So farewell then, Just Stop Oil. To the relief of just about everyone, the climate cretins announced this week that they are ending their protests and ‘hanging up the hi-vis’. Apparently, because UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has caved to the crackpot demand of issuing no new oil and gas licences, Just Stop Oil’s work here is done.
‘We’ve kept over 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground’, boasted Just Stop Oil in a statement on its site, ‘and the courts have ruled new oil and gas licences unlawful’. That’s why JSO considers itself to be ‘one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history’.
‘Civil resistance’ seems like a rather self-aggrandising term to describe Just Stop Oil’s antics. Each stunt seemed designed to cause maximum irritation and annoyance, from blocking motorway traffic to gatecrashing theatre performances and sports fixtures. The reasons for targeting each event were usually only clear to JSO activists themselves. There was rarely any link to fossil fuels or the oil industry. When a pink-haired Phoebe Plummer lobbed tomato soup over van Gogh’s Sunflowers, she yelled: ‘What is worth more? Art or life?’ But neither of these things is threatened by either fossil fuels or climate change.
The problem with Just Stop Oil was never just its disruptive methods – it was also its message. Which was demented. It was never merely concerned about climate change. It was apocalyptic about climate change. The supposedly impending end of the world, in JSO’s eyes, was apparently enough to justify taking any action imaginable – no matter how incomprehensible to onlookers.
Tellingly, when a group of Just Stop Oil brats targeted a first-round World Snooker Championship match in 2023, pouring orange paint powder over the table, they said they were ‘calling on UK sporting institutions to step into civil resistance against the government’s genocidal policies’. In JSO’s galaxy brains, that statement no doubt makes perfect sense. But for those hoping to catch a bit of snooker it just sounded loopy.
Artworks were a particular target – again, for reasons that will always remain mysterious. The soup-chuckers managed to get van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom, John Constable’s The Hay Wain, Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus and a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Historical treasures weren’t safe either. Two octogenarian Just Stop Oil protesters even tried and failed to get their wrinkly little hands on the Magna Carta last year, smashing the glass that protects the 800-year-old document. A month later, a student and a pensioner (representing the two core constituencies of this movement) sprayed JSO’s signature orange powder paint over the 5,000-year-old Stonehenge, one of humanity’s oldest surviving monuments.
Needless to say, the Great British public didn’t take kindly to Just Stop Oil’s not-so-cunning stunts. In 2022, when two activists invaded the pitch during a Premier League game between Spurs and West Ham, they were summarily pelted with drinks from the crowd.
What ordinary folk instinctively understood was that Just Stop Oil was waging a class war. This was a movement of the uber-posh and privileged. A movement full of people with names like Indigo Rumbelow, Eben Lazarus, Amy Rugg-Easey, Emily Brocklebank and Phoebe Plummer. And it was determined to get in the way of working people’s pleasures.
Just Stop Oil is still planning to hold one last hurrah in Parliament Square in London at the end of the April, but after that, it has promised to work towards its other goals through less disruptive means (its plan to put former PM Rishi Sunak on trial for genocide has yet to come to fruition). Unfortunately, there will probably be some other eco-activist group eager to take up the mantle of inconveniencing the public, just as Just Stop Oil stepped up to fill the gap left by those other compulsive disruptors, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion.
Still, one can still hope. For now at least, there’ll be no more orange fart clouds erupting on sports grounds. No more soup cans spoiling precious art. No more mentalists glueing themselves to public highways. In fact, probably the only good news to come from Labour’s Net Zero idiocy is that it has shut these tossers up, at least for the time being. What a shame it’s come at the cost of destroying the British economy.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
