I’m watching the Sheffield trees protest with growing fascination. It unites PFI contracts, council intransigence, questions over rights of local communities, and focused, polite moments of civil disobedience. It feels peculiarly British and is becoming one of the events of our time.
To recap, Sheffield City Council have set about felling thousands of trees from the city’s streets. They claim that the trees are “dangerous, dead, diseased, dying, damaging or discriminatory”. They believe these trees, amongst other things, are making roads and pavements unsafe. They say they are planting others to replace them.
However, the protestors disagree. And they, as an organisation called STAG (Sheffield Tree Action Groups), are growing in influence. Many of the trees are healthy, they say. They insist there are better ways to deal with the…
