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A JSO protester then asks the counter-demonstrator if they think standing for election is the best way to get their views across. “Democracy? It’s served Western civilisation pretty well.”, the anti-JSO protester says. A cause like this “has to bring people with you”, says Manners. “We spoke to a lot of people who are quite senior in the environmental cause […] who said even within the cause [JSO] are hated because they’re not achieving anything.
We’ve even got them on camera saying ‘oh yeah being arrested is uncomfortable but it’s really empowering’. And it’s like, well, it shouldn’t be empowering. That’s not the point of being arrested.” All it took was a fleet of orange helium balloons and a few panic alarms tactically placed at a Just Stop Oil banquet to disrupt it. In a matter of minutes, the group that has blighted our summer had been given a taste of its own medicine. Or as one commenter underneath the video of the stunt online put it: “Great idea, I did this at Eton in 1997.” They will argue that they never directly killed the millions who are already dying and will continue to die of starvation, floods, drought, wildfires and deadly heat." And earlier this week another car user got out to remonstrate with JSO activists holding up traffic in Westminster. You need some kind of long-term strategy and I think most people in the environmental movement will agree that [if you’re] just disrupting things — what are you going to achieve?”There is a sense they are even losing support among their own people. “None of us are taking them seriously — they are now just seen as posh kids on vacation,” says Jen, a former member of Extinction Rebellion, who asked to be referred to just by her first name. Jen feels Just Stop Oil is made up of people for whom protesting “seems to have become a bit of a middle class hobby”. JSO has protested at major summer events including the Proms, Wimbledon, the Ashes and the Chelsea Flower Show. Yeah but rush hour will be over”, a counter-protester replies. Another says: “There’s an election this time next year. If you don’t like this government, why don’t you stand for election?” There was speculation that the counter-protest may have been a stunt carried out by JSO to allow it to explain to the public why it is carrying out the slow marches, but the organisation insisted they were “nothing to do with us”. The JSO protesters then ask the group how long they are going to keep them there for, adding: “What’s your plan, because when you leave we’re going to go on the road again.”
Footage shows the environmental protesters sitting on the floor, encircled by a group of 15 to 20 people standing around them while they try to explain why they are slow marching in the capital. Daniel was assaulted while marching this morning, and remained nonviolent throughout. Disruption is difficult, but it's necessary. It comes as public frustration with the group, which has vowed to ‘paralyse London’ with slow-marching columns in a bid to force the government to scrap new domestic oil and gas licences, has started to boil over into violence. The JSO protesters said they were happy the group had come to disrupt their demonstration because it gave them a chance to debate.Standing on Parliament Square, six activists made the announcement that they would begin to collect evidence against them to put in front of a court of law. Yesterday, climate campaigner Daniel Knorr, 21, was punched to the ground by one furious motorist who blamed one of the slow protests for crashing his car with his pregnant partner inside.
The video was shot in Elephant and Castle, south London, by JSO. The organisation later said the counter-protesters dispersed at 9.40am, after a debate of about 30 minutes. In a statement, mum-of-two Chloe Naldrett said: “Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, at his trial sought to defend himself by saying that he didn’t kill Jews because he was only in charge of transporting them to the death camps. Manners and Pieters began by planting a mole inside JSO. What did they find? A group of people largely intent on getting arrested. “They seemed so much more obsessed with the tactics and the game of protest than they did with the outcome of that protest,” says Manners, who gets the sense the group has begun to tie itself in knots.Prowse, who worked with Extinction Rebellion when it was first established, says there are now “big divisions” between the two groups. “A lot of people in XR are frustrated by Just Stop Oil, because they just think these have been bad tactics. Just Stop Oil’s raison d’être (widely slammed by fellow environmentalists) has been “raising the alarm” about the climate crisis. The prank did an effective job of highlighting how untethered their tactics have become. In a summer where wildfires in Europe have led the news, says Prowse, “I don’t think disrupting the snooker is informing more people about the problem than we already are via the news reports we’re seeing.” The people that they’re targeting are not responsible for their cause,” says Manners. “A single mother trying to get to work to feed her kids during a cost of living crisis, who might be on a zero hours contract, who might be late for work and therefore earn less money. That achieves precisely nothing when it comes to solving the climate crisis.”
The funniest thing about that sketch was the fact that they ‘raised the alarm’,” says Heydon Prowse, the satirist best known for handing George Osborne a maths GCSE textbook at a dinner at Mansion House, and convincing Jeremy Corbyn, in a prank call in 2017, that he was Stormzy and they should make a grime video together. Starting from 9am, 132 supporters began marching in nine groups around West, East London and South London. The achievements of JSO are questionable. Have they succeeded in garnering widespread media coverage? Yes. But in doing so they have lost support. Dr Oscar Berglund, a specialist in climate change activism at University of Bristol, says Just Stop Oil is not popular. “It is disliked by about 60 per cent of the population.The judges threw out this obscene defence and he was hanged.“When those in charge today go to court in the coming years, they will claim that they only facilitated the continued use of oil and gas and coal. I’m a working-class woman who really cares about the environment for my child and their future. It’s losing people like me — mums who care because we’ve got kids.” The giant hypocrisy is that the new oil and gas projects that the government has in the pipeline will cause migration like we’ve never seen before. I’m taking action with Just Stop Oil today to call on the UK government to listen to the United Nations, the International Energy Agency and thousands of scientists over an opaque think-tank funded by fossil fuel money. We must do better.” In a YouGov poll in April, just 4 per cent of the people surveyed said they looked “very favourably” upon the group. MORE : From trains to doctors, strikes will grip London in July 2023. But who is staging industrial action?
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