Supporters of the climate group Just Stop Oil have announced that, after three years of disruptive protests, they are ending their campaign of civil resistance.
Hannah Hunt, whose speech on Valentine’s Day 2022 marked the beginning of the campaign, made the announcement outside Downing Street in London.
She said: “Three years after bursting on the scene in a blaze of orange, at the end of April, the Just Stop Oil campaign will be hanging up the hi-vis.
“Just Stop Oil’s demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history. We’ve made fossil-fuel licensing front page news and kept over 4.4bn barrels of oil in the ground, while courts have ruled new oil and gas unlawful.
“But it’s time to change. We are heading for 2C of global heating in the coming decade, resulting in billions being killed, mass civil unrest and social collapse. Meanwhile, we are seeing corporations and billionaires buying political power and using it to punch down on the weak and the vulnerable.”
Hunt said the group were creating the new strategy to tackle current realities but argued “nothing short of a revolution is going to protect us from the coming storms”.
A source within Just Stop Oil said the campaign would continue taking actions until a final protest in Parliament Square on 26 April. After that, the campaign will continue to exist “in the courts and in the prisons”, but cease actions on the streets. Any new protest movement devised by supporters would appear under a new banner with a new strategy.
Just Stop Oil said in a statement: “Just Stop Oil was intended to be a campaign to prove the effectiveness of disruptive tactics in bringing about necessary change, and we have been incredibly successful in that aim, but it’s now time to change.”
The announcement came after new laws passed in the past few years that have made it increasingly difficult and risky to carry out disruptive protests. In particular, new offences of interfering with key national infrastructure, “locking on” and tunnelling, and a revision of the law around causing a public nuisance have been used to criminalise climate activists and hand them long jail terms.
Dozens of protesters have been jailed. Last summer, five supporters of Just Stop Oil were handed multiyear sentences for planning road-block protests on the M25. Even after their terms were reduced on appeal this month, they remain the longest ever handed down for non-violent civil disobedience.
Meanwhile, new groups have emerged that have eschewed the previous commitments of some climate activists’ to be accountable for their actions, instead acting clandestinely to target organisations they regard as responsible for contributing to climate breakdown.
