“Love, Anger & Betrayal”, my new book, launched at the end of July. Nearly 5 months on, 35 book-signing meetings later, the length and breadth of the country, I’m knocking off for a bit of a break.
“Love, Anger & Betrayal” emerged as an idea nearly 2 years ago. I supported Just Stop Oil from the start in April 2022, and enthusiastically watched it grow into a serious force to be reckoned with, staging attention-grabbing actions to get people talking about the climate crisis – many of them involving the 26 young activists who eventually came on board as co-authors of “Love, Anger & Betrayal”.
The Conservative Government hated Just Stop Oil with a vengeance, moving rapidly to bring in new laws – the Police, Crime and Courts Act in 2022 and the Public Order Act in 2023. JSO was very much in their sights with this new legislation, which meant that its style of civil disobedience just got harder and harder. Meanwhile, the UK’s right-wing media wound themselves up into ever greater spasms of rage.
So when Labour won a landslide in July last year, hopes were high that it would row back on such repressive legislation, and perhaps even reach out to the organisation that had persuaded the Party in opposition to adopt its policy of no new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.
That now sounds pathetically naïve. But I can guarantee that not a single climate or human rights campaigner predicted that the new Labour Government (first with Yvette Cooper and then Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary) would not just embrace that Tory legacy but double down on it. First, in encouraging both the police and the judiciary to make things even more repressive for climate campaigners, with Just Stop Oil reluctantly having to ‘hang up the high viz’ in April this year. But then, in an even more authoritarian way, in using the 2000 Terrorism Act to seek to eliminate another highly effective direct-action organisation (Palestine Action) by proscribing it as a terrorist organisation in July.
That’s been the backdrop to my entire book tour – which I’ve made a little film about! https://youtube.com/shorts/qxAh6egRRuc?feature=share.
Inevitably, all those meetings had a dual focus, not just on the climate crisis but on the extraordinary campaign by Defend our Juries to seek to get that ban lifted – in which I myself became increasingly involved, with three arrests in August, September and November. We’ll hear in January whether the appeal against its ban brought by Palestine Action has been successful.
Worse yet, the last five months have been shaped even more powerfully by the ongoing genocide in Gaza. By the still shocking complicity of the UK Government in that genocide. By the daily war crimes being carried out in the West Bank. And by the courage of the 24 Palestine Action campaigners held on remand since July 2024, eight of whom are even now on hunger strike.
The book tour resumes in February. Until then, if you want some brilliant end-of-year affirmation about why so many people continue to bear witness to the inconceivable suffering of the Palestinian people, knowing that they risk arrest and imprisonment, check out this wonderful film, ‘Grandma’s a Terrorist’!
15 December 2025
