I'm being sued for £5 million by an energy giant

You may remember that back at the end of October, I was one of sixteen people who occupied a power station chimney for a week, in protest at the Government's proposed massive expansion of gas power. While I was up there, I wrote and performed this poem. There's an awesome video of the action on the Guardian website - check it out.

Last week, the sixteen of us were in court, along with five other people who had entered the power station but not climbed the chimney. All twenty-one of us pleaded guilty to Aggravated Trespass, and are due to be sentenced on March 20th and April 2nd*. However, the company who run the power station - the French energy giant EDF - seem to think that this isn't punishment enough for us, and have started the process of suing us for an estimated £5 million in supposed "lost earnings".

Now, I've done some badly paid gigs in my time, but if EDF win then this one is going to be hard to beat.

Obviously, we don't have £5 million. Despite our glamorous lives as performance poets, community volunteers and charity workers, we're never going to earn that kind of cash. That means that if EDF's (un)civil claim is successful, we stand to lose our homes plus any savings we might have, and then either declare bankruptcy or be in hock to a power company for the rest of our lives.

So we can't let them win. This is about much more than just the 21 of us - it's about the freedom to protest. If campaigners can be slapped with lawsuits every time they take part in civil disobedience, then that will make it much more difficult for people to stand up and be counted on the issues that matter.

Luckily, the backlash against Greedy-F's repressive tactics has already begun - since we announced the lawsuit on Wednesday, we've appeared on Channel 4 News, the Guardian, Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show, the Telegraph, the Independent, and lots of other blogs and magazines. A petition launched on Friday night already has more than 37,000 signatures, and is still rocketing upwards. We've had support from NGOs and big Twitter hitters like Naomi Klein and Richard Dawkins, and George Monbiot wrote a powerful article in support of us. EDF's Facebook page is now a hilarious delight to behold, plastered with sarcastic messages and customers pledging to switch suppliers.

Thanks to Pete Speller for this one...

It's all great, but it probably isn't enough, not yet. We need to make this into such a massive PR disaster for EDF that they drop this like a hot uranium rod (oh yeah, they're big into nuclear as well as coal and gas). If you want to help rescue a performance poet and his friends from financial ruin whilst simultaneously defending the right to protest and giving an unaccountable energy giant a well-deserved headache, here are a few simple things you can do:

IF YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS:

- Sign the petition at www.change.org/edf21
- "Like" our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/No-Dash-for-Gas/301820216584422
- Follow us on Twitter at @nodashforgas, and help us retweet updates about our case

IF YOU HAVE A FEW MINUTES:

- Please share the three things above - the petition, the Facebook and the Twitter
- Watch and share our two videos - this one showing the action itself, and this one explaining how we're being sued.
- Share your favourite media story about us, from the links above
- Leave some messages for EDF on their Facebook page or via Twitter.
- We have reason to believe that EDF's corporate mascot "Zingy" has decided to rebel against its corporate masters in support of us, and so is now being held hostage and forced to dance in EDF's adverts! Show your outrage by joining the "Free Zingy" Facebook page, and demanding Zingy's release here.

IF YOU'RE AN EDF CUSTOMER:

- Please change your supplier (ideally to a green company like Ecotricity or Good Energy) and tell EDF why - preferably in a nice public way on Facebook, Twitter, or at the bottom of the petition. You'll probably be happier for it, because EDF apparently have the worst customer service of all the energy companies.

Thanks everyone - any small thing you can do would be a massive help.

With love and chimney rhymes,

Danny x

* Protesters in these situations often try to run a "necessity" or "justification" defence - i.e., they admit to blockading a piece of polluting infrastructure, but argue that they were preventing a greater crime, such as the damage caused by CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, it wasn't really feasible for us to run such a defence in this case as we were up in front of a District Judge rather than a jury. As a result, we decided that our time and energy was better spent on other aspects of the campaign, and so we pleaded guilty to get the criminal trial out of the way and get on with other stuff.

More Poetry Shenanigans

Right. Sorry for the infrequent posts - since January, I've been mixed up in this as well as this and this which have absorbed a lot of my time and energy...

I am working on something rather interesting that I will post here soon. Honest.

In the meantime, it's all kicking off poetry-wise: I'm performing tomorrow at a Gappy Tooth Industries gig (poetry before and between the bands - it'll either be great or a disaster, I can't wait to discover which). Then on Wednesday 2nd April I'm doing two gigs in one night - "Re:Versing The Damage" with Hammer & Tongue and Climate Xchange, and then "Ha Ha From The Madding Crowd" as part of Oxfringe, which will be my first attempt to perform at a comedy night. Again, glory or failure awaits - why not come along and find out which?

Also, rather awesomely, Radio New Internationalist are using one of my poems in their current show - it's broadcast from loads of different stations all around the world, and is also available online right here. Radio NI is always fascinating and informative listening and I totally recommend it (with or without the inclusion of my own cheesy verses).

A regular post with the more usual ranting in will follow soon.

I've been kind-of-semi-sort-of-quasi-web-published

The New Internationalist magazine are using one of my poems to promote the latest issue, "Corporate Responsibility Unmasked". Don't let this put you off, though: it's a great (and very timely) edition of the magazine, and you should definitely check it out.



The NI is one of those publications that despite still having a lot of subscribers (about 35,000 apparently, more than the New Statesman, the Ecologist or any other ostensibly left-wing UK magazine), it hasn't really established itself on the web yet and so seems to have slipped off a lot of people's radars. This is a real shame, as it's one of the most consistently well-researched, incisive and thought-provoking publications around. Although I do need to declare an interest here (my girlfriend is one of the editors), there aren't many magazines out there that have managed to remain fiercely independent (unlike most political magazines, they have no wealthy backers and are kept afloat by sales alone; they're also very strict about what advertising they accept), continually tell stories that no-one else is telling, bring in marginalised voices from around the world, undertake proper research and write stuff that is genuinely interesting rather than the recycled opinion and ill-informed bile that passes for analysis in most "current affairs" magazines.

Sometimes it's rather dense, or a bit too worthy; they also really need to sort out their web presence and get more up-to-date stuff online. However, when you're trying to find out what's really going on in the world behind the puffing, pouting and posturing of the corporate media, then the NI rarely disappoints. If Corporate Watch is the fervent, fired-up colleague who meets you in the pub to tell you about the shocking new scandal they've just uncovered, and Schnews is the friend who bangs on your door unexpectedly to drag you out to some outrageous event that you'd no idea was happening, then the NI is the knowledgeable, worldly-wise mate that you go to when you're feeling confused about something important and want to talk it through properly, figure out what to think, and decide exactly which piece of planet-wrecking machinery you most need to D-lock yourself to.

However, magazine subscriptions are falling across the board, and the NI's aforementioned stringent advertising policies and lack of billionaire backing mean that if we want it to continue to exist, we need to keep supporting it. So check out the latest edition, sign up for their free trial subscription (if you're not already a subscriber), and help raise their online profile by giving them a friendly link or two!

This shameless pluggery is now over, and I'm going home to make some soup.

Slammed

I’m slightly dazed. I’m a bit confused. But I’m also Hammer & Tongue Poetry Slam Champion 2006/7!

Yup. Last night, I somehow emerged triumphant from Oxford’s infamous annual live poetry showdown using a poem about consumerism and the environment, and a poem about pigeons bent on world domination. I couldn’t tell you the exact scores but it must have been pretty ruddy close – the other contenders were all excellent (particularly Sian Robins-Grace, who came in second place), plus I think I scared the judges a bit by adopting an (admittedly rather disturbing) high-pitched freak-voice for parts of the performance. I should probably have given them some warning, but of course that’s far less fun. Heh.

Poetry slams are weird things – each poet performs a short piece, then the judges (who are 5 random audience members at H&T) hold up scorecards to show what they think. This makes the whole thing pretty unpredictable, as you can probably imagine; excellent poems can get low scores if they’re not immediate enough in their impact, and poems you wouldn’t think much of written down can capture the crowd if they’re performed with enough panache. Poetry slams are great fun, but are probably best thought of as a way of raising the profile of live poetry and getting more people involved (it worked for me), rather than an objective method of finding the “best” poets.

All of which means that although I did put a lot of time and effort into writing and practicing the poems, I wouldn’t have won without a big fat dollop of good luck as well, and so I shouldn’t let it go to my head. Despite all of this, though, I can’t help feeling REALLY EXCITED, especially coz the poem “Don’t Buy It” – which is my attempt to challenge the warm fluffy myth of “ethical” consumerism – got the highest score of the evening. Hurrah - people are up for a bit of politics in their poetry, based on this totally representative sample of people who live in Oxford and go to performance poetry competitions!

I’d better call a halt to all this shameless self-congratulation, but if anyone’s actually interested in my poetry here are some ways that you can see/hear it:

• Buy the book and CD “This Poem Is Sponsored By…” from Corporate Watch for only seven pounds – it includes “Don’t Buy It” and loads of great political poetry from an amazing selection of poets.
  
• Contact Hammer & Tongue for information on their forthcoming CD “OxTongue”, featuring performances by Oxford-based poets (including me).
• Come to one of my upcoming performances: the Christian Aid climate change poetry event in Oxford on May 15^th, the Corporate Watch book launch as part of Acoustic Night in Bristol on June 18^th, or (hopefully) the Poetry & Words tent at the Glastonbury Festival!
• Go to my lonely, barren new MySpace page (which I’m still in two minds about because of the Murdoch connection).
• Send me an email at dannychivers [at] wildmail.com and I’ll keep you updated on future gigs and things.

Enough of this. I’ll try to do a proper post again soon about exciting important things like the Climate Camp and suchlike (OK, I'm getting overexcited about this whole embedded link thing now).

Best,

Danny