‘Protest gave us the right to Vote’ – Women’s Day suffragette stunt against anti-protest laws

Fossil Free London campaigners protested outside the National Gallery dressed as suffragettes today. The action took place ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, drawing attention to the tightening of anti-protest laws.

The group held placards drawing direct comparisons between the jail terms received by climate protesters, and those handed to militant suffragettes in the early twentieth century.

Suffragette protest still echoes today

Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, Just Stop Oil activists, received a combined 44 months in prison for throwing soup in the National Gallery. They caused minor damage to the frame of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting.

Their action recalled the famous National Gallery protest by militant suffragette Mary Richardson, arrested for slashing Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. A crime for which she got a considerably shorter sentence of six months in prison.

Successive governments have systematically reduced the right to protest in recent years, with a wave of draconian legislation.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, 2022 dramatically expanded police powers, including the ability to restrict protests for being too noisy; a vague measure that is at the discretion of officers.

It also shifted the burden of proof onto protesters themselves, making it an offence to breach a police condition, even if a demonstrator could not reasonably have known about it.

The Public Order Act followed this in 2023. It introduced sweeping new criminal offences including “lock on” protests and obstructing major transport works. And it brought in stop and search powers that require no reasonable grounds for suspicion.

These powers came in the same year as the Casey Review. The review described stop and search as a ‘racialised tool’ used by an ‘institutionally racist’ police force.

These same laws have been used to impose disproportionate sentences on non-violent activists. Several Just Stop Oil protesters received multi-year custodial sentences, the longest ever handed out in the UK for non-violent protest.

Robin Wells, Director of Fossil Free London, said:

In 1906 Suffragettes were called criminals, locked up for fighting for their right to vote. Now, they’re rightly celebrated. But their modern counterparts – the women leading the climate movement – face harsher penalties than 1906. Back when it was normal to see women as less than full human beings.

The government uses one hand to erect statues to historic rights advocates, and swipes away the rights those advocates used to achieve their success with the other.

They say we’re in a democracy. Then they make almost all effective protest methods illegal.

The government says they’re acting on climate. Then they approve third runways and subsidies, and hint at waving through carbon bomb oil projects like Rosebank.

We, women campaigners of today, mean to celebrate the Suffragettes by continuing in their fight. Heed our clarion call, the same as our sisters from the past: deeds not words.

Deeds on climate!

Defend people, protect our one home and Stop Rosebank!

Deeds on our right to protest!

Repeal the Public Order Act 2023!

Featured image via Andrea Domeniconi / Fossil Free London