Climate protesters guilty of criminal damage after smashing windows of bank HQ

Climate change protesters who caused almost £100,000 of damage after smashing windows at the London headquarters of Barclays bank could face jail after being found guilty of criminal damage.

Carol Wood, 53, Nicola Stickells, 52, Sophie Cowen, 31, Lucy Porter, 48, Gabriella Ditton, 28, Rosemary Webster, 64, and Zoe Cohen, 52, were convicted at Southwark Crown Court on Monday over the incident on April 7 last year.

Besides Cowen, the six other women have previous convictions for either criminal damage, wilful obstruction of a highway, breaching directions imposed on public assemblies or a combination of the three offences.

The protesters were found guilty by a jury on a majority of 11 to one after more than nine hours of deliberations.

Prosecutor Diana Wilson said the women could receive sentences ranging from community orders to 18 months in prison.

Judge Milne KC said “all options” have to be considered before adjourning the sentencing to January 27 next year.

In April last year, the group spread out along the front of Barclays bank in Canary Wharf, east London, before using chisels and hammers to break the large glass panels that made up the exterior of the bank.

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Their actions were associated with climate change campaign group Extinction Rebellion.

During the trial, they argued that Barclays staff would have consented to the damage if they were fully informed about the climate crisis.

The prosecutor insisted this was not true during her closing speech. She added they were “doing it to impose their views and to force change” and because they “believe themselves to be above the law”.

Webster described Barclays as the “county lines of banking”, and told jurors the company is the global banking industry’s seventh-largest funder of fossil fuels, and the largest in Europe.

She said that the bank is “putting profits before people and the planet” and said she “cracked” the glass windows to “raise the alarm”.

Both she and Cowen, the founder of a social enterprise company that helps people move their money to “clean banks”, told the court their actions had emulated the suffragettes, who “cracked many, many windows”.

Porter, a former teacher, told jurors the bank’s windows were replaced but “ecosystems” are irreplaceable and that disrupting bankers over the course of a morning is incomparable with watching a child die of starvation.

In her evidence, Ditton said Barclays is “financing the destruction of everything that we know and love” and that it was “necessary” to break the bank’s windows to “sound an alarm”.

The court heard Cohen became a Barclays shareholder in early 2021 to put forward a resolution asking the bank to phase out funding for fossil fuels which was later voted against.

By April 2021, Cohen believed she had run out of other options to try to achieve change, and the repair costs – £97,022 – were insignificant to Barclays, which had spent £100m on refurbishments last year.

Both Stickells and Wood told the court they were “shocked” at how much the repairs cost.

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