Alice Swift

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:There were baton beatings, pepper spray from the police, people being captured by the police, people being arrested. But somehow we managed to get through. I mean the police at one point created a line in a tunnel under a bridge with police vehicles and really heavy police force thinking we weren’t going to possibly get through. But there was 400 international climate activists that were like, ‘We’re not fucking coming all of this way to Germany to not shut down a coal mine. We’re going to get through.’ And we pushed our way through. And we, the images, the videos you can see and it’s incredible and so scary. But like so empowering. We got into the coal mine and literally within like a very short space of time of getting into the coal mine, there was police vehicle upon police vehicle entering the mine. Security vehicles. And we got separated by the police into groups and kettled. And then we were like kettled by the police for like, I don’t know, like eight hours or something in the coal mine, in August in the Rhineland in Germany. And the police were like, ‘We’ll let you go once we see your ID.’ Well they didn’t actually say ID, it was hilarious, they said, ‘We’ll let you go once we see your personalities.’ Which of course we found totally hilarious and made light of. And they’d handcuffed us with cable ties as I learnt is common in Germany and other places around the world. But yes, and over the course of that like six, seven, eight hours or whatever, people were like managing to wiggle the cable ties off. We were being disobedient as hell. Like in the end we got loaded onto buses to be taken to Aachen just on the border between like West Germany and The Netherlands to be taken to the police station, or the like police processing facility. But as our German comrades knew all too well that the police in the Rhineland could only detain us for a maximum of twelve hours. Now in the UK legal system, like detention amounts to when you get to the police station. Detention in Germany amounts from when your autonomy is taken away from you, your freedom when you are actively being detained by the police, be that a police station or be that a coal mine. And so we got loaded onto these buses that we were then on for hours. And then at some point the twelve hours had expired and some of the Germans in our group were like, ‘The twelve hours have expired’ to the one police officer woman who was like guarding our bus. And it was getting to a point where like she was going to be facing some kind of riotous situation if she didn’t let us off the bus. And she got the command that, yes you have to let them go. The twelve hours is up. And that was one of the best experiences of my life. Like incredible. So empowering. And it had gone from like Reclaim the Power, this damp squib of a camp at Didcot to then shutting down this coal mine in Germany, being like fuck you, fossil capital, there are enough of us willing to break bones, to like have our bodies crushed and pepper sprayed and beat up, to stop this shit. And we, the, just the collective force of so many people from all over Europe in that international group, you know, where English wasn’t people’s first language, just for us Brits or whatever. And we all despite having different languages, we all knew what needed to be done. And we all just kind of just symbiotically just like went for it and we all just the empowering, the empowering experience was so overwhelming of actually winning against the police. And you know winning, you know, they had detained us or whatever, but we caused, we started what became like this next wave of the climate movement in Germany. And the internationals, we had this reputation in Ende Galënde as being more vehement than the German nationals. We were being fiercer than the German nationals that were on that action. And we gained this reputation of just being like absolutely going for it. Yes, and basically that was super empowering, illuminating.[...]But that was really formative and basically became the beginning of now what has been ten years of regularly going to Ende Galënde in Germany. I’m the only person from the UK to have gone to as many Ende Galëndes that I have. I used to be able to say I’ve gone to every single one but there was one in 2021 that I didn’t go to because people from the UK weren’t allowed because of Covid, fair enough. But then an exception was made for me because I was part of the international working group at that point. But then my passport had expired. [laughing] So I didn’t go to that one. And then there’s, in the last couple of years there’s been this regionalisation strategy in Ende Galënde, so there’s actually been a lot more smaller regional actions and not one or two large actions in Germany. And yes, and since 2019 I’ve been part of the international working group mainly was doing that to try and get internationals to come to Reclaim the Power’s Power Beyond Borders camp in 2019 that I was very actively involved with creating and setting up and mobilising for. And got like lots of internationals to come. And yes, and so I’ve been to pretty much, with the exception of one large, one Ende Galënde I’ve been to all of the large mobilisations. But yes not so much in recent years with the regionalisation ones. And I am very proud that like I’ve played a small part in destroying the coal industry in Germany.British Library catalogue number: C2037/100 Project clip number: 219