Climate Activists Say They Will Stop Throwing Soup and Halt Disruptive Protest Tactics
Members of Just Stop Oil made headlines for their controversial demonstrations involving valuable artworks and artifacts. Now, they say they’ve achieved their initial goal
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In recent years, climate activists with the British environmental group Just Stop Oil have made headlines for their controversial demonstrations: They’ve splattered soup on the glass covering Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, hammered at the case protecting the Magna Carta and spray-painted Charles Darwin’s grave, among other incidents.
Now, however, the group says it will stop using these high-visibility protest tactics.
“It is the end of soup on van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets,” the group wrote in a statement, adding: “This is not the end of civil resistance.”
Just Stop Oil has one final protest planned for April 26 in London’s Parliament Square. But after that, its members “will not be taking action under the Just Stop Oil banner,” a spokesperson tells CNN’s Catherine Nicholls.
The group is changing course after achieving its main goal, which was preventing new licenses for unexplored oil and gas fields in the United Kingdom. The government, controlled by the Labour Party, has pledged to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “We achieved what we set out to achieve,” James Skeet, a Just Stop Oil spokesperson, tells the New York Times’ Jonathan Wolfe.
He adds: “The idea around the [disruptive protest] strategy was to aim for a winnable demand and basically sort of prove the effectiveness of the tactics, essentially. We’ve done so. So now it’s on to moving on to the next thing.”
Valerie Brown, who has worked with Just Stop Oil, tells the Financial Times’ Attracta Mooney that the group’s protests were “exactly the right thing to do” but that the climate movement is “evolving and growing.”
Just Stop Oil formed in 2022 and quickly began staging attention-grabbing protests, like invading the track at the Formula 1 British Grand Prix and disrupting the red carpet at the BAFTA Awards.
Members also blocked London’s busy M25 highway for four days which, for some protesters, led to multi-year jail sentences. Members who participated in several other stunts were also arrested and served jail time. All told, 15 Just Stop Oil protesters are in prison, and another 16 are expected to be sentenced in the near future, per the Times.
More broadly, the group’s decision comes amid increasingly strict anti-protest laws in England and Wales. Even as it halts its disruptive protests, the organization says it will continue to support its “political prisoners” and push back against the new laws.
“We have exposed the corruption at the heart of our legal system, which protects those causing death and destruction while prosecuting those seeking to minimize harm,” the group wrote in the statement.
Moving forward, the group will take a “different approach” to end the use of fossil fuels, according to the statement.
“Nothing short of a revolution is going to protect us from the coming storms,” the group added.
