Just Stop Oil’s campaign to infuriate ordinary people has moved up a gear. After bringing traffic to a standstill and disrupting play at the snooker, now its activists are targeting those havens of peace, harmony and low blood pressure: Britain’s bustling airports during the school summer holidays.
A group of JSOers sat themselves down on the floor and locked their hands together at Gatwick’s south terminal yesterday, in an attempt to block the path through security. (Intrepid holidaymakers merely stepped over them and they were swiftly removed.) Now, JSO poster girl Phoebe Plummer – fresh from her conviction for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – has popped up at a protest in which paint was sprayed around Heathrow Airport.
A group of JSOers sat themselves down on the floor and locked their hands together at Gatwick
I’m almost surprised it has taken JSO activists this long to go after mainstream air travel (they have been known to spray up private jets before). Indeed, 21st century environmentalism has been obsessed with civilian aviation, despite it representing just eight per cent of UK emissions, and despite leading greens regularly being caught out as massive jet-setting hypocrites.
Back in the 2000s, we had the cunning stunts of Plane Stupid inflicting themselves on the holidaymaking public, blocking departures lounges, taxiways and – later – runways. They claimed to oppose airport expansion, but it didn’t take long for the mask to slip. Plane Stupid founder Joss Garman penned an article for the Guardian in 2007, decrying the ‘enormous growth in binge-flying’ and the ‘proliferation of stag and hen nights to Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner’. The supposedly uncultured plebs, with their insistence on enjoying themselves, were what really irked these people.
Indeed, rising eco-fury with air travel went hand-in-hand with the budget-airlines revolution. Suddenly, air travel had been democratised, all of these tracksuited people were showing up in places that had previously been the preserve of the middle classes. Greens were horrified. In 2006, then Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas said it was time for action – even if it meant the ‘end to cheap stag nights in Riga’. Time and again, environmentalists tellingly felt the need to denounce not simply air travel in general, but proletarian, unsophisticated, lagered-up air travel in particular.
Greens are a bit savvier now. They try not to say the quiet part out loud, at least quite so often. But when the likes of JSO’s Phoebe Plummer – a walking parody of a posh eco-warrior, who grew up in a £4million Chelsea mansion – are effectively demanding that the working classes be denied their week on a Spanish sun lounger, or lads’ weekend in Croatia, it isn’t hard to read between the lines. Just Stop Oil? More like Just Stop Oiks.
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