Just Stop Oil had looked on enviously at Dutch environmentalists who managed to rouse thousands of people to block a main road outside parliament in the Netherlands to protest against fossil fuel subsidies.
They had hoped to emulate their success in central London by gradually swelling a small demonstration to a mass protest that could “reclaim parliament”.
But the logistics of having enough people to occupy Parliament Square and the deterrent of potential jail sentences killed the idea in the end. “The firepower wasn’t there,” Jonathon Porritt, a JSO supporter, said.
Three years after it popped up at oil terminals, the M25 and football pitches, and more than 3,000 arrests later, the group is winding down with a final protest next month. James Skeet, who was recently acquitted over his role in JSO protests on the M25 three years ago, said now was a natural end point.
The official line from the group — which slow-marched along roads in orange high-visibility vests and threw orange paint at sporting and cultural events — is that it has achieved its goals. Labour’s policy is to ban new oil and gas licences.
It’s true that radical green groups are often like “pop-ups”, experts said. But the reality is the campaign has also been policed and legislated into oblivion.
Roger Hallam, a co-founder of the activist group, is serving a four-year prison sentence and key strategic thinkers including Louise Lancaster, a former teacher, and Larch Maxey, a researcher, are in jail. A plan for a summer campaign of disruption at airports was stopped before it even started after police arrested several activists.
“The toll of the trials and the imprisonments has had an effect,” said Graeme Hayes at Aston University, who has studied environmental movements in the UK for decades.
“Using conspiracy charges to bring in leaders — in politics, it’s called a decapitation strategy — has allowed the police and Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute people who weren’t necessarily undertaking action themselves but would have been at the heart of developing strategy.”
A JSO source said the organisation had been occupied with helping imprisoned members. They said that “repressive laws” passed by the Conservative government have also restricted their ability to recruit. “It’s inevitable that people are scared. They’ve seen what happens,” the source said.
Porrit, a veteran environmentalist and former chair of the Green Party’s predecessor, the Ecology Party, said the full implications of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 had only really become clear last year.
Porritt, 74, a former adviser to the King, said JSO could have quit when Labour were elected. “They chose not to do that and I think that’s proved to be a real problem for them. There’s no doubt that Labour has succeeded in persuading people they’re doing more than the Tories were, that the climate is safe in their hands, [though] in my opinion that’s complete nonsense.”
Hayes said JSO’s rationale for disbanding — that they had achieved their goal of ending new oil and gas extraction — was unconvincing.
Hayes said: “I think that’s a very weak claim. Even though the new licences aren’t being issued, we can just look around and say that this is hardly a sense that they’ve prompted significant policy action around climate change.”
Matt Twist, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police responsible for frontline policing, oversaw the force’s response to JSO and said that initially police were hampered by a Supreme Court ruling requiring officers to consider eight points before they could intervene with highway protesters.
He said: “The public were frustrated wondering why officers weren’t acting sooner. But then we used the Public Order Act to act more decisively and quickly.
“We increased the number of protest removal trained officers and increased the number of officers carrying debonding kits [for superglue].”
Twist said that once JSO began protesting at the homes of MPs, it had a “chilling” effect on democracy and was intended to intimidate politicians. He estimated that the cost of policing the protests was in the “tens of millions”.
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Twist added: “My thoughts [were] recognising that officers were becoming increasingly tired, and the demands are being placed on them day after day, fewer rest days, long hours, all of those things were playing on my mind when we are trying to resource these events and to make sure we do our job to keep the public safe.”
Labour is expected to consult later this year on banning new oil and gas licences. Two oil and gas projects approved by the last government, Jackdaw and Rosebank in the North Sea, have to reapply for development permits after a court ruling but do not require new licences. The government will not be adopting JSO’s specific demand of signing a treaty to stop fossil fuel extraction by 2030.
Rupert Read, a former political strategist for Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is still going but stopped disruptive protests in 2023, also said the declaration of victory was not entirely credible.
He argued that while XR’s protests in 2019 had spurred Theresa May, then prime minister, to write the 2050 net zero target into law, JSO’s disruptive actions had been repetitious, confusing and “not particularly effective”.
His new organisation, the Climate Majority Project, is trying to drive climate action through non-disruptive means by appealing to conservatives and helping communities to plan for extreme weather. “You can’t just keep on doing the same thing,” he said.
Talks are already under way for what comes after JSO. “There’s things in the works. Civil resistance isn’t over,” Skeet said. Mark Coleman, a 66-year-old priest in Rochdale who joined JSO in blockading Kingsbury oil terminal, said: “It’s important to take some time for rest and reflection. It’s a time to regroup.”
Climate groups in Britain have a history of rising from the ashes of old ones, from Climate Camp and Plane Stupid in the Noughties to XR in the next decade and Insulate Britain, JSO, Youth Demand and the Tyre Extinguishers this decade. A group calling itself the Citizens Arrest Network undertook “citizen’s arrests” of fossil fuel executives in London this month.
“My only certain feeling is that the climate movement needs a radical flank, people prepared to take direct action and hold politicians properly to account,” Porritt said. He added: “Whatever one may feel about it [the end of JSO], it’s a blow to the climate movement. There’s no question about that.”
