WHEN a Lord Chief Justice calls a custodial sentence “manifestly excessive,” it mirrors in restrained legalese what a layperson might call a “diabolical injustice.”

So Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett’s ruling that the jail terms imposed on Simon Blevins, Richard Roberts and Richard Loizou be quashed and replaced with conditional discharges indicates unequivocal disquiet over the legal sledgehammer wielded by Judge Robert Latham against these anti-fracking campaigners.

After the initial sentencing, North and Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce chief executive Babs Murphy’s comments were instructive.

She said it “sends out a clear signal” to those thinking of “committing such offences” that doing so would entail severe consequences.

In other words, Blevins, Roberts and Loizou would serve as examples to persuade the vast majority of Lancastrians who oppose fracking not to do anything about it on pain of being banged up.

The three men and fellow defendant Julian Brock, who was given a 12-month sentence suspended for 18 months, weren’t engaged in violence, intimidation or criminal damage.

They were carrying out peaceful direct action, which is an honourable and long-lived aspect of democratic expression in Britain, deployed in the face of refusal by the rich and powerful to listen to what the people of no property say.

Public inquiries into companies pushing for fracking have established that the people living above operations to fracture geological strata so as to extract shale gas do not want this going on below their feet.

The defendants’ legal teams are giving consideration to challenging the original convictions, rather than the draconian sentences imposed by Judge Latham.

The judge is said to have family links to the oil and gas industry through the JC Altham & Sons company, which supplies offshore gas and oil platforms and numbers the judge’s parents and his sister Jane Watson as directors.

Watson is also believed to have backed an open letter promoting fracking, which said: “It’s time to give shale a chance,” asserting that this would create jobs.

Kirsty Brimelow QC, who represented the three in court said that she wished to make submissions on the basis of the judge’s “apparent bias,” but the court did not hear this ground of appeal.

Most reasonable people would conclude that, if the above facts on his family links are factual, Judge Latham should indeed have recused himself from the trial.

Government ministers, whose political creed lays down that the likelihood of corporate profits will always trump people’s determination to protect their environment, vetoed popular protests, giving the green light to the frackers.

They justified their decision, as they have done with expensive and potentially hazardous nuclear power stations, by issuing dire forecasts of the lights going out as electricity supplies run out.

It beggars belief that the government  of an island, with almost unlimited possibilities for tidal, wave, onshore and offshore wind and even solar energy, could be so sceptical of the capacity for renewables that it prefers to opt for nuclear and fracking-generated shale gas.

The Tory government makes all the right noises about global warming and environmental protection, but, whenever there is a contradiction, it lines up behind the profits-obsessed vandals who make a mockery of the need to hand over a liveable planet to future generations.

The four brave activists who stood up against collusion between big business and government are an example to us all.

Saturday’s mass demonstration at the Cuadrilla drilling site near Preston should be supported, both on principle and to celebrate the release from jail of the Frack Free Four.