A failure of justice, and draconian Tory law, put Gaie Delap in prison. A failure of government is keeping her there<\/p>\n
Gaie Delap will turn 78 on Friday, in Eastwood Park prison, Gloucestershire. Sentenced to 20 months<\/a> last August for climbing a gantry over the M25 for Just Stop Oil, she was released<\/a> in November to serve the rest of her sentence on a home detention curfew. But the electronic tag that she was required to wear couldn\u2019t go round her ankle because she has deep-vein thrombosis and it might have risked causing her a stroke. It couldn\u2019t go round her wrist<\/a> because they couldn\u2019t find a tag small enough, which people keep saying is because she\u2019s frail. Delap hates being called frail. Her wrist is a perfectly reasonable size, 14-and-a-half centimetres. It\u2019s the wrist-tag design that\u2019s wanting. The topsy-turvy world where a government contractor, Serco, can fail and fail again, while a citizen with a social purpose gets called back to prison five days before Christmas to atone for that failure, isn\u2019t even the most absurd thing about this story.<\/p>\n Delap was engaged in direct action to raise awareness about the climate emergency, and the day citizens stop doing that is the day that progressive politics might as well give up and go home. Whatever pretzel twists Labour ministers have to perform to sound as if they\u2019re on the side of the decent, honest commuter, while simultaneously signalling that they understand the scale of the climate crisis, they must surely remember this: the trade union movement, the peace movement, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the climate justice movement; every known movement of change has relied on non-violent action to disrupt the status quo.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A failure of justice, and draconian Tory law, put Gaie Delap in prison. A failure of government is keeping her there Gaie Delap will turn 78 on Friday, in Eastwood Park prison, Gloucestershire. Sentenced to 20 months last August for climbing a gantry over the M25 for Just Stop Oil, she was released in November … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}