Jailed Just Stop Oil protester boasts of ‘very good vegan food’ in prison where he passed time reading philosophy and poetry
A Just Stop Oil protester who was jailed for scaling the Dartford crossing said his 13 months behind bars “hardly felt like punishment at all.”
Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison.
Trowland, along with co-protester Marcus Decker, was given the longest sentences to non-violent protesters in the UK after they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner in October 2022.
He said he is now “happy to be a free man” after his release on licence last month.
Speaking to The Guardian, Trowland said: “I’m personally not that bothered…It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry.
“It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd.
“It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.”
Trowland spent his sentence in three separate prisons, including a month in Pentonville, in London which he described as “the worst.”
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Speaking of his time in Pentonville, he said: “They don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time…but it did have very good vegan food.”
Later, Trowland was moved to Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. He said: “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things.
“So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?”
While in Highpoint, he took a philosophy course and had time to reflect on his punishment and offending.
He said: “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them, after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries.
“I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually, a few treasured books.
“And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why?
“Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.”
During his trial, the court heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments. A witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock.
Speaking of his regrets, he said: “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere.
“And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing.
“And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to, look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.
“I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.”