His first book is the best book I’ve read in years. Fabulous. Not hippy, unless you are full-gammon.
I found myself referring to it the other day when explaining to a friend the difference between ‘trespass’ and ‘aggravated trespass’. An the very fact that we are riding on private land could be taken as ‘intimidation’ and therefore the criminal offence of ‘aggravated trespass’.
Cut and paste job below from Hayes, Nick. The Book of Trespass (pp. 19-20). Bloomsbury Publishing.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 introduced criteria to arrest people for the newly invented crime of ‘aggravated trespass’.
The lawyers define ‘aggravated’ in their own breezy way as ‘any circumstance attending the commission of a crime or tort which increases its guilt or enormity or adds to its injurious consequences’. A hidden knife would be aggravated assault; and from 1994, a hidden intention had the same effect. Section 61 of the Act legislated that a police officer could remove two or more people from any private land, if they have met for a common purpose. That’s for the ramblers. Section 63 criminalises any gathering of twenty people or more who meet to dance to amplified music. That’s for the ravers. Section 68 criminalises the intimidation, deterrence, obstruction and disruption of lawful activities on land, which turns all protest on land not owned by the protesters into an illegal activity.
At the time, this was primarily to restrict the hunt saboteurs, but is used in the vast majority of protests of all flavours, from fracking, to animal rights, to war. Your right to protest is secured by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but for the last twenty years, if you do it anywhere but your back garden or a highway, you can be arrested and sent to jail.
On top of this, since 2014, a common ruling has inserted the phrase ‘additional conduct’. If you are trespassing on land and engaging in any additional conduct, literally anything, it can now be classed as intimidation. In the words of the Crown Prosecution website: There is no requirement that the additional conduct should itself be a crime, so activities such as playing a musical instrument or taking a photograph could fall within anything. What limits the scope of anything is the intention that must accompany it: the intention to obstruct, disrupt or deter by intimidating. In short, if you are doing something that is not illegal (photography, dancing, playing the flute), while doing something that is not criminal (trespassing) you can be automatically arrested, and liable to six months in prison and a level-four fine. In this equation, two rights combine and somehow make a wrong.
