Just Stop Oil to ‘Hang Up the Hi-Vis’, Final Protest in April

Since its inception in February 2022, Just Stop Oil made international headlines for a series of disruptive actions, including pouring tomato soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” paintings in London’s National Gallery and spraying pain on Stonehenge. The group will hold one last demonstration in London at the end of April.

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British climate group Just Stop Oil is ending its campaign of civil resistance after three years and dozens of arrests and imprisonments over its disruptive actions.

“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,” group member Hannah Hunt said on Thursday.

Announcing the decision outside Downing Street in London, Hunt said the group had achieved its main objective: forcing the British government to commit to ending new fossil fuel licensing and production.

“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,” Hunt said. “We’ve made fossil-fuel licensing front page news and kept over 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground, while courts have ruled new oil and gas unlawful.”

‘One Last Action’

Since its inception in February 2022, Just Stop Oil made international headlines for a series of disruptive actions, including pouring tomato soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” paintings in London’s National Gallery, spraying pain on Stonehenge, blocking traffic on a major motorway in London, and disrupting the World Snooker Championships.

“But it is time to change,” Hunt said on Thursday, as she called on “everyone who wants to be a part of building the new resistance” to take it to the streets of London at the end of April for “one last action.”

In a statement on their website announcing the protest, the group sought to reassure people hesitating to join the march for fear of arrest.

“This will be a lower-risk action and we won’t be pushing for arrest,” it said, adding that it “will be doing our best to minimize that risk so that everyone can join.”

Mass Appeal

16 Just Stop Oil activists were imprisoned last year for up to five years for protests they took part in or organized in 2022.

The activists launched a mass appeal last year, seeking to overturn what they described as “manifestly excessive” sentences.

Five of them – Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw, and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu – saw their sentence reduced to between four and two and a half years. They were originally sentences to between five and four years for joining a Zoom call to discuss plans for a peaceful protest on the London motorway to challenge the continued extraction of fossil fuels, which took place in November 2022.

Meanwhile, 78-year-old Gaie Delap was the only one among five activists who participated in the M25 protest by climbing onto gantries over the M25 to see her sentence reduced from 20 months to 18 months. 

The Court of Appeal rejected the claims of 10 other activists, including those of two activists sentenced to two years and 20 months, respectively, for pouring tomato soup over a Van Gogh painting.

The severity of the sentences, some of the harshest protest sentences ever handed down in the UK, sparked widespread criticism from humanitarian and environmental organizations. A study by the University of Bristol last year revealed that UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at three times the average global rate. Only Australia’ is worse.

Disruptive Tactics

The surge in disruptive tactics within the climate activism sphere has been instrumental in amplifying the urgency of environmental issues, with activists employing innovative methods to demand immediate action to address the rapidly worsening climate crisis.

Groups like Just Stop Oil in the UK and Letzte Generation (“Last Generation”) in Germany rely on blockades, sit-ins, roadblocks and art desecration to disrupt the status quo and propel climate change into the public spotlight.

However, the public response to these disruptive actions remains divided, with some lauding the activists for their courage and commitment to the cause and others criticizing the disruptions as causing inconvenience and potentially alienating public support. 

Extinction Rebellion, a group founded in 2018 and well-known worldwide for its use of nonviolent civil disobedience to raise awareness about environmental issues such as biodiversity loss and ecological collapse, announced in 2023 that it was moving away from disruptive tactics.

“As we ring in the new year, we make a controversial resolution to temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic,” the group said in a statement. “What’s needed now most is to disrupt the abuse of power and imbalance, to bring about a transition to a fair society that works together to end the fossil fuel era. Our politicians, addicted to greed and bloated on profits won’t do it without pressure.”

More on the topic: Opinion: Are Climate Activists Reaching Too Far?