For Some UK Activists, If You're Going To Prison For Protesting, You May As Well Go To Prison For Sabotage
It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them. Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”
Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds. Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.
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The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims. He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years – reduced on Friday after an appeal – for organising road blocks on the M25. “If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure … by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.
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But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin. But it is in France that the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it. Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said: “France really is the one case in recent years … where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful – and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/08/a-new-phase-why-climate-activists-are-turning-to-sabotage-instead-of-protest