A Bristol doctor has been jailed for a year for taking a hammer and chisel and cracking the display panels of 16 petrol pumps at a service station on the M25.
Dr Patrick Hart, a GP with the Bridge View Medical group in South Bristol, carried out the action at the Esso petrol station at Thurrock in Essex, and then waited to be arrested, before pleading ‘not guilty’ in court. He was convicted in October last year, and sentenced on Tuesday this week – where a judge jailed him for 12 months.
Dr Hart now faces being struck off or suspended by the General Medical Council for his conviction and sentence, but the Knowle and Bedminster-based GP said he disrupted drivers, who couldn’t fill up at the motorway services for a few hours afterwards, ‘as an act of care’.
The stunt, in August 2022, was a protest by Dr Hart and other Just Stop Oil activists against Esso, whose parent company Exxon has been found to have concealed the findings of its own climate scientists in the early days of research into global warming.
The 38-year-old from Knowle has been involved in some of the UK’s most high profile direct action protests with Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil over the past few years. In May 2023, he invaded the pitch during the Premiership Rugby Final at Twickenham and threw orange-coloured cornflour around, as part of a wave of Just Stop Oil protests at major sporting events at the time. He was later found not guilty of causing criminal damage to the pitch at Twickenham.
He has been acquitted by several juries for previous Just Stop Oil actions, after explaining a defence that outlined the bigger picture regarding climate change and his motivations. The previous Government changed the law in 2023, in the wake of the Colston 4 case, prohibiting defendants from using a moral defence on wider issues for their criminal damage – which prompted silent protests outside courts across England, including in Bristol.
During his trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in October last year, Dr Hart pleaded ‘not guilty’, despite acknowledging he carried out the act, telling the court it would have been ‘dishonest’ to plead guilty. “I do not feel guilty for what I did,” he said. “I believed then, and I believe now that it was the right thing to do. It was the carefully considered action of a responsible citizen. My only defence, however, is a moral one, not a legal one. I did what I did as an act of conscience,” he added.
While his defence could not use a moral case to back up his plea, the judge did allow Dr Hart the chance to address the jury about why he carried out the action, during the trial in October 2024. “I disrupted people as an act of care,” he told the court in Chelmsford . “I damaged the petrol pump screens as an act of care. Because in times of great peril, a caring person has to stand up for what is right.
“My actions have already cost me greatly. I have been penalised at work and stand to be suspended or lose my licence to practise as a doctor. But I regret nothing. Because to not do it, would have been to give up on caring, and that would be worse. In the face of the permanent collapse of our climate, our economy, our society and life on Earth, the only thing that keeps me going is our continued capacity to as people to care, regardless of what happens. Yes, I fear prison, but I am ready to go if I must,” he added.
Dr Hart now faces a tribunal to decide on his status as a GP, after the General Medical Council began disciplinary proceedings against him.