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A flying start to the new year for anti-aviation campaigners

trains not planes | 10.01.2009 01:31 | Climate Chaos | Ecology | Social Struggles | Cambridge

Campaigners against aviation expansion are having a hectic start to the new year. Half of those arrested for blockading Stansted airport last year have now been sentenced and all are under threat of being sued for damages. Meanwhile, airport operator BAA have managed to get the Plane Stupid website taken down and are preparing for the Climate Rush action on monday the 12th by threatening MPs who have said they will attend the events at Heathrow and Manchester airport. To cap it all, the government is set to announce the go-ahead for Heathrows runway three this coming week.

Twenty Two Plane Stupid members were sentenced at Harlow magistrates' court on Wednesday for their part in blockading the runway at Stanstead airport last month. Most were ordered to do between 50 and 90 hours of community service each after delaying 52,000 passengers.

A Plane Stupid spokesperson, Leo Murry said, "The sentences were surprisingly harsh but we went into it with our eyes open and we are ready to take the consequences."

District Judge John Perkins said, "Substantial loss was caused to the authorities that were carrying out lawful activities. I accept there is an honourable tradition of peaceful protest in this country and long may it continue, but that does not justify the sort of activity that you were involved in."

More than 50 Plane Stupid activists now face being sued for damages by Ryanair who have begun a £2.2 million compensation claim for loss of revenue after being forced to cancel 57 flights. They are also seeking almost £500,000 for "reputational damage". At the moment the claim is against Stansted operators BAA but the airline has refused to rule out suing individual protesters in the civil courts at a later date.

The place stupid website has been taken offline by the service providers after pressure from BAA.

trains not planes

Additions

Stansted action sentencing details

10.01.2009 13:02

On Wednesday January 7, twenty two of the forty nine arrested for last months blockade of Stansted appeared at Harlow Magistrates Court charged with aggravated trespass. All plead guilty to the charge.

Eighteen were ordered to complete community service orders of between 50 and 90 hours. Two must pay fines of £130 and £160 each; one - a 17-year-old who cannot be named - was given a three month referral order and an 18-year-old was given a three month conditional discharge.

All 22 were ordered to pay £60 compensation each towards the £3,000 damage caused.

It is expected the remainder of those arrested will be dealt with later this month.


courtwatch


Clear Defamation targeted directly at BAA ?

11.01.2009 19:36

reported elsewhere :

Stupid website shut down

Jan 11 2009 by James McCarthy, Wales On Sunday

THE website of eco-warriors Plane Stupid – founded by Joss Garman, from Llandrindod Wells – has been pulled from the net after the group was accused of libelling airport chiefs BAA.

Last month the protesters caused chaos when they staged a sit in yards from a runway at BAA-owned Stansted.

After that they got an e-mail from server provider 1&1.

It said: “There is clear defamation on the website targeted directly at BAA which is also in breach of clause 6.2.2 of our terms and conditions of service.”

A spokeswoman for Plane Stupid said: “We don’t know for sure who it is that has leant on them or asked them to shut it down, but we’ve an idea.”

BAA denied any involvement.

 http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/01/11/stupid-website-shut-down-91466-22665914/

Tim


Comments

Hide the following 6 comments

why not use some radical tech collective hosting

10.01.2009 09:44

like  http://www.aktivix.org  http://www.tachanka.org or  http://www.riseup.net ?

these people won't take you offline!

radical techie
mail e-mail: hosting @


We need to organise a mass blockade of Stanstead

10.01.2009 09:59

The way to deal with bullying tactics by BAA and the criminal justice system who have persecuted 50 Plane stupid activists is to organise a mass blockade of BAA with thousands and thousands of activists occupying the terminal building! We need to make the criminal justice system and BAA wish they had never taken on the Plane Stupid activists in the courts!

Climate change activist.


radical hosting isn't a total panacea

10.01.2009 19:37

Radical hosting is a good first step, but it is still vulnerable. The radical hosting companies have to rent their connections from some higher-up ISP, and companies like BAA can just put pressure on them. I don't know the details of why Plane Stupid's site was take offline, but this sort of thing (putting pressure on higher level ISPs) has happened many times with animal rights sites.

The furthest you can take it with conventional websites is to use hosting in places like the Far East where legal threats from Western companies are just binned. Even then, it has been know for UK police to visit providers in Hong Kong to get websites taken down.

One solution is to split your websites so the fluffy part is hosted in the usual way, and the contentious part is hosted on an anonymous network such as Tor or Freenet.

The disadvantages are that you can still get your fluffy site censored just for linking to other sites, and also that Tor and Freenet websites aren't visible without running special software.

@non


Evidence?

11.01.2009 10:08

People are asking for evidence that BAA caused the website to be taken down. Is there a copy of their letter or confirmation from the ISP? You know how reticent some people are to believe that political censorship takes place here in the UK.

Wotsit


If in doubt, bully people!

11.01.2009 16:52

Ho hum, the usual moronic bullying tactics from corporate interests, when they know that some activism has hit the nail on the head and made them look a bit stupid.

The best way to deal with this situation is to go VERY public (i.e. international press, the whole web) with the copy from the various correspondences they've sent you, just to make it plainly clear that these corporate idiots are not only running scared of the little man, but seem to think nothing of using the law as a baton to beat others with.

You see, there's nothing like a lot of bad publicity to make a bully back off, squirm a bit and see sense.

Who Cares what my name is?


This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here

14.01.2009 14:23

It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class. Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters with the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it's their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Agas use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.

So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn't one. I've lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Agas - which starts here - will divide rich greens down the middle.

But it is even more stupid to dismiss all environmentalism as a middle-class whim. It's the poor who live beside polluting factories, whose lives are wrecked by opencast mining, who can't afford to move away from motorways or flood zones. They are hit first and worst by climate change. Those who claim that all environmentalists are middle or upper class ignore the tens of millions of peasants and labourers who have mobilised on green issues in south Asia, Africa and Latin America. They indulge a transparent sophistry: some greens are aristocrats; all green issues are therefore the preserve of toffs.

Nowhere is this class-branding more evidently wrong than in the debate over flying. This week the government is expected to announce that a third runway will be built at Heathrow. MPs, airline bosses and rightwing newspapers have been trying to soften us up by insisting that this is happening for the benefit of the poor. Those trying to stop new runways are toffs preventing working-class people from having fun.

The group that has worked hardest to portray the issue this way is the weird cult that arose from the Revolutionary Communist party. This Trotskyist splinter, whose chief theorist is the sociology professor Frank Furedi, has spent the last 30 years moving ever further to the right. The magazine it founded in 1988, Living Marxism (later called LM), celebrated power and demanded total market freedom. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child pornography and the ownership of handguns. It denied that genocide had taken place in Rwanda, or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. It provided a platform for writers from the hard-right Institute for Economic Affairs and Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies, which was founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. He and the LM writer Tony Gilland wrote to the supermarket chains, offering - for £7,500 - to educate "consumers about complex scientific issues".

LM closed in 2000, and was replaced by the web magazine Spiked. Edited by Brendan O'Neill, it concentrates on denying the existence of social and environmental problems, and attacking protest movements with a hatred so intense and disproportionate that it must contain an element of self-disgust.

O'Neill, who still describes himself as a Marxist and blogs for the Guardian, calls environmentalism a "death cult" run by "fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans". The "anti-flying squad" is "illiberal, irrational, parochial, narrow-minded and backward". Plane Stupid's recent protest at Stansted, he says, was motivated by "unabashed, undiluted, unattractive class hatred".

If you understand and accept what climate science is saying, you need no further explanation for protests against airport expansion. But if, like Brendan and his fellow travellers, you refuse to accept that man-made climate change is real, you must show that the campaign to curb it is the result of an irrational impulse. The impulse they choose, because it's an easy stereotype and it suits their prolier-than-thou posturing, is the urge to preserve the wonders of the world for the upper classes. "Cheap flights," O'Neill claims, "has become code for lowlife scum, an issue through which you can attack the 'underclass', the working class and the nouveau riche with impunity."

The connection seems obvious, doesn't it? More cheap flights must be of greatest benefit to the poor. A campaign against airport expansion must therefore be an attack on working-class aspirations. It might be obvious, but it's wrong.

The Sustainable Development Commission collated the figures on passengers using airports in the United Kingdom between 1987 and 2004. During this period, total passenger numbers more than doubled and the price of flights collapsed. The number of people in the lowest two socio-economic categories (D and E) who flew rose, but their proportion fell, from 10% of passengers in 1987 to 8% in 2004. By 2004, there were over five times as many passengers in classes A and B than in classes D and E.

Today, the Civil Aviation Authority's surveys show, the average gross household income of leisure passengers using Heathrow is £59,000 (the national average is £34,660); the average individual income of the airport's business passengers (36% of its traffic) is £83,000. The wealthiest 18% of the population buy 54% of all tickets, the poorest 18% buy 5%.

O'Neill champions Ryanair, Britain's biggest low-cost carrier, as the hero of the working classes. So where would you expect this airline to place most of its advertising? I have the estimated figures for its spending on newspaper ads in 2007. They show that it placed nothing in the Sun, the News of the World, the Mirror, the Star or the Express, but 52% of its press spending went to the Daily Telegraph. Ryanair knows who its main customers are: second-home owners and people who take foreign holidays several times a year.

Who, in the age of the one-penny ticket, is being prevented from flying? It's not because they can't afford the flights that the poor fly less than the rich; it's because they can't afford the second homes in Tuscany, the skiing holidays at Klosters or the scuba diving in the Bahamas. British people already fly twice as much as citizens of the United States, and one fifth of the world's flights use the UK's airports. If people here don't travel, it's not because of a shortage of runways.

At the core of the campaign against a third Heathrow runway are the blue-collar workers and working-class mums of the village of Sipson, whose homes are due to be flattened so that the rich can fly more. If wealthy people don't like living under a flight path, they can move; the poor just have to lump it. Through climate breakdown, the richest people on earth trash the lives of the poorest.

Yes, this is a class war; and Brendan O'Neill and his fellow travellers have sided with the toffs. These Marxist proletarian firebrands are defending the class they profess to hate. Bosses of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your planes.

www.monbiot.com

GU