Love, Anger & Betrayal by Jonathon Porritt
- Maggie Hall
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
Book review by Maggie Hall
Maggie reflects on Jonathon Porritt’s passionate new book about the young activists behind Britain’s climate protest movement – the same generation that threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Porritt’s interviews reveal the love, fear and moral conviction driving their actions, and his fierce criticism of the harsh new laws that criminalise peaceful protest. Maggie finds the book both moving and unsettling, challenging readers to rethink their own views on civil disobedience and intergenerational justice.
As a life-long admirer of the works of Vincent van Gogh, I was dismayed when, in 2022, I heard that his famous Sunflowers painting had been splashed with tomato soup by Just Stop Oil activists at its home in London’s National Gallery. It was not until I read Love, Anger & Betrayal by Jonathon Porritt, however, that I learnt that the painting was, in fact, protected by a glass screen and had come to no harm, although its frame needed a bit of a clean-up. I also learnt the names of the two young women who did the soup-throwing: Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer. In 2024, they each received a sentence of twenty months imprisonment. Somewhat harsh, I thought, for making a bit of a mess on a picture frame and a piece of glass.
Right at the beginning of the first chapter of Love, Anger and Betrayal, Jonathon Porritt makes no bones about the fact that he is ‘not remotely objective’ in his approach. Porritt is a well-known climate campaigner, formerly Co-Chair of the Green Party and Director of Friends of the Earth. He has also been active in many other NGOs and campaigning organisations. He refers to the twenty-six young climate crisis activists that he interviewed for the book as his co-authors, and indeed much of the book is taken up with extracts from the interviews and their own ‘Personal Profiles’. He is vociferous in his support of their activism and admits to struggling with his ‘anger management’, particularly when it comes to what he sees as the unjust treatment that these young people received from the law.
He is not the only person to criticise the UK’s draconian new laws placing harsh limitations on the right to protest. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022) granted sweeping new powers to the police and introduced tougher penalties for protesters, as well as new restrictions affecting Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities. The legislation was rushed through Parliament despite a petition of nearly one million signatures and repeated attempts by the House of Lords to remove its most repressive measures.
The Public Order Act (2023) updated the Public Order Act (1986) to include a definition of ‘national infrastructure’ designed specifically to be applied to some Just Stop Oil actions. Any protester who chooses to ‘lock on’ to an object or another person, whether with an adhesive or handcuffs, now faces up to four and a half years imprisonment. As Porritt points out, this is more than twice as long as the maximum sentence for racially aggravated assault in the UK. He also points out that at the same time certain judges have curtailed the rights of defendants in courts, barring them from making ‘certain defences in the law’. This means denying defendants the opportunity to explain the motivations for their actions, sometimes preventing any mention of the climate crisis at all, and not allowing expert witnesses to speak on their behalf. One judge has even banned the use of the words ‘climate change’ or ‘fuel poverty’ in his courtroom.
Juries, however, are less enthusiastic about applying these harsh punishments to people who participate in peaceful protest. Jurors have been failing repeatedly to return guilty verdicts, even when the defendants have admitted to their actions, and in defiance of judges’ instructions to disregard their motivations.
A notable critic of these new laws is Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention, a 1998 UN treaty safeguarding the public’s right to information, participation and justice on environmental issues. In a report published after his UK visit, Forst criticised the new laws, writing:
‘Prior to these legislative developments, it had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK. I am therefore seriously concerned by these regressive new laws.’
In his report, Forst also quoted journalist George Monbiot, who wrote in The Guardian:
‘Why do the mass killers of the fossil fuel industry walk free while the heroes trying to stop them are imprisoned? … Why, when we know so much, do we permit a handful of billionaires to project us towards predictable catastrophe? Such questions invite trouble. Those who raise them are either sidelined or, if they cannot be ignored, relentlessly attacked. It is so much easier to lock up the people impeding our frenetic dance towards oblivion and then pretend the problem has gone away.’
The young people interviewed are indeed highly motivated. They are motivated by their anxiety about the climate crisis, by their love of nature and deep concern about the environment. This comes over very strongly in the interview extracts and the personal profiles written in their own words. Something that really struck me was how intelligent and well-educated they all were. Nearly all of them were either students or graduates, often from Oxford or Cambridge, and several were working towards, or already had a Master’s degree or a PhD, usually in a climate or environmental discipline. A few had dropped out of university in order to concentrate full time on their activism. Some of the interviews were conducted from prison. It's also notable that they are all white and middle class, something of which the young people themselves are acutely aware. Twenty-three-year-old Phoebe Plummer says:
‘I recognise that I’ve been able to take this path coming from a very privileged place, being white, middle class, having a huge amount of love and support around me, and not having any dependants. And I know that’s not the case for huge numbers of people who have to prioritise other goals and other people.’
There were many passages from these young activists’ contributions which I found very impressive and often very moving. I can only include a few brief extracts here. Twenty-one-year-old Master’s student Ollie Sworder writes about his motivation:
‘I have always been driven by being well-informed on the science of climate and nature, by a sense of both grief at the loss of nature and by anger at the destruction of it by corporations and our governments. I have been taught by the top academics in the world at Oxford and have had lecturers on the verge of tears describing the complete breakdown of the natural world and modern society. I am therefore driven to do everything I can to prevent this destruction.’
Twenty-six-year-old Jacob Pines, an energy specialist working for a renewable energy supplier, answers the question ‘what lies ahead?’:
‘I would hope that we as a nation, and as an international community, do everything we can to bring about climate justice, with all of the social aspects that come with it. I want to ensure that no one is left behind as we ascend from simply being a species that exploits the world we live in to one that acts as its custodian. I don’t believe that I’ll live to see an egalitarian utopia that could rise from the ruins of capitalism, but I hope to act as a stepping stone towards it. Failing that, given how dire things already are and are likely to become, I will endeavour to ensure that there is a semblance of global order so that we can meet head on the challenges that will inevitably arise.’
Regarding the title of his book, Jonathon Porritt explains that love is what the activists feel for their planet and for nature, the anger is not that of the activists, who express remarkably little anger, but his own anger, not only at the lack of urgent action being taken by politicians with regard to the climate crisis, but with what he sees as intergenerational injustice. The betrayal is that of the system, particularly the politically-manipulated legal system, towards those who feel desperate enough about what the future holds to take non-violent direct action.
One of the things that makes him so angry is the way these young people are often characterised by the media. He writes: ‘They do not see themselves as “brave” or as “beacons of hope”, let alone as some kind of “latter-day martyrs”. Nor do they see themselves as “eco-zealots” or “spoilt brats” or “dangerous extremists”. And they seriously dislike the way they are constantly traduced by the UK’s right-wing media.’
There is much more in this book than just the interviews. Porritt writes about the science, which is at best misunderstood and at worst blatantly ignored by the politicians. He also writes about the deep ‘anticipatory grief’ that young people feel about the inevitable tragedy that is to come in the absence of any urgent political action to prevent it. There is a whole chapter on ‘the emotional burden’ and another on ‘intergenerational justice’.
If, like me, you've ever said, ‘Well, I see their point, but I’m not sure that I approve of their actions’, I urge you to read this book. It offers a deeper understanding of the motivations behind those actions, and of the sacrifices and emotional burden carried by today’s young people because of the way in which governments are still failing to act on the unprecedented climate emergency that is already with us – now.
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