Shattered windows, broken rules ... and victory! The medics who protested against the climate emergency

At 7.30 on a sweltering Sunday morning in July 2022, six medics from across the UK met at London Bridge station and set off for Canary Wharf. They were wearing scrubs and carrying bags loaded with hammers and chisels. Their mission was precise and perilous: to carefully crack six windows belonging to JP Morgan, the American bank they had identified as topping the league for investment in fossil fuel extraction. They knew that they would be arrested, and that they were putting both their careers and their liberty at risk. It was a gesture of desperation, a performance for what they saw as the greater good.

One of the six, mental health nurse Ali Rowe, was also carrying a letter she had hurriedly scribbled on the tube, which she read out to the police who arrived to arrest them. “It is with overwhelming sadness that I take this action,” she wrote. “I’ve never broken the law in my life until now.” London was in the grip of an unprecedented heatwave, she explained later in court. “On that day it was the first level-four heat warning and people were going to die. 3,271 people to be precise that are not walking the Earth are dead. I broke a window because we are in a medical emergency.”

The six defendants – two hospital consultants, two GPs and two nurses – are all members of Health for XR, an independent group of medical staff supporting Extinction Rebellion. Last week, all six were dramatically acquitted of criminal damage, in one of a series of blows against increasingly draconian restraints on the right to protest. Two days later, aggravated burglary charges were dropped against 18 Palestine Action activists after a jury cleared six others of the offence at an Israeli arms firm site in Filton, near Bristol. 

In the case of the medics, it was the second time jurors had disobeyed a clear instruction from the judge that the only questions they had to answer were whether the defendants had broken the windows and whether they had set out with intent to do so. In the first two-week trial last year, the jury was dismissed after being unable to reach a verdict. The prosecution immediately requested a retrial. It took the new jury less than four hours on Monday last week to declare all six not guilty.

Three of the medical staff defended themselves in court, constructing vivid arguments based on medical ethics and clinical observation from their own lives. Yet so many protesters have been brought to trial in the last couple of years that the case of the Health for XR Six received barely any media coverage. Their story might have disappeared for ever into the court archives were it not for a brave decision by a charity, Empathy Museum, to commission a verbatim play from transcripts of the first trial. 

Most verbatim theatre on legally and politically sensitive issues – for instance, Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tricycle theatre collaborations about the Stephen Lawrence trial and the Hutton inquiry into the death of whistleblower Dr David Kelly – happen after the legal processes are safely over. In Case of Emergency was different, coming in the middle of two trials, when restrictions on reporting were still in force.

The scale of the undertaking became clear in real time for Clare Patey, Empathy Museum’s founder and the show’s producer, starting with the challenge of finding backers to finance it, and a venue willing to take the risk of staging a work that could at any moment be halted for contempt of court, thereby putting their own institution at risk.

Two weeks of testimony had to be condensed down to 90 minutes of drama under the lead of playwright April de Angelis and director Ian Rickson. A series of post-show discussions had to be cancelled, and all media coverage postponed, for fear of running into legal trouble and endangering the medics’ case. But, almost miraculously, days before the retrial was due to begin, In Case of Emergency was performed by a star cast to packed houses across five nights at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room in London. 

At the time, the buzz of witnessing the arguments unfold was tempered by pessimism about the likely outcome of the looming second trial. At an informal gathering after the final performance, anxious questions hummed around the room. The power of the case rested on the judge’s decision to allow the defendants to tell their stories. Would they be allowed to do so a second time? Might the very mention of the climate crisis be ruled inadmissible as evidence in a trial for criminal damage? How likely was it that a second jury would refuse to accept the narrow criteria for criminal damage as defined in law? 

Now that the trial is over, plans are being hatched to restage the show and, potentially, tour it around the country to reach as wide an audience as possible. The unique perspective of the medics, and the clarity and force of their evidence, make it a story that urgently needs to be heard.

Several of them had worked for medical charities in some of the regions worst hit by the crisis. Alice Clack, a consultant in gynaecology and obstetrics now based in north Wales, told of coping with 40-50C heat in Yemen. “We had air conditioning in our house, and there was some in the hospital, but I just wondered how any of my patients were managing to survive in tents around the town.”

David McKelvey, a Manchester-based GP, spoke of being in Tanzania when the rains failed. “They call it the njabi – the hunger – and, you know, people talk of the challenge of putting their child to bed when they’re crying of hunger, and then you land them with a bit of malaria on top of that, these children become desperately ill.”

But all of them were clear that climate catastrophe is no longer something that happens somewhere else. Maggie Fay, a hospice nurse living on a Scottish island, recalled trying to explain to an elderly patient with dementia, who lived on her own, why spending the weekend in her conservatory – her favourite place to while away a sunny day – might be fatal.

As she took her hammer to the glass, said Juliette Brown – a consultant psychiatrist working in east London –  she thought of the children of Tower Hamlets “whose lungs are smaller than those of other children across the country because of air pollution, which is a manifest injustice”.

In the very week of the protest, Brown pointed out, the IT systems for two major London hospitals had collapsed in the heat. “We rely entirely on our IT systems: we don’t have paper records in London any more. It was a critical patient safety incident and people died.”

Patrick Hart, who worked as a GP in Bristol, recounted the life story that led to his first public protest in 2018. It took him from a complete faith in the power of medicine – because, as a child growing up in Devon, he had frequently witnessed it saving the life of his own mother – to a realisation that good health did not rely on doctors and nurses so much as on the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. “I started asking: ‘What does it mean to be a health worker?’ I can either be just the narrowest version of a doctor – keep giving out the pills – or I can start thinking about the health of the global population, and the health of the planet.”

Between the first and second trials, Hart spent four months in jail for convictions arising from another protest. His licence to practice has been suspended by the General Medical Council. Meanwhile, the British Medical Association last year passed a resolution recognising that the climate crisis was a public health emergency and that medical professionals had an ethical duty to advocate for urgent action.

Among the issues given painstaking clarity by the trial were the ethics of protest and the importance of juries – described by Brown, in her summing-up, as “the moral sense of the people – who bring humanity into this system … reality into these rooms”. 

For both these things to be under extreme legal challenge at a time of such unprecedented crisis is a small catastrophe of its own. If the case had come to court back in 2022, Hart pointed out, legal defences would have been available that have since been taken away from protesters.

Yet, Rowe said in her closing address last week: “Medicine is not about blind rule-following. Every good clinician knows there are rules that must be broken to prevent more serious harm. Is it acceptable for doctors and nurses to do nothing more than write another letter, sign a petition, attend a march, lobby MPs, organise high-level briefings? Is it ethically justified to break a lesser rule – to crack a window – when our collective intention was to protect life?”

In the old adage, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. In court, it was done but not seen by anyone beyond the few dozen who packed into the public gallery to support the medics, and the readers of legal bulletins and medical magazines. By putting it on the stage, In Case of Emergency has given their testimony a loudhailer and a future. As Hart said of the glass-cracking that set it all in motion: “Why bother when things look so bad? Because it is in this trying that we find our humanity.”

For details of upcoming projects: empathymuseum.com