Injunction stops power protest
Updated on 20 March 2007
Electricity giant Npower has obtained an injunction to stop protests and filming at the site of a proposed ash dump.
If you don't want to risk being jailed for up to five years, avert your eyes.
What began as a local environmental battle has now escalated into something a lot more serious. When the people of Radley village took on the electricity giant Npower because of its decision to destroy a local beauty spot, they little expected what would follow.
It is a cautionary tale of how large corporations are now able to suspend some basic freedoms we all thought we enjoyed.
Protection from Harassment
by Alex Thomson
Under the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 things which we claim to hold dear: freedom of peaceful protest, assembly, the press, have been disappeared at a stroke by high court judges who only ever hear one side of the argument with 'evidence' which would be contested in any other kind of court sitting.
Corporations adore it since it stops any kind of meaningful protest. And politicians too seem quite happy to let all this simply continue behind closed doors.
At Radley Lake there has - Thames Valley Police tell us - not been a single arrest for any violent offience whatsoever. And yet a campaign of harassment was built on those witness statements and the protest and the ability of the media to cover it were shut down at a stroke.
So there you have it. Freedoms which people in this land fought long and hard for over centuries, are dispensed with at a stroke by uncontested evidence in a court.
Make no mistake. It's coming to a protest near you, unless somebody, somewhere, somehow gets up and decides that the Protection from Harassment Act needs rethinking from top to bottom.
Read Alex Thomson's blog by clicking here.
