Any news story starts with a single question. When I put in my first call to npower’s press office I knew the when, the where and the how. But what I didn’t know was the why: Why had an accredited press photographer been served with a High Court injunction and threatened with a five year jail sentence for simply doing his job ?

Three months on, even after the injunction has been lifted from members of the press I’m afraid to say that I’m still none the wiser.

“First of all, the injunction is not about stopping news reporting at Radley Lakes” began their spokesperson, before I’d even finished my question. So why had a news photographer been legally injuncted from taking news photographs ? I had to ask the question five times before I got an answer: which was, they didn’t know. They’d get back to me.

In a written statement later that day, npower said – apparently with a straight face – that the injunction served on news photographer Adrian Arbib to stop him taking photographs “does not stop media reporting”. Before I had time to mentally unravel that conundrum, the statement went on to add: “we WANT media to report so we can give our side of the story” (their use of capitals). Well, if so, they certainly have a funny way of going about it.

If npower genuinely want wider coverage of the Radley Lakes story, they must be more confident than I would be in their position. The plain facts of the case, undisputed by either side, are that a multinational company bought a much-loved local beauty spot, populated by otters and kingfishers, with the express purpose of dumping thousands of tonnes of ash there from the fourth most polluting power station in the world.

And while I’ve no doubt that their press office is full of dedicated, hard-working individuals, I really can’t imagine any of them leap out of bed in the morning with enthusiasm, given their PR strategy hinges on debating on blogs as whether to the exact percentage of arsenic, cadium and lead in the ash means it can be referred to as “toxic”. In press officer parlance, it’s the kind of story that “doesn’t spin well”. As a general rule, if you’re a PR, you don’t really want to be putting the words “dumping”, “beauty spot”, “arsenic”, “cadium”, “otters” and “kingfisher” in the same press release.

Narrow remit

The stories we cover on the EPUK website take a deliberately narrow remit to reflect our membership. So the sole issue we addressed in the Radley Lakes case is why one of our members, a respected environmental photographer, was prevented from taking photographs and earning a living. But in trying to understand the truth of the matter, it is impossible not to form opinions on the bigger issues involved.

For example, having read the court papers, it became very clear to me, that the injunction was granted on the flimsiest of unchallenged evidence, largely made by anonymous witnesses who knew they would never have to appear in court. Almost all the witnesses were receiving money from npower in one form or another, whether as employees, contractors or consultants. The one statement seen by EPUK which is made by someone not in the pay of npower consisted largely of hearsay evidence, which would in any case be generally inadmissible in court. And there is, npower’s solicitors have since acknowledged, at least one serious error of fact in at least one of the statements.

What was happening in February at Radley Lakes didn’t really amount to much. So npower based their case on what could theoretically happen in the future. Even npower’s own expert witness conceded that it was difficult to predict whether the protest would escalate into a full scale illegal protest, or whether it would remain on the right side of the law.

And therein lies the problem for those opposing it: attempting to prove that something won’t happen is significantly more difficult than saying that it might. I think Natalie Portman might drop by my house this evening begging for a date. Now you try to prove that she definitely won’t. And without using my byline picture.

So the reason the injunction bans the carrying of “hammers, nails and rope” within a mile of the site, is not because these have been used to disrupt npower’s activities, but because it was speculated that they might be so used in the future to construct traps or spike trees. That no trees had been spiked, nor any traps constructed, was neither here nor there. And the reason photography was banned was not because photographs of contractors had been used maliciously, but because they might be in the future.

One of only two npower employees who gave a statement alleged that as he drove out of the Radley Lakes compound a protester reached into their bag “as if to take out a camera”. No picture was actually taken, but to follow npower’s reasoning, that’s no reason that photographs might not be taken in the future to incite direct action against their employees.

“Only slightly afraid”

Not that there had been any violence against the security guards. The most serious evidence that npower could muster was that a security guard’s leg was (in the words of his colleague) “brushed” by a protester’s vehicle one night: not hard enough to leave a bruise, but troubling enough to leave the thesaurus-owning Witness E “scared”, “shocked”, “traumatised” and “threatened” following the incident.

The statements also list a remarkable number of overheard private conversations and phone calls which were made by protesters when secuity contractors were within earshot. Now either the security guards have ears like fruit bats, or they have an uncanny ability to be within listening distance when private conversations happen. Witness C, a security guard, reports that while being interviewed by a reporter, a protester allegedly states of his willingness to get backing from extremist animal rights groups to “rip [the security guards’] hearts out”. Another security guard’s statement consists entirely of an incident in which the same protester described the security team as “the enemy”. The guard rather boringly admits that this made him “only slightly afraid”; an unusual anticlimax to a three page statement. Perhaps he should have borrowed Witness E’s thesaurus.

While these statements are presented by npower as evidence of a real and present danger to the security guards, it is clear from other overheard conversations involving the same protester that he could be described most favourably as prone to exaggeration. And the impression that I got at the time from the witness statements of the protester was that he was more of a danger to himself than others. Indeed, since then, the only damage he has inflicted has been to himself: a broken arm and a cut artery sustained during a frankly hare-brained attempt to flee from police custody through an air vent.