–A denigrated climate whistleblower and journalist, I seem under increasing attack by Britain and beyond … on multiple fronts. It’s probably state /corporate harassment, I contend. Or a bunch of very weird coincidences.
Play this while reading:
Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
April 22-25, 2024 — As an increasing number of people are finding out … in Britain, and around the world … standing up for yourself against a government, a judiciary and/or corporations and banks can result in very painful retaliation.
I’m being and have been attacked on an increasing number of fronts. I’ve got it easy compared with many, yet I can’t stand by and let the harassment get worse while the hypocrisy magnifies among the G7 politicians and global corporations.
I was arrested March 2, interrogated and kept in a jail cell for most of a day, I’m now revealing for the first time …on Earth Day 2024, April 22.
To protect my privacy, I’m not saying why I was arrested for now…partly because I’ve not yet been charged (and I did not do what I’m accused of — it might be a case of mistaken identity).
I was released on police bail, itself a strange concept that ignores the “innocent until proven guilty” doctrine.
Here are some related documents that I’ve redacted to protect myself (and potentially the alleged victim — in the case of mistaken identity)**:
** The documents are confusing. To be sure, I didn’t commit an offense while on bail, as indicated in the document above. I’ve never been arrested before in my 50+ years.
I was arrested and bailed …apparently …because that would prevent me from committing an offence while on bail, I was told by an officer (but that makes no logical sense because if I was not arrested I would not be on bail). One officer said the documentation was somewhat confusing.
Contradictory evidence was introduced near the end of my police interview … for which I was deliberately dehydrated and it was properly designed to trick me into saying something incriminating.
I accused police to their face of abusing their power. They did not seem surprised I said this.
On the bright side, the experience probably gave me a taste of how people are treated by the police …treatment I hadn’t before suffered.
To me, the coppers seem focussed on protecting the establishment …not the people… keeping the greedy, destructive status quo in place.
Some of their behavior seemed very strange indeed, such as the prison guard who told me the custody sergeant had lied about how soon I might get out of jail.
For evidence of the onslaught of jailing of those favorable to climate action (not just journalists) see how many “Just Stop Oil” supporters have been arrested in Britain.
- News Reports: An ITV News report from November 2023 states that in all of 2022, there were 236 activists charged under the public order act for Just Stop Oil protests, whereas just in the first 3 weeks of 2023, that number was already at 296. The Guardian reported there were about 600 Just Stop Oil protestors arrested in one month — November last year — alone. (Updated May 8, 2024)
These imperfect figures do strongly suggest a significant increase in arrests for Just Stop Oil this year compared to the same period in 2022. (Google Gemini)
Journalists are being locked up around the world.
On Earth Day, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on governments to step up protection for environmental reporters, who are encountering growing difficulties.
“From physical attacks to intimidation suits and restrictions on access to information driven by economic or political interests, environmental journalism finds itself at the crossroads of the threats to press freedom. On the occasion of Earth Day, we deplore the obstacles to the right to information about ecological and climate issues and call on all countries to recognise the essential nature of the work of environmental journalists, and to guarantee their safety.”
Arthur Grimonpont, Head of RSF’s Global Challenges Desk
RSF said: “Risking their lives to cover the environment: In the past ten years, according to RSF’s tally, nearly 200 journalists have been subjected to threats and physical violence, including murder, because they were working on stories linked to the environment.”
Back to the documents; more than three people have said my incarceration was very strange, including some people familiar with policing:
The special warnings related to whether I would rely later in court (should it come to that) on things I didn’t want to talk about during an interview (which occurred at the police station), I was told.
Or were they even more special? Related to my criticism of the establishment and the United Nations, perhaps?
I was never asked to attend the police station voluntarily for interview …so that phrase is strangely misleading, for instance.
The police said they considered placing me on a curfew – I think from 9pm to 5am (from memory)…until May 31. One of the senior police decided not to impose this.
The other conditions were: that I was not to attend a certain place (which I’m not specifying for now) and I was to sleep at home (see the document snipped above). (The police did vary this for an international trip I had planned prior to my arrest… so this is a complex situation, which is why I’m not naming officers for now. Had they really been dead against me, they would not have varied the condition of bail and I would not have been able to take the trip.)
The tax office in the UK, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, was seemingly attacking me for money around the same time.
Now … it’s saying its multiple requests to pay up — increasingly shrill — might have been related to identity fraud.
One of the many strange things about my runins with the HMRC was:
On the phone, officials said HMRC had sent letters, yet they took weeks to turn up, prolonging the stress. The letter, immediately above, is dated March 19, yet didn’t turn up at our house until a few days before (April 6) — after we returned from being away.
Why would the tax office of a hugely indebted colonialistic power spend extra money to send a letter first-class to me? So that APPEARS they are treating my matter urgently when they are actually doing the opposite. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this.
The other reason why I’m not buying the …”it was all just a mistake” argument is …the time it took for the HMRC to say that. More on this later.
The circumstances
Why am I mentioning “transnational repression” in relation to these harassments?
It feels like my family and I have been under attack for years. I was fired by Bloomberg LP in a cowardly fashion in May 2020 and still have litigation pending.
I was arrested eight days after calling on JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon to resign. It’s probably entirely coincidental that I was arrested after writing about that huge bank.
Still, several reports point to JPMorgan Chase as the global bank with the most financing directed towards fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement to cut emissions in 2015/2016. It’s been credited with financing over $434 billion 2016 through 2022.
Its market capitalisation, a measure of the bank’s total value as a company, has risen by a few hundred billion dollars in the same period …and rests at about $550 billion (Apple stocks app).
The financial industry as a whole plays a significant role financing the destruction of nature as we know it. Bloomberg’s biggest customer grouping is banks (as I understand it). JPMorgan Chase’s leading position in financing fossil fuels makes it a significant contributor (Google Gemini).
I was locked up a couple of days after I said the following on LinkedIn of Mark Carney and Mike Bloomberg (both UN climate envoys with conflicting senior roles in business/regulation):
“Shouldn’t you resign from your climate envoy roles because of your repeated failures to slow climate change? If not, why not?”
The stressful judicial hearings about my sacking are ongoing (as I said above)…even though I’ve tried to back out of the process.
After my arrest and release last month, I compiled these calls for resignations here (to have them all in one place, for convenience):
My arrest came a few days after I inferred the Met Police did not do a very good job investigating this situation:
It came less than two weeks after I criticised the 0.1% richest/most powerful (I’m pretty sure they are not ALL bad).
So …in relation to my jailing … I might have done something wrong (in some mystic haze that I don’t recall at all) … or … it might be related to my journalism criticising the state/corporations/judiciary. It might not.
The tax office might just have made a mistake or someone did fraudulently sign me up for VAT …or perhaps I did that one myself … in my sleep … or accidently while tooling around on the hugely fun HMRC website.
I’ve given police and the Independent Office for Police Conduct seven weeks or so to comment on my arrest and treatment. They are passing the buck for now. I’m told by a lawyer they move slowly.
I most recently was told to get in touch with the Metropolitan Police Service’s Complaint Resolution Unit (CRU) — even though the IOPC is on the UK government’s list of prescribed people for whistleblowing under the Public Interest Disclosure Act (the law that everyone agrees needs to be reformed).
Apparently, if you are a regulator in Britain, you can do what you like.
The confusion and mistakes are deliberate, I contend.
Perhaps, as this Financial Times columnist asks, it could be strategic incompetence?
Like the much more famous whistleblower Julian Assange, I’m Australian …I was born there …I also have British citizenship … and so the Australian High Commission in London were notified by the Met Police of my arrest. I also wrote to them.
They sent by email a list of lawyers, in return. Thanks, Aussies. A lovely group of people more responsible for the climate crisis on a per-capita basis than most in the world.
I’ve had to remortgage my house multiple times and borrow from family to help blow the whistle on mainstream-media climate-news coverage that I contend was (and still is) designed to delay cost-efficient action in a predatory way.
I was calling out bad news judgement on climate news inside Bloomberg for at least five years before being sacked.
My litigation against the news and data giant is set to extend to Oct. 29 this year, at least…even as global temperatures rise increasingly rapidly.
I contend my family and I are facing this situation because giant corporations, government departments, health services, post office executives, the judiciary, groups of powerful people generally, don’t like to admit they are doing wrong …even when they are … and even when they know they are.
Surging, destructive, food-inflation-inducing, immigration-causing global heat
My situation and multiple others — I’ve spoken to several people facing similar multi-pronged attacks over many years for blowing the whistle — show quite clearly that Britain needs to finally have that long-delayed debate about new whistleblowing-protection law.
That was listed to happen last Friday in parliament in London and was deferred a seventh time (approx) to April 26. Listed Friday debates more often get delayed than actually occur (another way MPs mislead the people).
I can’t stand by and let this harassment just happen while those delays extend and the G7 sprouts its nonsense about being victims of transnational repression. My family and I feel like a victim of that repression from within the G7 and by the G7.
On Saturday just passed, I went back to the police station because the Met police called me back to retake a DNA sample.
After arriving there, an officer told me the station could not do the retake, even though I arrived at the times they suggested. The reason? The officer I was speaking to was not authorised to take me into the custody area and no one else could do it, except the officer who originally arrested me, she said. And he — the arresting officer — wasn’t answering his phone.
The police note calling me back appeared to be hand delivered …they have time to do that? And it arrived hours after I pressed JPMorgan for comment by sending emails to spokespeople in London and New York. The bank declined to provide any response and I’m not alleging a direct link …just saying what happened — providing the circumstances.
If China and Russia (and others) are boosting their transnational repression in one of the biggest ever years for national elections, it’s because they have been shown the way to do this by the US’s Central Intelligence Agency, which created the playbook along with the other three-letter agencies of that nation, FBI, NSA. These are the people Assange warned us about.
For nations and their apparent corporate masters, it’s about protecting money, as the former and late prime minister of Singapore starkly pointed out decades ago, citing one incident in 1960:
That particular PM showed the world how to create a peaceful society, and prosperous — it’s a template that includes social capitalism that’s been mimicked somewhat by nations including China, UAE. (Singapore is far from perfect, but it is trying to show leadership on some tricky issues.)
The repression playbook by the biggest nation in the G7 is now being deployed around the world via techbros from Facebook/Meta, X, Google to the rest (or are they really with the people? .. the 99.9%?)….but TikTok is not allowed to do it, of course!
It’s unAmerican when others behave like America … or if they act like the US’s butler, the “great” colonialist power called Great Britain (which desperately wants a post-Brexit trade deal with the world’s biggest economy ahead of an imminent general election).
Source doc, see page 16, 17:
(More to come. Updated with HMRC envelope, earlier with former Singapore PM, I tweaked a few things vs the imperfect first version of this story. I will tell my story more fully … later.)