessity so people are now seeing the environmental impact of an economy based on fossil fuel non-renewable fossil fuels coming home to Roost so some people take that argument too there's an element in there I could sort of understand it but I think it's a complex picture in short but by and large the most powerful bit is that people are now seeing this as the opposite of keeping it in the ground in short isn't one of the arguments of the they tend to say Russia less dependent even though most of our gas comes from Norway but there's lots of misinformation about it even if you just go on BP's website say what's the energy mix in the UK most of our gas comes from Norway but they like us to get worried about Russia controlling our gas etc but I think you don't think you can look at borders like that the point is the whole globe is in climate breakdown mode and you have to look in terms of the efficiency more rather than who's got it and who's controls it is looking at how efficient it is so if we have to move to you're talking about 20 odd years to go to complete decarbonisation on this current model we've got actually no chance of doing that if you add unconventionals in the mix too I mean to reach decarbonisation we have to be reducing our carbon emissions between 6-9% every year at the moment they creeping up it's just an incredible ask so if you add this into the mix as well it doesn't matter where it's coming from the point is it's replacing a more efficient method i.e. the existing reserves we do have with less efficient stuff you know and you're also carving up local environments arguably unnecessarily so those climate scientists who are very outspoken in their disagreement with this pathway say that the remaining reserves we're allowed to burn we should be using to make the renewables we need because you know solar powers don't make themselves they need oil and gas and everything else so the climate scientists are very strong in making those statements you know Kevin Anderson is probably one of the best to read on this topic and he makes that very strong argument you know we've got a very small amount of time in which to try and save us from runaway climate change and we should be using the most efficient stuff wherever it comes from and the government should be working together to ensure that that's what it's used for you know the other massive concern is at the moment a lot of the gas produced by fracking in the US isn't used for the energy supply the Food and Water Watch Europe have just discovered this in a recent report it's used to make plastic obviously as we all know we've probably got enough plastic so there's lots of elements underneath it and that goes back to that question the other reason people are so worried about it it's not often being used that's what we're told it would be used I'm not sure exactly about the US figures I mean it should be simply a question of a quick email to some of our collaborators the Frack Tracker Alliance in the US monitor these sorts of things I'm not 100% sure with the US I mean it has used a lot of its own fracking for energy as well as plastic I know that but it's not had a very big impact on prices the real argument we're told about the UK is it'll make gas prices lower based on the US and also in the UK it just goes to a general gas market anyway it's not like you produce gas and Lancashire and everyone's local homes powered by this it doesn't work but that's the imagery we're told and the environmental arguments the gas companies try and use as well is akin to that of growing an organic carrot it's local it's homegrown you know you get that all the time it's bound to be better environmentally because it's produced there and that's ignoring the energy return on energy invested argument intentionally ignoring it but there's lots of spin misinformation and trade there's no one easy thing so is there any I'm not I'm just I'm sorry is there any scope for how does corruption law work is there any scope for any kind of application of any kind of corruption law there was there's malfeasance in public office is one of the main ones that people have been trying through fairly publicity stunt oriented actions so this person produced this diagram and then went and did a bigger one and proved categorically that a number of youth government officials had lied in parliament and based on they said the connections with industry and they could prove it and document it but the only way they could get taken seriously was to go and try and conduct a citizens arrest of the prime minister time so myself and a number of others went and filmed this happening so the guy spent four hours trying to get arrested on Downing street and he had two pockets with memory sticks full of data and the idea was that he'd get arrested and they'd become evidence so the court would have to go through the process of analyzing the evidence so after four hours he's eventually arrested so he wanted to affect the citizens arrest we kept saying this to the security officers at the time and ultimately he was arrested for public nuisance I think and his data sticks were admitted as evidence and then within seven days all the charges had dropped so he tries to do it every year and he just can't get the evidence taken seriously by those authorities that he would like to do it but malfeasance in public office was what he was trying to get taken seriously by the court so I don't know much about that I haven't looked at them just looking at these connections personally but it was an attempt you can have a look at it on YouTube just have a look it's quite an interesting attempt and come like an opposition party bring this up in Parliament well I mean at the moment you've got the Labour party you've now come out fairly against tracking since Jeremy Corbyn came in they said we will not allow it so as far as their concern they're just going to use it as an election booster there's one thing past the MP Caroline Lucas can't she is there like a parliamentary motion or something if it's provable corruption there's no kind of I'm not sure they'll have been able to they can tentatively suggest it what they've proven is lies in Parliament right it's just slightly different but I mean you know it's fairly overt it's just permissible right it's accepted that this is the way it's done here it's just not public knowledge in the same way yeah you might know more about this me you could argue the use of the Human Rights Act in terms of responsibility you know breach of rights and freedoms through the Human Rights Act by public authorities because presumably you know you could kind of prove to an extent you know irresponsible behaviour in the same way that the judge who originally convicted whatever they were called a fracking tree or whatever they were like was obviously there was a conflict of interest it's always persuasive isn't it I think he was mindful of that I mean yeah they don't know where the next steps are going to be right so I mean all of these things are sort of on the table and some of our students have helped do like a legal brief and the groups are all considering but they're all knackered they spend an awful lot of money they have to crowd fund all the time to even get to the judicial review which they've done was £10,000 you know it's a lot and whilst there's a lot of positives that have come out of it there's also a sort of as I've described in the paper like a collective trauma we're seeing now a lot of people are really deeply traumatised by this process of constant resistance but yeah they're looking for the next legal idea actually so I mean I think the Human Rights Act whilst we still have it you know is a potential avenue but they always ask me and at the moment I'm sort of you know I'm struggling with so many elements of the research project I'd like to have like a team of really good lawyers who are interested so let me know because we need more lawyers interested in all of this actually what you'll get is a couple of the law firms that do a little bit like Lee Day for example that sometimes chip in with people that go and talk to the planning council planning committees and things like that but we really are some way behind where they were in the Netherlands with legal systems okay we're done one more how is that going to change the approaches because as I understand it the UK doesn't have its own Human Rights Act does it? it's dependent on the EU well it does have its own one which came from the EU but I think it has a relationship with it but I think it's still technically independent it's still ours yeah I mean that's going to be the big question so I know Labour's argument is that that's one of their six tests that they've got for approving Brexit it's just such a mess at the moment I think that the Human Rights Act side of it will be so far down their worry list that it will take a while to sort it out alongside environmental regulation that's the other big thing right is the environmental protections that we have at the EU level what's going to happen with those? things it's just a point of correction that your thing's convention on Human Rights but nothing's to do with the EU well I have a question for that I don't know so we have a Human Rights Act and that's nothing to do with either the EU or technically even with the the European Convention because it's just passed it into British law and you were signatory but that in was nothing to do with the EU people always assume that that's through the EU so European what do you there is a slight link however because the European Union has said that being party to European Convention on Human Rights they might decide not to basically do business with countries that didn't keep that legislation or didn't have that level of Human Rights legislation so technically that could be kind of a loophole if we decided to repeal the Act separately that could kind of because we want to keep some trade relations with Europe that could actually affect us interesting in terms of the human rights dimensions one of the things that we did with the Lancashire hearings was make a human rights based argument and I would say surprisingly but a lot of the councillors were interested in that I thought there was probably a little bit of skepticism but ultimately was one of the many arguments they put forward that was persuasive to them at that level that council level but ultimately when it came to the government appeal process it was a sort of relevancy unfortunately cheers thanks cheers next seminar is in two weeks again on time a change on small island states by Susie Allegri of the island rights initiative so very much related it seems that most of you as in the sign up she can go around we only use it to announce other sign-iners whoever is interested in the future sign-iners sign-up before you go I have a question I don't have time to pack up I just want to ask about that I'm actually very interested in the environment well I mean it was like 30 years ago and I'm thinking coming up going to a local and trying to even commit for both sign-iners