Hello and welcome to this episode of A World to Win, a podcast from Tribune magazine.

I'm Grace Blakely bringing you your weekly dose of socialist news, theory and action from around the world.

This week I talked to Ben Smoke, one of the members of the Stanstead 15,

a group of activists who stopped a mass deportation flight from taking off from Stanstead Airport in 2017

before being tried under law designed to prosecute terrorists.

We discussed the details of the protest in the trial, how to put together a good direct action,

the government's barbaric approach to migration policy, and why successive Tory governments seem so adept at breaking international human rights law.

Thanks so much to all our amazing patrons who make the show possible.

If you want the full hour long episode of this show, as well as full length interviews with previous guests like Naomi Klein, Dr Cornel West and Jeremy Corbyn,

support us at patreon.com slash a world to win pod.

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Another big thank you to the revenue and the makers who've let us use their track Heavyweight Champion of the world as our intro and outro music.

And now here is Ben Smoke on the trial of the Stanstead 15.

Hello Ben Smoke and thank you so much for joining me on this episode of a world to win. How are you?

Thanks so much for having me. I am relieved. I'm so relieved. I'm ecstatic and happy and very energetic.

I had my first unbroken night's sleep for a very long time last night.

That's fantastic. That's really good to hear.

And how is everyone else feeling? The group must be generally kind of relieved and happy and ecstatic.

Yeah, I think it's taken some time to kind of properly sink in. I know for me particularly like I kind of...

I didn't really kind of get to like realising that we'd actually won until Saturday night, Sunday morning.

...