In praise of Just Stop Oil

As a child in the 1960s, all I wanted to do was get to London: to be rich and famous, yes, but also to go on demos. As I watched the attractive young adults having seven bells knocked out of them by the boys in blue for protesting outside the American embassy against the Vietnam War, I yearned to join the struggle. But as I was eight years old, this seemed highly unlikely at any time in the immediate future.

Instead I sought out and found images of the American civil rights marches: men in suits, nuns and priests, dignified black and white students. Then the suffragettes: delicate Edwardian women in bonnets and bustles being dragged away by the police to be force-fed. And right back to the Jarrow marches, which I can’t see photographs of to this day without feeling a distinct kick of class-hatred.

When I finally got to London, I threw myself at demos like a girl trying out potential suitors, dallying with being in favour of dolphins one weekend and being against hunting the next. Best of all was an anti-National Front protest in 1977 where I got knocked off my feet by a police horse; I tended my bruises like medals, sad when they faded.

Would any eight-year-old look at today’s climate-change demonstrators in general – and the Just Stop Oil disrupters in particular – and think: ‘I want to be like that!’? Probably, yes – but unlike me watching the Vietnam protests, they wouldn’t see these demos as part of the life of a principled and engaged citizen – they’d see it as a way to justify and prolong their own immaturity. Imagine being a parent trying to guide your offspring out of tantrum-having – and knowing that when the TV news comes on, they’re going to see adults sticking themselves to roads, throwing soup at art and pouring excrement over statues in the name of saving the planet.

Modern demos certainly aren’t what they used to be. Take the dwindling band of Remainers marching on like glazed hamsters on a wheel, a cross between Miss Havisham in her decayed wedding dress and a Japanese soldier hiding out in a Philippine forest not realising it’s all over. Or the balaclava wearers who menace feminist rallies, mistaking themselves for anti-fascists. And now the hysterical toffs of Just Stop Oil.

The privileged have always been drawn to ecological concerns. As I wrote of King Charles many moons ago: ‘It’s easy for the rich to be Friends of the Earth – it’s always been a good friend to them’.  It gives our rulers a new way to corral and control hoi polloi now that the old ways of pushing us around are deemed unprogressive. XR were out of touch enough. But the Just Stop Oil mob make XR look like reasonable and productive members of society.

I dubbed their kind the ‘Shrieking Violets’ (they often have Victorian parlourmaid names – Violet, Lily, Daisy – and they also resemble Violet Elizabeth Bott of Just William fame) in this magazine awhile back. All too often, their number includes the most irritating type of posh kids, who think they’re carefree hippies but are actually even more entitled and unapologetic about their privilege than their parents. I had beef with them for making Brighton so right-on: now they’re spreading across the land with their attempts to make life hard for anyone not in their gang. One of them – Indigo Rumbelow  – has inspired an amusing Twitter game of Find Your Silly Posh Name ‘by combining a colour with a defunct shop’. Another of them, 24-year-old Louise Harris, perched upon a gantry above the M25 having what my mum would have called ‘the ab-dabs’ as she bleated: ‘I’m here because I don’t have a future. You might hate me for doing this, but I wish you would direct all that anger and hatred at our Government. They are betraying young people like me — I wouldn’t have to be here if they did their duty.’ She appeared to be an older version of the pig-tailed pedagogue Greta Thunberg, whose petulant demands that we live a simpler life sound especially tone-deaf in the wake of the pandemic’s decimation of our economy.

Just Stop Oil protesters often have the same constant shrill refrain of ‘I don’t have a future!’ Why not ‘we’ or ‘the planet’? Are they so entitled they genuinely think the threat of their own non-existence will be enough to make the rest of us spring into action? Never mind the fact that anyone who actually knows anything about this stuff (on both sides of the argument) says we literally can’t Just Stop Oil straight away – these Verruca Salts know what they want and they want it now.

But aren’t they passionate, these youngsters? Shouldn’t we jaded old hacks give them props for their willingness to act on their beliefs? No: I don’t think that these people really believe their antics will have any effect on climate change. These aren’t protesters passionately against social injustice but people who weren’t given boundaries as children. I saw the seeds of this grim situation being sown a decade back, in the boy in Waitrose screaming at the top of his lungs only to have his plummy mother enthuse ‘That was a lovely big scream – let’s do another, even louder!’ Or in my waitress friend leaving her job because she was tired of being told it was part of her work to change the steaming nappies of actual toddlers while their yummy mummy made a cappuccino with her cronies last for hours. And now here we are, stuck with these huge toddlers doing anything they can to stop the grown-ups going about their business

A culture which deified a child like Thunberg over a life-long environmentalist scientist like James Lovelock (who said before his recent death he was ‘alarmist’ about climate change) was bound to spawn a JOS. And though I despise them, as a climate change sceptic myself I’m also quite pleased by the fact they exist. It’s piquant that the other meaning of ‘demos’ is ‘the common people’ – as these uncommon fools have managed in a few short weeks to totally alienate ordinary people from the ecological doom-mongering which was becoming the norm. Go, JSO!