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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.”
Starting from 9am, 132 supporters began marching in nine groups around West, East London and South London. 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”. 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.Jen was one of the founding members of her XR group in a small market town. “What I liked about it was that it was properly organised to disrupt but not upset. JSO has protested at major summer events including the Proms, Wimbledon, the Ashes and the Chelsea Flower Show.
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.” Daniel was assaulted while marching this morning, and remained nonviolent throughout. Disruption is difficult, but it's necessary. 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. A JSO spokesman said the encounter ended cordially, and that while the counter-protesters “didn’t understand the necessity in the mechanics of society for social disruption’, the two sides “were broadly in agreement”.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. 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”. It all points to the idea that JSO may finally be running out of steam. “Just Stop Oil isn’t the climate movement,” says Suzanne Dhaliwal, a veteran climate change activist who has never been a member of XR or JSO. “It’s one tactic, one demographic and maybe it has had its moment and now it’s time to move on.” 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?”
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.” MORE : From trains to doctors, strikes will grip London in July 2023. But who is staging industrial action? 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. 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.”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.
In a YouGov poll in April, just 4 per cent of the people surveyed said they looked “very favourably” upon the group. 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.” The JSO protesters said they were happy the group had come to disrupt their demonstration because it gave them a chance to debate.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. 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.
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