So it’s a not-so-fond farewell to Just Stop Oil, the soup-throwing, hand-gluing environmentalist troupe. According to JSO activist Hannah Hunt, who helped kick off the group’s campaign of infamy back in 2022, she and her comrades are calling it a day.
The reason? They’ve just been too successful.
‘Just Stop Oil’s demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil-resistance campaigns in recent history’, says Hunt. ‘But it’s time to change.’
Tragically, they haven’t given up altogether. They intend to work on new groups and strategies to deliver the ‘revolution’ they believe we need to ‘protect us from the coming storms’ – presumably literal and figurative.
But we can only hope those new groups and strategies won’t be quite so infuriating as what JSO got up to. If that is even possible.
JSO, its predecessor Extinction Rebellion and its various other People’s Front of Judea-style offshoots, certainly blazed a new trail in direct-action activism. Where earlier campaigns would aim to disrupt the powerful and win over the public, JSO et al disrupted the public with the approval of the powerful.
Many politicians are trying to pretend otherwise now, but when Extinction Rebellion first burst on to the scene in 2018 – blocking roads, ambulances and everyday life – it was slathered in praise by SW1, including by one Keir Starmer.
When Just Stop Oil spawned four years later, it seemed to be going out of its way to target working-class people, with protesters lying down in front of transit vans and throwing paint around at the snooker.
This was climate war as class war, unashamedly, with comically posh, comically named activists – Phoebe Plummer, Edred Whittingham, etc. – insisting the dumb, gas-guzzling plebs stop and listen to them.
Meanwhile, top museums displayed their materials, police officers were remarkably soft in dealing with them, and judges would pause before sentencing them to lavish praise on the guilty and endorse their cause.
Depressingly, JSO is not wrong to say its campaign was a success – with politicians, if not ordinary people. When Labour mooted its ban on new oil and gas licences, predicted to destroy more than 30,000 jobs, it effectively became the parliamentary wing of Just Stop Oil.
For all the anti-establishment posturing of the protesters, and the anti-JSO posturing of the politicians, the two sides have always – deep down – been singing from the same deranged hymn sheet.
Even when the Tories (remember them?) were still in power, the only real disagreement between the ministers and the crusties was how quickly net-zero penury should be implemented. These activist groups are merely the most irritating expression of a broader upper-middle-class hysteria.
So if you think climate-change zealotry will disappear with Just Stop Oil, you’re in for a rude awakening. But at least we’ll be spared their blood-pressure-raising amdram antics, if only for a little while.
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