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In a YouGov poll in April, just 4 per cent of the people surveyed said they looked “very favourably” upon the group. A JSO protester then asks the counter-demonstrator if they think standing for election is the best way to get their views across. “Democracy? It’s served Western civilisation pretty well.”, the anti-JSO protester says.
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?”And earlier this week another car user got out to remonstrate with JSO activists holding up traffic in Westminster. I’m a working-class woman who really cares about the environment for my child and their future. It’s losing people like me — mums who care because we’ve got kids.” The group of volunteer counter-protesters flooded into the banquet and disrupted it with the alarms, the footage shows. 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.
Footage shows the environmental protesters sitting on the floor, encircled by a group of 15 to 20 people standing around them while they try to explain why they are slow marching in the capital. 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.”
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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”. MORE : From trains to doctors, strikes will grip London in July 2023. But who is staging industrial action? I’m slightly nervous we’ve given them an idea,” says Manners of his prank, which has been viewed nearly 450,000 times in two days, and was designed to mimic the sorts of antics that JSO has made their bread and butter. 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.”
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.” 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”. 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. The achievements of JSO are questionable. Have they succeeded in garnering widespread media coverage? Yes. But in doing so they have lost support. Dr Oscar Berglund, a specialist in climate change activism at University of Bristol, says Just Stop Oil is not popular. “It is disliked by about 60 per cent of the population. We thoroughly enjoyed Josh & Archie’s prank yesterday. Great action design — nonviolent and ever so slightly disruptive,” Just Stop Oil tweeted Monday morning.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.” 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”. 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.
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