Just Stop Oil supporters take direct action
Just Stop Oil (JSO) has announced that it’s “hanging up the hi-vis”. It comes after three years of blocking traffic, throwing soup at paintings and standing up to fossil fuel bosses.
A JSO statement on Thursday said, “We are creating a new strategy to face this reality and to carry our responsibilities at this time. Nothing short of a revolution is going to protect us from the coming storms.”
JSO spokesperson Hayley Walsh told Socialist Worker the decision is “about recognising the vast amounts that the campaign has achieved”. “We’ve kept 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground and our original demand, no new oil and gas licences, is now government policy,” she said.
“But the primary issue is that we’re really uncovering how deep the issue is and how much there is to fight against.
“It’s not just about stopping oil—it’s about a society that is built to serve billionaires, by billionaires. It’s extracting from so many different areas of society. A campaign to just stop oil isn’t sufficient anymore.
“There’s such a desperate need to help people join the dots and tell the truth. The reason you’ve got a crumbling health care service, that you’re not able to afford food, that your kids’ education isn’t good enough—it’s all linked.”
Hayley said that, “without doubt”, the problem is capitalism. She added, “People are being told lies that we have to cut disability benefits.
“But we still pay, on average, £5 billion a year in subsidies to fossil fuel companies. And these are companies that make billions of pounds in profit every year.
“If they had a 2 percent wealth tax on the super-rich that would generate £24 billion. I think that would solve a huge number of problems rather than taking it away from the poorest.
“But that doesn’t serve those people that are making that money, does it? And that’s really what our government is doing.”
JSO’s shift comes as the British state is ramping up repression against the Palestine and climate movements. The state arrested nine Youth Demand activists and raided a Quaker meeting house last week.
Supporters of JSO have faced criminal convictions, with some of them imprisoned for years for their role in trying to shut down fossil fuels.
The group says it will continue to oppose the criminalisation of protest.
Hayley says repression isn’t the reason JSO are ending their direct action. But “it adds a weight of responsibility in terms of what we’re asking of people”.
“We need to make sure we’re doing it in the most impactful way,” she said. “Any organisation that is run responsibly has to consider how they use their people, how they use their energy, how they use their resources.
“While we’re a peaceful, non-violent, direct action group, we are causing disruption. But we’re not just doing that for disruption’s sake. We’re doing it to try and evoke change.
“We don’t know what will be next. It’s going to be a time of really looking and researching and assessing what’s worked and assessing what we need to do.”
The final JSO action will be in Parliament Square on 26 April and JSO wants everyone who opposes climate breakdown to join them. Hayley said, “It’s a low risk kind of action outside parliament, the place where you’re supposed to protest.”
A combination of mass and militant action is the best way to defend the right to protest.
And it has the power hit back at our rulers, their state and system—whether it’s over their climate inaction of complicity in Israel’s genocide. It’s more vital than ever to escalate resistance.
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