As the waters rise, a two-year sentence for throwing soup. That’s the farcical reality of British justice

Why do the mass killers of the fossil fuel industry walk free while the heroes trying to stop them are imprisoned?

The sentences were handed down just as Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. As homes were smashed, trucks swept down roads that had turned into rivers and residents were killed, in the placid setting of Southwark crown court two young women from Just Stop Oil, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, were sentenced to two years and 20 months, respectively, for throwing tomato soup at the glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. No prison terms have been handed to the people whose companies deliver climate breakdown, causing the deaths of many thousands and destruction valued not at the £10,000 estimated by the court in damage to the painting’s frame but trillions.

Everywhere we see a farcical disproportion. The same judge, Christopher Hehir, presided over the trial of the two sons of one of the richest men in Britain, George and Costas Panayiotou. On a night out, they viciously beat up two off-duty police officers, apparently for the hell of it. One of the officers required major surgery, including the insertion of titanium plates in his cheek and eye socket. One of the brothers, Costas, already had three similar assault convictions. But Hehir gave them both suspended sentences. He also decided that a police officer who had sex in his car with a drunk woman he had “offered to take home” should receive only a suspended sentence. Hehir said he wanted “to bring this sad and sorry tale to its end with a final act of mercy”. The solicitor general referred the case to the court of appeal for being unduly lenient, and the sentence was raised to 11 months in jail.

Hehir also handed a suspended sentence to a man who rammed his car into the gates of Downing Street and was then found by police to have extreme child abuse images on his phone. By contrast, in July Hehir – the Judge Jeffreys of our time – gave five climate protesters who blocked the M25 jail terms of four and five years. It looks to me as if justice itself is suspended in Southwark crown court.

The disproportion became still more visible after racist rioters (some of whom should arguably have been tried as terrorists) this summer received much shorter sentences than the nonviolent M25 protesters. It was highlighted again when the newsreader Huw Edwards received a suspended sentence for his disgraceful crimes. When people expressed their shock, lawyers and other upright citizens defended the disparity, primly explaining that it represents the proper application of sentencing guidelines – as if this somehow makes it right.

That is indeed the main source of the problem, though the attitude of judges like Christopher Hehir makes it worse. When the maximum sentence for chaining yourself to the railings is more than twice the maximum sentence for racially aggravated assault, anyone who cares about justice should be appalled. The draconian new laws introduced by the Conservatives, which, shockingly, the Labour government now defends, ensure that non-violent protest is routinely treated as a more serious crime than most forms of violence. The issue is precisely that this asymmetry is institutionalised.

Point this out and the conversation immediately switches. Why can’t those stupid activists target fossil fuel infrastructure instead of attacking works of art? Well, they do, but scarcely anyone notices. Last month, four protesters, also with Just Stop Oil, were sentenced in Basildon crown court for trying to block access to the Navigator oil terminal at Thurrock in Essex by digging tunnels under the road then living in them. Joe Howlett was jailed for 15 months, Chris Bennett for 18 months, Samuel Johnson for 18 months and Larch Maxey for three years. When the BBC reported this sentencing, it mysteriously failed to mention the oil terminal – it must have seemed to anyone reading this story that they tunnelled under a minor road in Essex for no obvious reason.

The same goes for the trials: thanks to the removal of crucial legal defences by the Conservative government, climate protesters are now routinely forbidden from explaining the context for their actions and must be tried as if they committed mindless acts of vandalism. No link can be made with the global disasters that now rumble behind almost every one of these sentencing decisions. The desperate, courageous attempts by powerless people to draw attention to the issues the media and governments neglect are endlessly decontextualised.

Most of our media could be seen as a giant context-stripping machine. In recent years, there has been a sharp rise in the intensification of tropical cyclones, resulting in more devastating hurricanes like Helene. Why? Because greenhouse gas emissions heat the ocean. An early estimate is that global heating caused 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in parts of Georgia and South and North Carolina. The hurricane’s impact might also have been exacerbated by higher land temperatures, as the resultant evaporation allowed the storm to rage longer and further. Yet most news reports – and most political responses – treated this disaster as if it were a random quirk of nature.

What we see in all these cases is a fatal lack of moral seriousness. It extends from the media to the courts, from the government to our living rooms. We are swept along on a storm surge of virulent trivia. A single episode of Strictly Come Dancing receives a thousand times more media coverage than the recent mass deaths in West Africa and Nepal or the current inferno in the Amazon, all caused or exacerbated by climate breakdown. Does this reflect our hierarchy of values? If so, we have fallen into a deep moral pit. If not, we should ask how we have allowed ourselves to become perennially distracted from what will be, if unaddressed, the only issues that count.

Or perhaps it has to be like this. If it were otherwise, we would need to ask some further hard questions – questions almost no one in a position of power or influence wants to air. Why do the mass killers of the fossil fuel industry walk free while the heroes trying to stop them are imprisoned? Why, in nominal democracies, do we allow industrial lobbyists to steer government policy? Why, when we know so much, do we permit a handful of billionaires to propel 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.

Cover photo: Photograph: Antonio Olmos/the Guardian