On today’s online EDP came the news that a vandal¹ had been given a £750 fine for tipping pink paint on the bronze doors of Norwich City Hall. It seemed like a reasonable punishment to me, although I immediately thought of something better: she should have been made to scrub the doors clean. Of course, that would require instant delivery of justice. That was not what happened here, because according to the report, the offence took place on the 15th of February 2021. So, it has taken 5 years to deliver a £750 fine; if the vandal had put money by against this (for her) sad day, about 50p per day would have covered it.

The vandal had a companion who was found not guilty. Pink paint was also tipped on County Hall’s doors the same day, but both of them were found not guilty of that. The innocent one of the duo admitted the act but said it was “lawful protest.” Upon her acquittal last month, she is reported to have said:

This is not a victory for us. We are facing the greatest threat humanity has ever known.

The EDP’s report also notes that the vandal has 12 convictions from 17 offences, and has done stupid things for whatever the cause of the day was: Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and Burning Pink. [The latter must have been the cause of the City Hall vandalism, because the paint was pink.] The EDP used the word “including” when listing those four causes, so I wondered what else she was a member of. A search of the web showed me:

1. A GoFundMe, launched in October 2022, but now paused, that raised £2307 pounds towards court fines:

I am a front-lines climate activist in the UK, looking for financial support to allow me to spend less time working and more time engaging in nonviolent civil resistance which is the best way to bring about rapid social change.

2. She has a page on the roll-call of Extinction Rebellion’s heroes, which lists her front-line derring-do up to the first half of 2021:

[The vandal who] has previously been an animater [sic], illustrator and teaching assistant, was first arrested during the 2019 October Rebellion for Obstruction of the Highway. She was arrested again for the Trinity Lawn action during the Cambridge Rebellion in October 2019 and charged with Criminal Damage. She pleaded guilty in August 2020 and was given a £415 fine. She was arrested again at an action at the Shlumberger [sic] Oil and Gas HQ in Cambridge in July 2020 and charged with Criminal Damage. She pleaded guilty in August 2020 and was ordered to pay minimal court costs.

She was arrested again on 5th September 2020 at the Murdoch printworks blockade at Broxbourne during the 2020 September Rebellon [sic]. She was charged with Obstruction of the Highway and pleaded not guilty at St Albans Magistrates’ court on the 6th October 2020. Her trial is due to begin on the 12th July 2021. She has since been arrested for the Norwich Crane Action and charged with accessory to a crime with a plea hearing scheduled for 13th April 2021. She has also been arrested once with Stop HS2 at the Denham construction site, and twice with Burning Pink.

She seems to have graduated from Extinction Rebellion at that point – one presumes into their next incarnation. Was that Insulate Britain? I lose track. Maybe it was Stupid Britain. Or Just Stop Britain. Or Just Burning Stupid. Anyway, the page at Extinction Rebellion provides the statement she made to the Court at the printworks hearing. It begins:

I’m here today because I wanted to have a baby. And you don’t have to look very far to get a picture of what the world is going to look like in less than 20 years time. In my heart, I know it’s wrong to knowingly subject a human to that level of suffering. So you see my heart is broken. But I see other people’s kids, kids I don’t even know, and they need someone to fight for their futures because it doesn’t feel like anyone else is doing it.

Without immediate action on the climate emergency, billions of people will die. Billions of people will starve to death. I wake up every morning and wish it not to be true, but it is true, and no amount of wishing, or sticking my head in the sand, is gonna change that.

The forests are burning, the ocean is dying, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is choking us and you choose to come here today to waste my time talking about compensation?* Where is MY fucking compensation?

Wait, I think I can answer that: your compensation is that you live in the sort of society that is willing to put up with your endless stupidity and disruption, or at least demand a trivial fine from you every so often in payment for your antics, that your simps on the internet will pay on your behalf anyway. Your compensation is that you live in a modern, and still wealthy, liberal country where life is so easy that wasting your time wasting everyone else’s time is a viable life choice.

3. I also found a rather rage-baity article in the Mail, which lists what it sees as the character flaws of several activists. It mentions that the vandal “attended Wymondham College in Norfolk where boarding fees are £11,500 a year,” and posed topless to highlight some cause or the other. [I think they are trying to paint a picture here, but they do not spell out that the vandal was a boarder, leaving us to shade that in ourselves. Maybe she is not, after all, Veruca Salt.]

I could scroll further down, but I’ve read, and said, enough on this particular topic, I think.

To the vandal, I say, please stop vandalising things. Continue your protesting by all means. But waving a home-made placard on the side of the road is the limit, yeh?

Bonus Image

(From here, several years old.)

Featured image

I found it on the web, but it had a transparent background, which I made suitably pink.

Notes

*The original asterisk leads you to a note that says News UK was demanding compo for the printworks “blockadge” [sic].

1. I am not going to dignify her with a name here, but it would be a moment’s work for you to find out, if you really cared. ↩︎