Who’s a Bigger Threat? ‘Eco-Terrorists’ or Thugs’?

Two headlines raising eyebrows this week: multi-year prison sentences for the UK rioters, and Stonehenge’s shock Scottish origins. These stories are connected by an unlikely strand.

The average two-year prison sentence dished out for the violent disorder, seen by some as controversially high, shrinks in the shadow of the UK’s record five-year sentence for peaceful protest issued last month, and now facing appeal after violent rioters were given comparatively smaller terms.

Shocked? Not nearly as much as you were when you learned the same protest group threw orange powder on Stonehenge.

In July, five Just Stop Oil campaigners were sentenced to either five or four years jail over a Zoom call in 2022 in which they planned to gridlock the M25. The sentences – issued under a new law of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance that was brought in by the Conservative Government and backed by current Prime Minister Keir Starmer – are believed to be the toughest sentence ever given for peaceful protest in the UK.

Compared to three years for “racist hate”, “mob-fuelled violence” and beating an emergency worker; or two years and eight months for armed, violent disorder; or two years and five months for setting a police vehicle alight.

But who do you feel more afraid of: “ruffians and thugs,” or “eco-terrotists”?

The Just Stop Oil campaigner who appeared on Media Storm this week was slapped with a blaring ‘terrorist’ banner on his TalkTV appearance days before. The same chat show labeled Brits involved in violent riots “concerned citizens”. The words our media choose to use clearly shape public opinion. But do they shape prison sentences too?

Aside from the fact that a Sun reporter infiltrated Just Stop Oil’s meeting and sent its damning contents to the police in the first place, climate reporter Diyora Shadijanova points to language used by the prosecution that echoed many media headlines in branding the campaigners “fanatics”. 

“I’m hearing the headlines that I’ve been reading for the last couple of years,” Shadijanova said, “misinformation trickling in from think-tanks that are funded by lobbies. These phrases that the public has picked up have come from the top. And I think it’s really, really important to make that clear.”

Interestingly, the demands made by these ‘fanatics’ in 2022 are now official Government policy, following Labour’s pledge to issue new no oil and gas licenses (“it’s like Ed Miliband read our press release,” our Just Stop Oil guest told us gleefully– someone deradicalise Ed Miliband, quick, before it’s too late!)

At the time of the M25 blockade, the protesters echoed demands already being made by the United Nations, World Health Organisation, and International Energy Agency policy.

Grandpa-by-day, ‘eco-terrorist’ by night, Adrian Johnson outlined Just Stop Oil’s principle of non-violent civil disobedience on this week’s Media Storm. News to some of us in the Spotify studio was Just Stop Oil’s ‘Blue Lights policy’, a mandate to move out of the way for emergency vehicles that has been in place since the group’s conception.

This has not translated into public perception. “They’re stopping ambulances! They’re stopping fire engines!” was a common refrain in vox-pops from the public plastered on news broadcasts. Blue light blockades appear to be the group’s most damning public indictment: “Just Stop Oil are okay with people’s lives being at risk because they want to make a point.”

Is Johnson lying? In October 2022, Just Stop Oil activists scaled the Dartford Crossing bridge in Kent, forcing police to divert traffic onto the M20, where a fatal collision led to two women’s deaths and a man suffering a broken leg and vertebrae. The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Express reported Just Stop Oil protesters slowed down the ambulance from arriving at the scene of the accident. The Express splashed an additional exclusive: “Eco-mob has ‘blood on their hands’ after mum died waiting ‘40 minutes’ for ambulance”. ‘Non-violence’ means little when someone ends up dead on the road.

And yet, the collision was over 10 miles away from the Dartford Crossing protest. And yet, the Southeast Coast Ambulance Service abjectly denied that protesters had slowed paramedics. They told OpenDemocracy ambulances arrived without delay, well before the 40 minutes claimed by The Express, and pointed out an additional air ambulance attended the scene, a detail missed by tabloid reporters.

This is clearly misinformation. And it’s clearly working.

But a question remains: why is it happening? For Shadijanova, it’s all “business strategy”, serving media generously from the bottom-up and top-down. ‘Outrage clicks’ drive up monetisable engagement, while “tracing the money” reveals a funding web sooty with polluters.

Which is why Johnson doesn’t deny the media’s framing of climate campaigning as a class war, he just denies it’s being fought by middle-class campaigners making working-class individuals’ already hard lives harder. “It is a class war between ordinary people and the elite, the billionaire class, the rich fossil fuel industry.”

The media has a legitimate right to hold disruptive campaign groups to high standards of accountability, but their credibility crumbles when they let the powerful lobbies opposing their cause off the hook. “There’s a really heavy focus on the protesters,” Sadijanova points to journalists scouring social media profiles for pictures of campaigners boarding a plane years before, “and such a lack of focus on polluters themselves”.

“But I think that says much more about the mainstream media than it does about Just Stop Oil.”

Media Storm’s latest episode ‘Just Stop Oil: Why do people hate them so much?’ is out now.