'I read a lot of philosophy' Bridge climate protester's time in prison

Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing.

- Damien Gayle

The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all.

In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent.

Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.”

Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration.

“I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “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.”