Just Stop Oil have finally met their match

Have Just Stop Oil finally met their match? The splendidly named counter-organisation ‘Just Stop Pissing People Off’ have pulled off two bracing publicity coups in the last week.

First, in Elephant & Castle in south London last Wednesday JSPPO ‘kettled’ JSO activists who were planning one of their slow marches down the public highway, forming a human ring around them (for a whole thirty minutes). Then at the weekend, and rather more spectacularly, JSPPO infiltrated JSO and spoiled their lovely lunch at the Heritage Centre in Bow in east London, releasing balloons up to the very high vaulted roof of the building and then switching on the ear splitting panic alarms they had attached to them.

The video footage of both incidents is particularly amusing because of JSO having to pretend that what has happened is great, because protest and debate are vital, etc. During the kettling, one of them even says: ‘It’s really great that we’re having this conversation’, which as I pointed out here last week is always untrue. After the balloon video was released, JSO put out a statement which said ‘We thoroughly enjoyed (the) prank yesterday. Great action design – nonviolent and ever so slightly disruptive.’ This is the posh version of ‘is this face bothered?’

But there’s something worth noticing about both JSPPO and JSO, and what they have in common. JSPPO is the brainchild of a pair of ‘YouTube pranksters’ (heavy sigh) called Joshua Pieters and Archie Manners. These are two ever so nice, very well spoken and very well-scrubbed boys of the type your mum would like your sister to bring round for tea. She would even put out the special doilies on their plates.

So what was their motivation here? The very same spur that causes people to eat whole jars of nutmeg or to leap from second-storey windows: views. On Josh and Archie’s YouTube channel – 1.4 million subscribers – you can watch a video of them hatching their plan. It turns out that they agree with JSO’s aims but not their tactics. This is a posh-on-posh crime. Their schtick is  ‘actually, we’re actually more environmental than you are, actually’.

Some years ago, a friend of mine briefly joined a feminist direction action protest group. She didn’t last long, as their meetings seemed to be taken up mostly with internecine disputes about tactics conducted in comically cut glass accents. One of these squabbles culminated in the use of the immortal line ‘You’re harming the movement, Lucinda!’ which became a catchphrase among our set for a little while.

There is something extremely ‘You’re harming the movement, Lucinda!’ about JSPPO and JSO. JSO’s statement after the second incident ends with this glorious passive-aggressive barb: ‘(Josh and Archie’s) faith in democracy is touching, but the climate crisis needs urgent action today – we simply don’t have time to wait for a new government’.

As always with doomsday cultists, the Rapture is never far away, and there is always a reason for why it never quite arrives, or alternatively signs and wonders – aah, do you see? – that it already has. Famously, Jesus was very vocal on the imminence of the Eschaton, leaving the Apostles looking a right bunch of lemons as the world obstinately kept turning. It’s very tempting to remind JSO that the democracy that they describe faith in, with mixed sarcasm and condescension, as ‘touching’ is the only thing preventing them from being either dragged off to a remote prison camp never to be seen again, or from being repeatedly run over, reversed over, and run over again just to make sure.

We regularly see actual grass roots protest against JSO from harassed motorists and commuters, ripping away their banners, lifting them helpfully out of the way, and generally doing the job the police have abdicated. Rather wonderfully, these people inadvertently present a positive picture of the modern British working class – all races united in their contempt for these posturing idiots. Similar, genuinely spontaneous ‘direct action’ has recently been seen in Llanelli in Wales against the repurposing of the local hotel to house illegal immigrants. It makes the heart swell with pride.

Direct action – rather than angry reaction – is very much a bourgeois thing, carried out by the very young and the very old members of that class when they really should be playing tennis or making some nice jam. Splendidly, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s speech at NatCon was stormed by a former member of ‘Canterbury scene’ progressive rock group Egg – called Hugo! – whose dad was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Tank Regiment.

This kind of activity requires a certain Whiggish priggish self-importance and a determination to stretch a joke beyond the two minutes it might actually be amusing. People on what I suppose we must still call ‘the right’ just don’t have those qualities. This is why Laurence Fox’s stunts, like burning a ‘Progress Pride’ flag, tend to elicit cringe rather than applause from what is nominally his ‘side’. He still retains the instincts of a leftie.

Like so many things in British political life, JSO vs JSPPO is really just a gripe between two basically very similar tribes of middle class people. ‘Something must be done!’ vs ‘Something must be done!’ Meanwhile, nothing is done.