The M25 was brought to a standstill (Picture: PA/Getty Images)
Five Just Stop Oil protesters have been jailed for planning to block the M25 motorway.
The protesters – Roger Hallam, 58, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22 – agreed to cause traffic chaos by climbing over the gantries for days on end in November 2022.
The five defendants shouted ‘We love you’ when they were given their sentences.
Hallam, one of the co-founders of Just Stop Oil, has been sentenced to five years in jail.
The other four were given four year sentences by Judge Christopher Hehir.
He said: ‘The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.
‘You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.’
The co-leader Roger Hallam has been sentenced to five years in jail (Picture: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire)
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The sentences are longer than those given to Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland (three years) and Marcus Decker (two years and seven months) for scaling the Dartford Crossing.
45 people ended up climbing onto the gantries which cost the Metropolitan Police more than £1.1million to deal with, prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward KC said.
This impacted around 700,000 vehicles and meant that the M25 grinded to a halt for more than 120 hours, Southwark Crown Court heard.
She said the five defendants joined a Zoom call to discuss the planned protests.
This was aimed to recruit others and was based off ‘what was said expressly and what could be inferred’.
Just Stop Oil stopped traffic for multiple days on the busy motorway (Picture: Just Stop Oil)
A journalist from The Sun recorded the meeting pretending to be interested in the protest and sent this on to police.
The judge said the call showed ‘how intricately planned the disruption was and the sophistication involved’, and was ‘compelling evidence’ of the existence of a conspiracy.
He addressed Hallam directly and said: ‘You are the theoretician, the “ideas” man.
‘In my judgment you sit at the very highest level of the conspiracy.’
11 protesters were arrested on suspicion of contempt outside the court during the trial but proceedings were discontinued because the judge became ‘concerned’ about their position.
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