The wording of the article here, ‘can’t rely on beliefs’ is doing a lot of work, first it frames legitimate concerns about climate change as ‘beliefs’, and second of all it implies that people are somehow dodging criminal damage charges based on their subjective feelings, which isn’t what’s happening at all. Instead, the UK government is stripping away a layer of legal protection for protestors which was established in the Criminal Damage Act of 1971 (for more info google ‘the consent defence’).
The UK has been drifting into authoritarianism for a long time, but in the last few years, the repeated attacks on people’s right to protest have become far more transparent. There is a high-ranking UK judge called Silas Reid who became famous for forbidding mentions of climate change in his courtroom, and recently threatened a jury with prosecution if they acquit a group of climate protestors.
It’s sad to see newspapers spin this into such neutral language. This is a brazen assault on human rights.