I fought the law

The last cover of the Sonny Curtis 50's classic by the Dead Kennedys saw the lyrics changed to 'I fought the law and I won', in recognition of 70's San Francisco Mayor-Murderer Dan White's successfully altering his charge from murder to man-slaughter. In view of the recent Kingsnorth victory, which saw protestors cleared of criminal damage after painting Gordon Brown's name on a chimney and costing the plant £35000, perhaps someone should do another re-hash in honor of the 6 lucky Greenpeace activists. (A good car game by the way is to actually try to sing the song replacing 'I' with 'Greenpeace'. The excessive emphasis on 'peace' makes it sound like piss)

I thought of Kingsnorth whilst reading through the governments 'Learning together to be safe' initiative - in its own words 'a toolkit to help schools contribute to the prevention of violent extremism'. Now, I'm sure the reasons that young people turn to violent political solutions are complex and varied, but I'm fairly sure it's not for lack of government sanctioned, bloodless and potentially bitterly ironic 'happy lessons'. Another aspect that may rile the casual reader is the mindless and repetitive use of words like 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'community' without any attempt to engage with what they actually mean, thus rending them totally impotent.

The phrase that particularly caught my eye though asserted that one of the aims of the teaching guidelines was to ensure that children were taught that 'violent solutions were criminal'. Not immoral, not emotionally backward, not simply 'bad' but 'criminal'. The implication being that criminal actions can be equated with actions being wrong in themselves. Fair enough coming from a government document you might think - a governments purpose must surely be to convince the young populace that its laws are the embodiment of right.

Except the Kingsnorth case has surely proven that this is not true.

Obviously the jury did not acquit the activists on the basis that they were right to break the law - it was found that technically they were acting within the law, that they had a 'lawful excuse' on the basis that they were attempting to prevent the greater criminal damage that a coal-fired power station would eventually cause to property, vicariously through global warming.

So why has no court case been launched against Kingsnorth? Because they, rightly or wrongly, have the law on their side. The jury in this instance asserted that, while the activists were breaking the law - and they were - they were acting morally and therefore did not deserve to be punished. The Jury stood up and questioned the morally impervious nature of the law, or rather the morally impervious nature of our duty to obey the law.

In terms of education, these progressive decisions should surely should be taken into account. Teachers should be issuing children with reasons rather than directives (the same goes for governments and citizens, respectively). And maybe a broad moral education and an amount of trust is preferable to hurling massive words such as 'criminal' and 'freedom' at small children and their educators with an an abandon that undermines the multi-faceted and changing nature of these concepts.







http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies-breaking-the-law-925561.html.