Just when you thought it was safe to go to a museum, art gallery or World Heritage Site, Just Stop Oil has struck again. Having already defaced Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Stonehenge and Magna Carta, the eco-activist group has decided to really hit the fossil-fuel industry where it hurts this time… by defacing Charles Darwin’s grave at Westminster Abbey. Take that, BP!
Today, Alyson Lee, 66, and Di Bligh, 77, scratched ‘1.5 is dead!’ in orange chalk on Darwin’s marble gravestone, nestled in the north aisle of the nave of the Abbey. ‘We have passed the 1.5-degree threshold that was supposed to keep us safe’, proclaimed the activists, before explaining their target’s tenuous connection to their cause: ‘Darwin would be turning in his grave to know we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.’
I can’t say for sure, of course, but I tend to think Darwin would have bristled at being claimed by these lunatics, whose zealotry owes more to dogma than to science
I can’t say for sure, of course, but I tend to think Darwin would have bristled at being claimed by these lunatics, whose zealotry owes more to dogma than to science. (Just Stop Oil galaxy brain Roger Hallam is fond of saying six billion people are going to die this century because of climate change, even though he has never been able back this number up when challenged.)
‘Why make a mess at Westminster Abbey – isn’t this going to alienate people from their cause?’ This really is the wrong question. The tactics of Just Stop Oil types don’t make any sense because Just Stop Oil types don’t make any sense. These aren’t activists trying to change things, they are cultists engaged in deranged public rituals, aimed only at demonstrating their supposed goodness and wisdom. The End might be nigh, but at least they did Something.
Those who thought this lot might pack it in now that Labour is back in power were always bound to be disappointed. Mad old Ed Miliband might be busy inflicting net zero misery and ever-higher energy prices on our already troubled nation, but that hasn’t calmed the likes of Alyson and Di, who told perplexed tourists in Westminster Abbey this morning that Labour is still ‘not doing enough’ on climate change. Indeed, JSO activists essentially see Labour as phoneys and sell-outs. They even disrupted one of Miliband’s speeches last year.
But if there is one slim, silver lining to the experiment in eco-austerity currently being inflicted upon us – set in train by previous governments, but pursued with renewed vim by Keir Starmer’s Labour – it’s that this extreme environmentalism is finally, albeit painfully, being exposed for the regressive ideology that it is. It is becoming impossible to deny that this is all about ordinary people being colder, poorer and less free in order to make politicians feel good about themselves and pacify the hysterical upper-middle classes.
I dare say the cunning stunts of Just Stop Oil will be given even shorter shrift by the public in the near future, as their worldview continues to collide so brutally with reality.
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