The British police are using COVID-19 measures to criminalise protest. We need to be ready to fight back.



Tom Anderson
9th September 2020

This article was updated on 10 September 2020 at 10:40am following the government publishing its guidance on the new coronavirus laws. Previously the article stated that there was no exemption for protest. It has now been updated to include the limited exemption for protest.

Increasing evidence is emerging that the police are using coronavirus (Covid-19) legislation to criminalise and disrupt protests.

Back in June, after Black Lives Matter demonstrations swept across the UK calling for an end to police violence, the Police Federation called for an outright ban on protests in the UK. The Federation said that the ban was necessary in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The ban wasn’t enacted, but it shows that top police officers have been pushing for authoritarian measures.

With the government announcing further restrictions on gatherings of more than six people, it is more important than ever that we collectively fight back and don’t allow the state to use this legislation as a protest ban. While we all need to take action in response to the pandemic and look out for each other, our freedom to demonstrate is non negotiable. We need to defend our freedom to act collectively and to defend ourselves and our communities.
Police threaten Palestine solidarity protesters

On 5 September, the Met police threatened to arrest Palestine solidarity protesters in London under Coronavirus legislation.
















Police trying to 'balance approach' on Covid-19 breaches

This video from Real Media shows officers threatening to arrest demonstrators at a protest outside the offices of the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit:


No freedom to protest under new coronavirus measures

At the time of the Palestine Solidarity protest, coronavirus restrictions had eased allowing for the reopening of most businesses, but still restricting gatherings of over 30 people.

There are a number of exceptions to the 30 people maximum. For example, for gatherings organised by businesses or those related to work, training, or education.

There is only a limited exemption to the legislation to allow campaigners to organise protests. And on 8 September, new coronavirus regulations were announced by the government further limiting gatherings to six people. This legislation is due to rising coronavirus cases, but it does seemingly put strict limits on the size of demonstrations while allowing other activities like schools and weddings to continue. Under the new government guidance, protests will only be allowed when they are:

organised in compliance with COVID-19 secure guidance and subject to strict risk assessments

It is necessary for us to come together and demonstrate, particularly in a time where the government is awarding itself increasingly authoritarian powers off the back of this crisis. We need to determine when and how it is necessary to take collective action, and not leave it to the state to deem when protest is necessary.

Campaign group Big Brother Watch tweeted in August:

According to the lockdown regulations, only businesses, charities, political parties and public bodies can organise gatherings of 30+

This excludes campaigners and community groups

We are calling on the Government to amend the regulations and let ALL groups protest

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) August 27, 2020


Coronavirus legislation used to intimidate and arrest protesters

The Met’s policing of last Saturday’s Palestine Action protest is only one of an increasing number of instances where the police have used coronavirus legislation to try to break up demonstrations.

Real Media has published another video showing the police using coronavirus regulations to threaten Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion (XR), and Stop HS2 demonstrators with arrest:

One protester was arrested for demonstrating, even though he was taking part in a socially distanced protest in Parliament Square.
Repressing Black community action

In the run-up to the August bank holiday weekend, Black community organiser Ken Hinds was threatened with arrest and prosecution for organising an anti-racism demonstration in Notting Hill, dubbed the Million People March.

The Guardian quoted an email Hinds had received from the Metropolitan Police warning him that he was not qualified to organise a demonstration as he was not:


a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution, a public body, or a political body. What this means is that you are encouraging anyone attending to commit an offence contrary to [Health Protection] regulations 5 and 8

Hinds has since launched a legal challenge against the Met, and the march was eventually allowed to go ahead.
“This is a protest ban and it needs to END”

On 2 September, 10 Downing Street’s Twitter account tweeted that ‘Gatherings of more than 30 people are illegal’, and warned of fines of £3,200 for those prosecuted. But Big Brother Watch responded by highlighting the fact that the measures amount to a protest ban:

Unless you’re in a pub, restaurant, workplace, gym, school…

This is a protest ban and it needs to END.

Attending a peaceful demonstration should not be a criminal offence. https://t.co/IRLmBY7JqP

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) September 4, 2020


Patel threatens new restrictions

Last weekend, home secretary Priti Patel responded to XR protests against Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper distribution sites with typical Tory nationalistic rhetoric, calling them a threat to Britain’s way of life and threatening to classify XR as an organised crime group.

The Network for Police Monitoring responded:

This weekend Priti Patel threatened new restrictions on the right to protest and the Police Federation in London has called for an outright ban. Today, we begin consulting with the organisations we work with on a new Charter for Freedom of Assembly Rights https://t.co/vOVNaDMiRA pic.twitter.com/FTA5xRHyzh
— Netpol (@netpol) September 7, 2020


We need to be ready to fight back against state control

The coronavirus pandemic is only the latest justification that the state has used to try to prise our freedoms away from us and attack our power to act collectively.

Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s Conservative governments mobilised fears of the Left, and of workers’ collective power, to introduce successive pieces of legislation aimed at restricting the ability of trade unions to take effective collective action, while the Tory Criminal Justice and Public Order Acts of the 80s and 90s scapegoated travellers, squatters, and ravers as a way to mobilise support for further restrictions on the freedom to protest. To read about this history see Chapter 16 of Corporate Watch’s book: Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent [written by the author of this piece].

The Labour governments of the late 90s and early 00s consistently used the threat of ‘global terrorism’ to introduce repressive terrorism legislation that criminalises Kurdish people and other communities involved in liberation struggles. The term ‘domestic extremist’ was also coined under Labour, and has been used to mobilise state repression against the UK’s animal liberation and ecological movements.

The Tory governments of the last decade have continued Labour’s scapegoating of Muslim communities and continued expanding the scope of its Prevent legislation, which aims to create a climate of fear, particularly amongst Muslims and other marginalised communities.

Using coronavirus regulations to justify the repression of protest is just another step in the state’s attack on our ability to collectively organise to defend our communities, to resist corporate power, to stop ecological destruction, to strike for better pay, to stop the landlords from evicting us, or the Border Agency from deporting our comrades.

We need to take note of this new state attack on our freedoms and be ready to fight, as we have done before, to maintain our collective power.

Featured image via VPalestine/Palestine Action (with permission)

Get involved
Check out Big Brother Watch
Read Netpol’s response to Priti Patel’s new threats to the freedom to protest
Take a look at the Policing the Corona state blog

UK

“What have we become?” Ministers said to be considering opt outs of Human Rights Act laws

Labour's Shadow Justice Secretary said: “A future where (the) UK breaks its international law obligations, and opts out of Human Rights protections is a very bad future.”

 by Jack Peat

 September 13, 2020

in Politics

Boris Johnson has instructed ministers to look at opt-outs from the Human Rights Act, with a formal review expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

The Tory manifesto pledged to “update” the Act after Brexit, but the move is contentious with Brussels and negotiators have expressed concern over the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.

The moves could prevent many migrants and asylum seekers from using the legislation to avoid deportation and protect British soldiers against claims relating to overseas operations. 

Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser, has previously attacked the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for judgments, based on the ECHR, blocking the deportation of “dangerous” foreign criminals.

Mr Cummings has warned that voters would expect the jurisdiction of European judges to end in the UK as part of the Brexit process, but others have expressed dismay at the move.

Shadow Justice Secretary, Lord Falconer, said: “A future where (the) UK breaks its international law obligations, and opts out of Human Rights protections is a very bad future.”

While Jo Maugham QC added: “Shocking that the United Kingdom, once thought a leader amongst nations, should in a single week signal a desire to flout both international law and to fail to adhere to basic human rights protections. What have we become?”

Cummings now wants to roll back human rights laws. He’s out of control.

The Telegraph has reported that Boris Johnson’s government is set to ‘opt out’ of human rights laws. This is, of course, part of Brexit. It also appears to have Dominic Cummings’ hands all over it. But the reality is that even under EU rules, successive Tory governments flouted them anyway.

Human rights under threat?

On Sunday 13 September, the Telegraph said that the UK government was planning to put in place “optouts” [sic] from the Human Rights Act. The Telegraph wrote that ministers:

are drawing up proposals to severely curb the use of human rights laws in areas where judges have ‘overreached’.

 One group the government is targeting is asylum seekers. It wants to stop judges applying to the European Court of Human Rights in asylum cases. The Telegraph noted that the government will be doing a formal review into the laws. This is in line with the Tories’ 2019 manifesto commitments.

But as with many government actions, Johnson’s aide Cummings appears to be at the centre.

 

Take the boy on the anti-female website, and watch him grow into an adult misogynist

Sonia Sodha

Treating misogyny as a hate crime will allow us to stop young males from being ‘groomed’

‘Technology is changing the way the men who objectify and hate women are created.’ Illustration: Dom Mckenzie/The Observer

Sun 13 Sep 2020 

Two books about hate and gender have been published in recent weeks; one is pretty much irrelevant, but has been propelled into the global spotlight thanks to an overly zealous French official and a tiny but astute publisher. The other is a profoundly important piece of work that is unlikely to get the universal attention it deserves. These topsy-turvy reactions reveal much about skewed societal reactions to feminism.

First, the irrelevant: a tract entitled I Hate Men by a 25-year-old French feminist, set for an initial print run of 450. None of us would have heard of it but for the civil servant who wrote to her publishers telling them to pull it because “incitement to hatred on the grounds of gender is a criminal offence”. Except it turns out the civil servant was freewheeling rather than speaking for the French government. I’ve never encountered any feminists who hate all men, but the global media’s fascination with this niche provocation shows that there is something irresistible about associating feminism with misandry.

That is the wry observation of Laura Bates, the author of Men Who Hate Women, a book everyone should read. “It makes me smile when people ask me whether you have to be a woman who hates men to write a book about men who hate women… in reality the opposite is true,” she writes. Her book is a chilling investigation into the world of online extreme misogyny and its real-world consequences: the incels (“involuntary celibates”) who believe women are denying them their right to have sex and consequently deserve to be raped and murdered; the pick-up artists who believe women can be manipulated and controlled into sleeping with them; the “men who go their own way”, who believe women are so toxic they must cut them out of their lives altogether.

It is too easy to dismiss these as sinister but irrelevant internet cesspits, filled with dysfunctional loners who fantasise about committing sick acts of violence against women that they will never get the chance to act upon. That is a mistake: one of the most disturbing aspects of Bates’s book is how she came to her subject matter. She realised a couple of years ago through her regular work with schools that some boys were increasingly parroting the kinds of arguments about women common in these online communities.

How many of these boys will grow up more likely to be domestic abusers?

Bates also documents the murderous rampages inflicted by incels: men such as Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 others in California in 2014, or Ben Moynihan who stabbed three women in Portsmouth the same year. Yet despite fitting the definition for terrorism – the use or threat of action designed to intimidate the public to advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause – there is only one case of an incel attack being treated by authorities as terrorism, when a 17-year-old murdered a woman using a machete in Toronto earlier this year. It seems a dangerous hatred of women simply doesn’t meet the ideological bar, a bizarre and troubling minimisation of extreme misogyny.

Links between terrorism, misogyny and domestic violence have been well-documented; last year, Joan Smith described how most terrorists involved in far-right and Islamist attacks have a track record of abusing women. There is, however, little evidence that this insight has filtered through to the government’s counter-terrorism efforts. Yet Smith observes that one thing that unites far-right and Islamist extremists is their embrace of rape and domestic violence and its use as a recruiting tool.

But there is another link between extreme misogyny and other forms of terrorism that Bates exposes: the ways in which boys and young men are radicalised into these extremist ideologies. The grooming techniques are identical: pushing initially relatively mild misogynist memes and humour on to vulnerable teenagers with low self-esteem on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and bodybuilding websites, which then leads to darker and more violent stuff. The platforms are complicit: Bates describes how YouTube’s content-pushing algorithm takes someone searching “what is feminism?” to an interview with Milo Yiannopoulos decrying feminism as “primarily about man-hating” and spreading a “constant message that men are evil” via just one other video.

These are important insights into how technology is changing the way the men who objectify and hate women are created, making it ever easier for vulnerable young men to be caught up in the damaging orbit of extreme misogyny. Only a tiny number of these will engage in the terrorism of a Rodger, but the same is true of far-right and Islamist terrorism, and that, rightly, does not prevent us from pouring billions into countering them. And that is before we consider the wider costs: how many of these boys will grow up more likely to be domestic abusers? (To put this in context, 49 people tragically lost their life to terrorist attacks in the UK between 2010 and 2017 –around one every 10 weeks – but two women a week are murdered by a current or former partner.) Or the worrying trend of women in their 20s being pressured to take part in dangerous sex acts such as choking.

We need to start taking extreme misogyny seriously rather than writing it off as a community of oddballs: not to do so is to utterly fail in our duty to keep this generation of boys and girls safe. It is imperative that misogyny gets classed as a hate crime in the same way as crimes motivated by hostility towards people because of their race, disability or sexual orientation are. This is not about criminalising wolf-whistling, but understanding the extent to which crimes are motivated by hatred of women. Treating it as terrorism could at a sweep multiply the resources available to tackle violent misogyny many times over. And we need to develop our understanding of how to help those boys at risk of getting groomed down this path and prevent it from happening in the first place. As Bates says, failing to act is the mark of a society that devalues not just women, but men.

• Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and an Observer and Guardian columnist

Topics

• Women
• Opinion

How the South Won the Civil War review: the path from Jim Crow to Donald Trump

Protesters against Washington state’s stay-home order at the state capitol in Olympia in April. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Heather Cox Richardson offers an eloquent history of the negation of the American idea, with clear lessons for November

John S Gardner
Sun 13 Sep 2020 06.00


Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is not principally about that war. Instead, it is a broad sweep of American history on the theme of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy – between the vision that “all men are created equal” and the frequency with which power has accumulated in the hands of a few, who have then sought to thwart equality.


A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876

What she terms the “paradox” of the founding – that “the principle of equality depended on inequality”, that democracy relied on the subjugation of others so that those who were considered “equal”, principally white men, could rule, led to this continuing struggle. She draws a line, more or less straight, between “the oligarchic principles of the Confederacy” based on the cotton economy and racial inequality, western oligarchs in agribusiness and mining, and “movement conservatives in the Republican party”.

More specifically, she writes that the west was “based on hierarchies”. California was a free state but with racial inequality in its constitution. Racism was rife in the west, from lynchings of Mexicans and “Juan Crow” to killings of Native Americans and migrants who built the transcontinental railroad but were the target of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

There, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” This ranged from western Republicans working with southern Democrats on issues like agriculture, in opposition to eastern interests, to shared feelings on race.
Does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others?

Once Reconstruction ended, and with it black voting in the south, Republicans looked west. Anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness.

For Richardson, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was thus not an electoral strategy but a culmination of a century of history between the south and west, designed to preserve oligarchic government in “a world defined by hierarchies”. Richardson sees Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the reaction against it as “almost an exact replay of Reconstruction”. What she terms the “movement conservative” reaction promoted ideals of individualism – but cemented the power of oligarchies once again.

But isn’t America the home of individualism? Richardson agrees, to a point. The images of the yeoman farmer before the civil war and the cowboy afterwards were defining tropes but ultimately only that, as oligarchies sought to maintain power. Indeed, she believes, during Reconstruction, “to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own”, notably ignoring the brutal work required and the fact that about a third of cowboys were people of color.

These tropes mattered: “Just as the image of the rising yeoman farmer had helped pave the way for the rise of wealthy southern planters, so the image of the independent rising westerner helped pave the way for the rise of industrialists.” And for Jim and Juan Crow and discrimination against other races and women, which put inequality firmly in American law once again.
The flame was never fully extinguished, despite the burdens of inequality on so many

Yet ironically, as in the movies, the archetype came to the rescue: “Inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype re-engaged the paradox at the core of America’s foundation.” In the Depression, “when for many the walls seemed to be closing in, John Wayne’s cowboy turned the American paradox into the American dream.” (Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach marked the emergence of the western antihero as hero.)

Indeed, the flame was never fully extinguished despite the burdens of inequality on so many. In Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans fought for equality for black people. The “liberal consensus” during and after the second world war promoted democracy and tolerance. Superman fought racial discrimination.

In all it is a fascinating thesis, and Richardson marshals strong support for it in noting everything from personal connections to voting patterns in Congress over decades. She errs slightly at times. John Kennedy, not Ronald Reagan, first said “a rising tide lifts all boats” (it apparently derives from a marketing slogan for New England); she is too harsh on Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms; and William Jennings Bryan – a western populist Democrat who railed against oligarchy even as he did not support racial equality – belongs in the story.

Barack Obama addresses the Democratic national convention, in August. Photograph: DNCC/Getty Images

Richardson has achieved prominence for her Letters from an American series, which daily chronicles the latest from the Trump administration. As with many American histories these days, Trump and Trumpism form a backdrop to her work. She subtly draws connections between echoes of the past and actions of the Trump administration which appear as their natural, if absurd, conclusion.


Rick Perlstein: 'If you're not writing about the berserk, you're not writing about America'


As Richardson writes, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act extended the possibility of slavery in those territories, “moderate Democrats were gone, and slave owners had taken control of the national party”. She needn’t finish the analogy, other than to say that “[t]he world of 2018 looked a lot like that of 1860”.

The broader question is vital: does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others? Richardson eloquently and passionately accounts why that principle is so dangerous and damaging.


Refuting it – precisely by asking America to extend the benefits of the founding to everyone – is the principal task for Americans today. She concludes that “for the second time, we are called to defend the principle of democracy” – something that can be done only by expanding its definition in practice to match the ideal. Only in that way can the American paradox be resolved.

Or, as Joe Biden recently said in fewer words: “Democracy is on the ballot.”

Trump doesn't care if wildfires destroy the west – it didn't vote for him
Robert Reich





The climate crisis is upon us all but the president pursues more rollbacks. This election offers an existential choice

Cars drive along the Golden Gate Bridge under an orange smoke-filled sky – at midday in San Francisco. Photograph: Harold Postic/AFP/Getty Images

Sun 13 Sep 2020

The air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a “health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours”. Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for several days.

The west is burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke.

Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and looters”. He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.

Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. Trump will visit California on Monday, but he has said little.

One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.

He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding.
He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned downMiles Taylor

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.

Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.

Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. On Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.


These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.

Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.

He has called climate change a “hoax”. He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.

He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.

In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.
The core of [Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energyDonald Trump

Now, seven weeks before election day, with much of the nation either aflame or suffering other consequences of climate change, Trump unabashedly defends his record and attacks Joe Biden.

“The core of [Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energy,” Trump harrumphed in a Rose Garden speech last month.

Not quite. While Biden has made tackling climate change a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing to invest $2tn in a massive green jobs program to build renewable energy infrastructure, his ideas are not exactly radical. The money would be used for improving energy efficiency, constructing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, and increasing renewable energy from wind, solar and other technologies.

Biden wants to end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035, and to bring America to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by no later than 2050. His goals may be too modest. If what is now occurring in the west is any indication, 2050 will be too late.


'Unprecedented': the US west's wildfire catastrophe explained
Read more

Nonetheless, Americans have a clear choice. In a few weeks, when they decide whether Trump deserves another four years, climate change will be on the ballot.

The choice shouldn’t be hard to make. Like the coronavirus, the dire consequences of climate change – coupled with Trump’s utter malfeasance – offer unambiguous proof that he couldn’t care less about the public good.


Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US

Scientists baffled by orcas ramming sailing boats near Spain and Portugal


From the Strait of Gibraltar to Galicia, orcas have been harassing yachts, damaging vessels and injuring crew

Full story: ‘I’ve never seen or heard of attacks’ – scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats


Susan Smillie

Sun 13 Sep 2020 07.27 BSTLast modified on Sun 13 Sep 2020 11.02 BST

-
 

An orca feeding near a Moroccan fishing boat in the Strait of Gibraltar. Photograph: Patty Tse/Alamy


Scientists have been left baffled by incidents of orcas ramming sailing boats along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts.

In the last two months, from southern to northern Spain, sailors have sent distress calls after worrying encounters. Two boats lost part of their rudders, at least one crew member suffered bruising from the impact of the ramming, and several boats sustained serious damage.


'I've never seen or heard of attacks': scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats

Read more

The latest incident occurred on Friday afternoon just off A Coruña, on the northern coast of Spain. Halcyon Yachts was taking a 36ft boat to the UK when an orca rammed its stern at least 15 times, according to Pete Green, the company’s managing director. The boat lost steering and was towed into port to assess damage.

Around the same time there were radio warnings of orca sightings 70 miles south, at Vigo, near the site of at least two recent collisions. On 30 August, a French-flagged vessel radioed the coastguard to say it was “under attack” from killer whales. Later that day, a Spanish naval yacht, Mirfak, lost part of its rudder after an encounter with orcas under the stern.

Play Video
1:15 'It broke the rudder!': orcas damage Spanish naval yacht – video

Highly intelligent social mammals, orcas are the largest of the dolphin family. Researchers who study a small population in the Strait of Gibraltar say they are curious and it is normal for them to follow a boat closely, even to interact with the rudder, but never with the force suggested here.

The Spanish maritime authorities warned vessels to “keep a distance”. But reports from sailors around the strait throughout July and August suggest this may be difficult – at least one pod appears to be pursuing boats in behaviour that scientists agree is “highly unusual” and “concerning”. It is too early to understand what is going on, but it might indicate stress in a population that is endangered.


On 29 July, off Cape Trafalgar, Victoria Morris was crewing a 46ft delivery boat that was surrounded by nine orcas. The cetaceans rammed the hull for over an hour, spinning the boat 180 degrees, disabling the engine and breaking the rudder, as they communicated with loud whistling.

It felt, she said, “totally orchestrated”. Earlier that week, another boat in the area reported a 50-minute encounter; the skipper said the force of the ramming “nearly dislocated the helmsman’s shoulder”.

Boats off Spain damaged in orca encounters



At 11.30 the previous night, British couple Beverly Harris and Kevin Large’s 40ft yacht was brought to a sudden halt, then spun several times; Harris felt the boat “raise a little”.

Earlier that evening, Nick Giles was motorsailing alone when he heard a horrific bang “like a sledgehammer”, saw his wheel “turning with incredible force”, disabling the steering as his 34ft Moody yacht spun 180 degrees. He felt the boat lift and said he was pushed around without steering for 15 minutes.

It is not known if all the encounters involve the same pod but it is probable. Dr Ruth Esteban, who has studied the Gibraltar orcas extensively, thinks it unlikely two groups would display such unusual behaviour.

Alfredo López, a biologist from the Coordinator for the Study of Marine Mammals in Galicia, said orcas made their way up the coast each September from the Gulf of Cadiz to chase tuna into the Bay of Biscay.

Morris’s sailing job was abandoned after the boat was lifted for repair, and she was diverted to another delivery. She is currently sailing down the Spanish coast and in the early hours of Friday a VHF radio warning came in. “All ships, all ships,” it began. “Orca just north of Vigo” – five miles from her location.

After her last experience, Morris is a little jumpy, but, as a science graduate with plans to study marine biology, she is concerned for this vulnerable population of orcas and interested to learn more. She’d just prefer not to get too close a view next time.