The story of a GP imprisoned for climate activism

We all admire people with the courage to suffer and pay a heavy price for acting on their beliefs. They act when most of us don’t. I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who spoke up against Hitler when most Germans went along with the Nazi horrors. He was arrested and hanged. I think of Mahatma Gandhi in colonial India campaigning against poverty, expanding women's rights, ending untouchability, and working for and achieving swaraj, self-rule, through civil disobedience. He was imprisoned repeatedly and eventually assassinated. I think of the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who was sent to prison, force fed and died when she threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby.

These people come into my mind as I read the words of Patrick Hart, a GP who has been sent to prison for a year for damaging petrol pumps during a protest against the climate emergency.12 Hart’s powerful words can be read on the website of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (UKHACC), and he is responding to questions that I put to him as the chair of the Alliance. I’ve neither met nor spoken with him, and the interview was conducted via prison email. It took time because he could not send a spontaneous email. He could respond only to an email from me and only in 2400 characters at a time. Plus, the emails are vetted. I once wrote a series of articles on prison healthcare, and the rhetoric then was that people are sent to prison as punishment not for punishment. Deprivation of liberty is the punishment, but now there seems to be more, not least hunger.

Hart describes how he became increasingly concerned about the harm from climate change, and in 2018 he read the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and “finally realised that this was a civilisation ending, mass extinction inducing threat to all of us.” He made changes in his lifestyle, including becoming a vegan, wrote to his MP, and worked for a year on the Green Impact for Health Toolkit to try to reduce emissions in the workplace. During that year he realised that “far reaching system change was required for human civilisation to have a meaningful chance of survival. I realised that everything I had done up to that point was within a system which was fundamentally incapable of saving itself and us.”

More was needed, and Hart joined protests: “I had never protested before and I felt deeply uncomfortable doing it. I made myself do it because I felt even more uncomfortable sitting at home doing nothing.” Then he read the history of civil disobedience and was convinced of its value: “Given that something had to be done (and everything done so far had failed) it appeared to be the best option available.” He writes: “I’ve sat in the street, marched in the street, cracked windows, broken petrol pump screens, blocked oil tankers, climbed into oil terminals, run onto a sports pitch, glued and locked myself to things.”

In the interview Hart shares the evidence of what direct action by him and many others has achieved—for example, Parliament declaring a climate emergency “immediately following the blocking of junctions and bridges in London by Extinction Rebellion in 2019”; and Just Stop Oil drawing attention to and demanding an end to North Sea oil and gas licenses.

Hart knew that his actions were likely to lead to imprisonment and subsequent removal of his licence to practice. He accepts these punishments but plans to continue to take direct action. “At this point, we have essentially failed to tackle this problem and are now almost certainly committed to catastrophic runaway overheating. I have to face the fact that my life, and the lives of the people I love will become increasingly difficult and may well come to a premature end. As such I do not wish to spend my remaining life in prison. At the same, direct action has become for me an expression of care and a refusal to give in to the uncaring destructive world.”

What, I asked Hart, did he think health professionals and UKHACC should be doing in response to climate change? His answer: “I think everyone should take direct action. If we all took direct action we could sort this thing out very quickly…I think opposing civil disobedience is a luxury we can no longer afford and it is complacent of UKHACC to do so.” Hart sees a bleak future ahead: “Sadly we have now missed the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophe. A mass popular uprising might be enough to create the radical change needed to curb emissions, but I don't think this will happen. I plan on learning how to grow food to prepare for the famine which is likely to come about in the coming decades.”

I’m greatly impressed by the courage of Hart, and I urge you to read his whole interview. It’s full of passion and expressed in direct strong words. But I don’t agree with all that he writes. I fear that he may be right that humanity is going to find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to turn away from the route to disaster that we are rapidly following, but I don’t think that much would be gained by everybody resorting to civil disobedience—and, as Hart concedes, it isn’t going to happen. I’m more sceptical about the evidence of the effectiveness of civil disobedience: there are certainly historical examples—for example, the Indian experience—where it was important, although many other factors were at work in leading to Indian independence. Ironically the legal system and the change of government have probably been more important than Just Stop Oil in making it unlikely (but not certain) that there will be drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. Then even if direct action has been important, it may have become counterproductive. Rupert Read, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, has decided that it has and has formed Climate Majority: its theory of change is that once something like a fifth of the population becomes very concerned about climate change and expresses so to political leaders then serious change will follow.

As the “model and showgirl” Mandy Ride-Davies famously said, “He would say that, wouldn’t he,” but I think that it would be counterproductive for UKHACC to advocate and practice civil disobedience. I have agreed with friends from Extinction Rebellion that it doesn’t make sense for us all to do the same thing. Our “unique selling point” is that we are an alliance of respected organisations, most of them royal colleges, and we use that respect to try and persuade politicians and others to greater action. The suffragettes had three groups: those who resorted to violence; those who pursued non-violent direct action; and those who worked through democratic systems. All contributed to women being given the vote.

But perhaps Hart is right and I’m wrong. I urge you to read his interview and think what you are doing to counter the major threat from climate change.12