More than 1,100 people have been arrested since the start of Extinction Rebellion’s protests this week in London, including 50 who were detained at City airport on Thursday.
Those arrested at the airport included James Brown, a partially-sighted former Paralympian who climbed on top of a British Airways aircraft, while another man, who boarded a flight to Dublin and stood up to speak about the effects of the climate crisis, was held for failing to comply with the orders of a captain. On Thursday night the Metropolitan police said there had been 1,112 arrests in connection with the protests across London.
While the bulk of activists failed to penetrate security and get inside airport terminals, as they had hoped, protests were staged at the airport’s Docklands Light Railway station, outside its main entrance and on roads leading to the site.
Protesters at the exit of the DLR station sat down and superglued themselves to the floor, chanting “fly today, gone tomorrow”, as they were surrounded by police. At about the same time, a second group of protesters who had travelled to the airport by coach staged protests outside the main entrance.
Responding to the arrest figures, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said: it was “an astonishing number”. They added: “But also it’s really worrying that it takes this to get the media to notice and pay attention to this as a news story – people are having to put their bodies on the line for this.”
The police were asked to respond to footage on social media showing an officer instructing colleagues to “use pain and compliance” as they grappled with protesters on the ground outside of the airport.
The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Laurence Taylor, said officers would always try to use the least force possible but added: “If that level of resistance then increases to passive resistance – so refusing to be lifted – we would then use what we call pain and compliance, which is not what it might sound.
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“It’s using some compliance techniques just to allow us to get control so that we can lift somebody up,” said Taylor, who also revealed that police would now be carrying out a review of the general security situation at the airport.
Speaking outside the airport terminal, the Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook said: “I think the most important thing is that we are alerting the British people to the crisis that we’re in and the threat to all the forms of business-as-usual.”
Asked whether the remaining protesters should go home, she said: “I don’t know, I think we’ve made our point, but I’m not making that decision for other people.”
Elsewhere in London, Scotland Yard said officers had cleared all Extinction Rebellion sites as early evening approached, apart from a “fairly sizable” number of people in Trafalgar Square and a small number in St James’s Park.
Those activists cleared from the park planned to move their camp across the Thames to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. In Westminster, protesters said they felt police had become increasingly heavy-handed, and were policing the demonstrations much more aggressively than they had in April.
Commenting on the police move to clear protesters from St James’s Park, the Extinction Rebellion police liaison Paolo Enock said: “I’m deeply frustrated that while police at the chief superintendent level – who we are communicating with on the ground – are interested in compromise, in relation to moving our site at St James’s Park to ensure a safer space for protesters, twice today we’ve had offers ignored or rebuffed at the command team level.
“It is becoming clear that there is no desire from the higher levels to facilitate the right to protest. They have also consistently blocked the introduction of portaloos and waste disposal systems at Trafalgar Square.”
One protester at the airport, Val Saunders, 65, from Stroud in Gloucestershire, said: “We got off the coach today, we looked around, it’s like HG Wells. All this infrastructure, all these airports, they are just spreading out more and more. It’s just encouraging people to fly more. It’s going in the wrong direction, this government.
“I’m so angry. If we keep going with expansions, there is no future. [The protest is] a way of telling people: yeah, this is the right thing to do, this is the way to go, we need more and more. No, we need less, we need to stock-take what we have. We need to reassess. We need to use some of the money, those billions that go into expansions, put that into alternative energy.”
Police attempted to clear journalists from the scene before leading and carrying people away one by one.
One officer said authorities wanted to create a “sterile area”. He said he had the power to order journalists to leave because the area was private property covered by bylaws governing access.
One man appeared in pain as he was moved by officers towards a staircase. Among those carried down the steps was Frank Benatt, 78, from Totnes in Devon. Minutes earlier, asked if he was afraid to be arrested, he said: “I think really this is minimal. I’m approaching 80 and I’m disposable and I’ve had a very good life. Unlike lots of young people, I haven’t got commitments.
Benatt added: “I’ve been campaigning about [the environment] for 30 years and nobody has taken a blind bit of notice. XR is a last-ditch hope to actually take some action.”
Also among those arrested at the City airport protest was 84-year-old Phil Kingston, a veteran of the movement who has been arrested many times, including in April for supergluing himself to a DLR train.
“[I’m here] for my grandchildren and all their generation,” he said. “I’m also here for the poorest people who have done the least to cause climate breakdown and are suffering the most and are predicted to suffer dreadfully in the coming year, as eventually we all will, unless we do the most enormous turnaround.”
A spokesperson for London City airport said it remained “fully open and operational”.
Police also revealed that the last person from the Extinction Rebellion protests in London in April had been charged. Nearly 900 charges had now been levelled and 250 people had been convicted at court.
“We will go through the same process with the people who have been arrested on this occasion,” said Taylor.
“It definitely places a burden on the criminal justice system but the system is agile and is able to cope with the volumes that we have seen in April and I think the figures probably speak for themselves.”