"You are the best of it" - Yorkshire Post Editor James Mitchinson praises tree scandal protesters as plaque unveiled

In May 2023, Sheffield City Council committed to fund and commission a plaque to acknowledge the significance of the Street Trees Campaign and the wrongs committed by the Council in Sheffield between 2012 and 2018.

The council said it would “serve as a permanent, lasting memorial to those who campaigned and why, and to Sheffield people who value the city’s rich and diverse environmental heritage”.

The Yorkshire Post Editor James Mitchinson delivered a speech on the steps of the Town Hall on Friday afternoon.

In the speech, he praised the determination of the protesters and said what they achieved was “nothing short of remarkable”.

He said the protesters had “left an indelible mark of righteousness on Sheffield” and their “honesty and integrity are now hallmarks branded into the metal of the Steel City forever.”

The speech in full:

First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me to give this address today. When the invitation arrived in my inbox I wrote back: I think you’ve written to the wrong James, I’m afraid. I said. There are a great many people more suitable than I, who have sacrificed far more and toiled far harder than I have in this skirmish who are surely better placed to speak, I said.

Alas, I was told, it was not a mistake. So, before I begin, I want to thank you for putting me up here. It is an honour. It is … a privilege and I want to dedicate what I say next to the incredible people who put their lives on hold, their liberty at risk and their sanity through a years-long mangle of corruption that, without your courage, would have prevailed. Honestly, thank you.

And, yet: I would rather not be here. I would rather you all weren’t here, either. At least not for the reasons we’re gathered, but here we are. 14 years after the people inside this building, people charged with taking care of Sheffield, struck a £2 billion deal with a contractor - the deeply flawed terms of which led to one of this city’s darkest hours, putting a forest of 17,500 majestic and mature street trees in the vexed cross-hairs of the chainsaws, wielded by people who simply didn’t care.

Fortunately, though, there were people living in this city who did and do still care.

—

9th February, 2017: my secretary Jayne took a call. She transcribed the conversation and emailed it to me - adding: ‘the lady was really articulate and intelligent but I could tell she was really upset. She seemed a genuine caller.’ That caller had said this: “I wish to remain anonymous. I’m scared. But I saw a tweet from James about tree felling in Sheffield and I want him to know how worried we all are about it. There is little to no media coverage of what’s happening, and as a result the full extent of the conduct of Sheffield Council and its deceit is going unchallenged.”

—

With hindsight, that was more than a fair criticism. We simply weren’t doing enough. I would turn on the radio and hear false equivalence being wheeled out, masquerading as journalism. Each side was being given a chance to have their say, but only one was acting in good faith. I didn’t know that, then. It is perhaps easy and obvious, now, to say that of course the campaigners were right and of course the council was wrong but at the time the prevailing narrative was different.

An expensive smear campaign was at full tilt - hundreds of thousands of pounds were being spent on trying to buy a new truth: councillors and officials - many of whom have sauntered off into the shadows, long gone, people who must be held accountable if we are to stand any chance at all of bringing full and proper closure to this matter - were portraying campaigners as tree-hugging crackpots with nothing better to do than meddle in their expensive public realm improvement project - one that we were repeatedly told was for the good of the city. Lies, damned lies and statistics were being shown to me and to others to illustrate that these people, you people, were nought but ill-informed busy bodies.

I kept going back to that call Jayne received: she was articulate; she was intelligent; she was upset. She was genuine, James, Jayne had told me. I knew I needed to listen more carefully, observe more diligently. And so, I got to know a few of you.

As I did look more carefully and listened more intently, I saw men and women investing hours and hours of their own time, days, weeks, months and in the end years in pursuit of truth. Detectives and journalists in your own right, working with and alongside my irreplaceable colleague Chris Burn, you formed a formidable team, a battalion is perhaps a better description because you went to war with Goliath and in the end, David won.

But you were up against it: boy were you up against it. The full might of the Establishment. Bouncers recruited to manhandle you off the streets; police deployed as tactical reinforcement; cars towed in the dead of night to make way for trees to fall. I will not repeat what I shouted when word reached me that two women in their 70s - Jenny and Freda - had been arrested. Nick Clegg was right: it was like something out of Putin’s Russia, and since he said that, we have all been reminded of that which Putin’s Russia is capable of.

The then Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, who, having come to Sheffield to see for himself what was going on, described it as Draconian and Bonkers. It was…41 people were arrested. One for tooting on a child’s toy horn. Bonkers doesn’t get close, when you think about it.

And, yet: you did not relent. You did not give up. Bullied, intimidated, harassed, belittled and besmirched by people who were later described as deluded. Even when you were accused of spiking tea with poison - that one made international headlines, by the way, in the shape of The New York Times - as well as booby-trapping trees and many, many other reputationally harmful conspiracies. You kept going and went on to win one of the most hard-fought and successful environmental campaigns ever waged. In the end, it was not your reputations that were left in tatters but that of this council and the city itself.

To the credit of Kate Josephs and Tom Hunt, they saw that too and to the surprise of us all, accustomed to obfuscations, lies, hubris and denials, they apologised so sincerely, and profusely that it could not be interpreted as disingenuous. It was four pages of what I thought, to the credit of the new leadership, was sincere remorse and regret. Too late, yes. Too little, no. To dwell in the mire of discord in perpetuity is not healthy. Without those words, I suspect we wouldn’t be here today marking this occasion. They have helped the city to begin the process of healing the rift between the people and the city’s leaders.

One of those people I called yesterday. A familiar voice answered. “Hello, James. I still have your number saved, even after all these years,” said the friendly voice. I smiled. Years in which protest proved justified. Direct action, the route of last resort, was proven just. The tree-hugging crackpots, it turned out, were the good guys all along. I am proud to call you my friends, and I am proud to call myself a tree-hugging crackpot if that’s what we are.

But seriously: what you achieved is nothing short of remarkable. You turned around a tanker of insincerity - adrift in your city, and saved 11,000 trees that were in its path, destined for inevitable destruction. The plaque placed today will forever remind us of what happens when democratic power is abused; it should also be the starter of infinite conversations about the heroes who saved Sheffield’s trees.

You have left an indelible mark of righteousness on Sheffield. Your honesty and your integrity are now hallmarks branded into the metal of the Steel City forever. You are the best of it.