16/11/2023
"In Emergency: Break Glass"
In summer 2021, one early morning, nine women - Valerie, Susan, Tracy, Clare, Sam, Gully, Blyth, Miriam & Jess - converged on the HSBC headquarters in Canary Wharf, and, using brightly painted and slogan-covered hammers and chisels, provided to carefully crack some windows.
19 windows in total. The whole thing took about 2 minutes.
They than sat down on the floor next to the building, and sang songs and chanted chants.
About an hour later they were arrested and taken into police custody.
The reason they did was in to challenge and confront the fact that, between 2015 and 2020 - the five years following the Paris Climate Agreement wherein national governments had agreed to take action to limit catastrophic global heating to between 1.5 and 2 degrees - HSBC had invested over £80 BILLION in new fossil fuel extraction.
This investment alone represented a truly suicidal, genocidal path for humanity in terms of fossil-fuel driven climate breakdown, but also immediate and utter devastation for communities all around the world - from Germany to Mozambique to Bangladesh to Indonesia to the Amazon - as the ecocidal destruction of extractivism bulldozed houses and forests, poisoned land and water, and displaced 100,000s of people.
In the spirit of the Suffragettes, these nine women decided to use "the noble art of window smashing" to draw dramatic attention to the monstrousness of the practices HSBC was funding, fueling and profiting from, and to ramp up the pressure on them to change, though this utterly unignorable public shaming.
Which made sense, for no company is as guilty of "woke-washing" as HSBC - from claims about enabling houseless people to open bank accounts, to claims of helping disenfranchised youth to get into arts, to claims of supporting gay marriage - HSBC spend mega mega millions trying to convince us they are a positive progressive force in the world.
When in reality the exact exact exact opposite is true.
Some time after the action, all nine women were charged with Criminal Damage, to the tune of slightly over £500,000, as apparently these windows cost 30 grand a pop 😬🤑🤯
(This number seems big, to put it in context - HSBC's profits were 18 billion that year (18,000,000,000).
So the supposed value of the damage was 0.003% of HSBC's profits that year...)
The trial was delayed significantly by events surrounding the Colston Case - where anti-racists in Bristol had torn down the statue of enslaving monster Edward Colston during the global Black Lives Matter uprising of summer 2020.
While the Colston topplers had been acquitted by a jury of Criminal Damage, which thankfully still cannot be overturned by judicial diktat, the Crown Prosecution Service appealed to the High Court for a ruling on the legal defences that had been relied upon in the trial.
And the High Court eventually ruled that, from now on, defences based around protest rights, - Articles 10 & 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to free assembly and free expression, which the Colston topplers had used in their case - could *not* be used in cases of property damage.
So just under three weeks ago, fully two and half years after the action, the trial finally went ahead at Southwark Crown Court.
The judge allowed the defence to put evidence before the jury around the defences of Necessity, Protection of Property, and Assumed Consent, meaning that the women were able to explain to jury that they acted that day to protect life, to protect property, and with the sincere belief that if the owners of the property (HSBC shareholders and employees) truly understood the context and reasoning behind the action - the true horrifying enormity of planetary-scale biospherical breakdown, the endless devastation of extractivism, the specific role of HSBC's investments in driving all this, and the historical effectiveness of civil disobedience - then they would have consented to the action and the damage to the windows.
After evidence was all submitted, the judge ruled out the defences of Necessity and Protection of Property as legally invalid, as expected, but he left intact the defence of Consent, as hoped.
After nearly three weeks, in which time the prosecutor for the Crown had made every nasty effort to undermine and attack the defendants testimony at every turn - the jury were sent out to deliberate and make their verdict.
Hopes were not high - so much f**kery has been going on in the courts to manipulate outcomes so that those standing up for Life are consistently convicted, along with the government introducing dozens of new authoritarian anti-protest laws, and the oligarch-controlled media demonising protestors with everything they've got.
But barely two hours after they'd gone out, the jury had returned a verdict... unanimously.... NOT GUILTY!!! 😲
🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Utterly incredible!
The magnificent power of each woman's testimony - their fierce courage, their undeniable integrity, their intelligence, their deep love, and all unique in their stories of what brought them to take action that day - coupled with the incredible work of the defence legal team, had completely convinced the jury that they had committed no crime.
The 12 jurors had decided, unanimously, and without hesitation, to take their place on the right side of history, on the side of Life.
In these darkest of dark times, any glimmer of light, any small victory, any reinforcement of humanities goodness, is well worthy of celebration.
Throughout the trial, on the days between court, going to the multiple Palestine solidarity demonstrations, against Israel's genocide against Gaza, I kept thinking about something that Max Ajl, agrarian Marxist thinker, had once said
"Capitalism is not an abstract system.
Capitalism is Palestine.
Capitalism is Haiti."
Its not flippant to say everything is connected
It really is.
The ultimate reason for British and U.S. imperialist backing for racist settler-colonialsm in Palestine is that Israel represents the absolute linchpin of Western dominance in the region, from North Africa to Central Asia.
And what is this desire to dominate about?
Making sure that capitalist corporations like HSBC and those they fund and profit from can continue to ruthlessly, violently exploit people and planet.
Whether its oil fields in the Middle East or the Amazon, or coal mines in Bangladesh or Indonesia, the colonised, racialised peoples of the majority of the world, the so-called "Global South" bare the huge brunt of this genocidal onslaught.
And as we have seen the biggest ever demonstrations for Palestine the last few weeks, so too does this juries decision - of power enacted by 12 ordinary Londoners from a diverse mix of backgrounds - show that regular people, when they can see and hear and understand the truth, and cut through the propaganda and conditioning and insane systems of control, they side with Life.
People side with Life.
