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Gaie Delap will turn 78 on Friday, in Eastwood Park prison, Gloucestershire. Sentenced to 20 months last August for climbing a gantry over the M25 for Just Stop Oil, she was released in November to serve the rest of her sentence on a home detention curfew. But the electronic tag that she was required to wear couldn’t go round her ankle because she has deep-vein thrombosis and it might have risked causing her a stroke. It couldn’t go round her wrist because they couldn’t find a tag small enough, which people keep saying is because she’s frail. Delap hates being called frail. Her wrist is a perfectly reasonable size, 14-and-a-half centimetres. It’s the wrist-tag design that’s wanting. The topsy-turvy world where a government contractor, Serco, can fail and fail again, while a citizen with a social purpose gets called back to prison five days before Christmas to atone for that failure, isn’t even the most absurd thing about this story.
Delap was engaged in direct action to raise awareness about the climate emergency, and the day citizens stop doing that is the day that progressive politics might as well give up and go home. Whatever pretzel twists Labour ministers have to perform to sound as if they’re on the side of the decent, honest commuter, while simultaneously signalling that they understand the scale of the climate crisis, they must surely remember this: the trade union movement, the peace movement, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the climate justice movement; every known movement of change has relied on non-violent action to disrupt the status quo.
Delap has been an activist years in the making. In the 1990s, as a Quaker, she was involved in the international observer movements against Israeli settler violence in Palestine. In the 1980s, as a peacenik, she didn’t live at Greenham but she went there. Without people who care about causes, prepared to put themselves in the cross hairs, leftwing politics wouldn’t exist. So even if the secretary of state for justice, Shabana Mahmood, is stuck with the hangover of Conservative policy on public protest, even if it has Suella Braverman’s pugnacity written all over it, she should at least have some respect and exercise the discretion which is her right to say that this is ridiculous. There wouldn’t be a Labour party if it weren’t for people like Gaie Delap.
That Tory hangover is having a chilling impact on the climate movement, as 2024 saw record sentences for activists. In July, five protesters, including Roger Hallam, who co-founded Extinction Rebellion, were found guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and given terms of four and five years. Delap walked into court in August last year thinking she would be found guilty but, having no previous convictions, expecting community service. In her final statement, she said she had done her bit but didn’t intend to do anything similar again. When the judge handed down a custodial sentence, he said he didn’t believe her. There is, again, a topsy-turvy standard here – it’s baked into the theatre of justice to consider both character and remorse. In Delap’s case, the judge effectively used her good character against her, to determine that she was more likely to obey her conscience than the law.
Her brother, Mick Delap, finds this ridiculous on a practical level: anyone in their 70s, he told me, knows you might hop on a gantry at 75 but wouldn’t three years later. It’s a sound point, but not the main point. Justice demands that you weigh the risk of traffic disruption against the loss to the community of someone who also runs community art workshops for local kids; acknowledge the category difference between non-violence and riot; and balance the inconvenience of the rule-breaker against the numb state of a completely supine population. If you can’t exercise that kind of subtlety, you might as well be replaced by AI.
Retirees undertake arrestable actions in the climate movement because they know the younger generation has more to lose. And maybe that makes them fair game, these people who are asking to be arrested, or maybe that should force a reckoning. They’re not hotheads, they’re not hooligans, they’re not on a bandwagon. The science tells you they have a point; the law doesn’t demand that you ignore it.
The funny thing is, while Delap has been in prison, she has met numerous other victims of an electronic tag system that is positively Kafkaesque. For example, the prisoners who were let out of jail too late to get the bus, so didn’t get home in time for their curfew requirements and got hauled immediately back in. If it was a failure of imagination, of recognition and of justice that put Delap in prison, it’s a failure of systems and bureaucracy that have kept her there. Serco is not up to this job, as evidenced by its multiple failures and fines, yet the CEO’s salary in no way reflects. It remains in the power of the Ministry of Justice to find a solution. “That’s what we’re hoping for,” said Mick. “Come on, it’s her birthday on Friday.”
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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