Just Stop Oil Has Called It Quits, but They Say Their Fight Is Far From Over

On Thursday, some big news landed regarding the future of the climate movement in Britain. Just Stop Oil announced that: “Three years after bursting on the scene in a blaze of orange, at the end of April we will be hanging up the hi-vis.”

“It is the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets. But it is not the end of trials, of tagging and surveillance, of fines, probation and years in prison,” the group said in a statement. 

They will hold a final action in Parliament Square on 26 April. 

During their short history, Just Stop Oil supporters have been arrested 3,300 times and imprisoned 180 times for, in their words, “having broken laws that were drafted by the fossil fuel industry”. In June 2023, the Met Police said the group had cost it more than £4.5 million in just six weeks.

But while the organisation may be ending, they continue to face the force of the law. Seven of their activists are in prison serving sentences of up to four years, and eight are on remand. In the next few months, 16 more are due to be sentenced.

Byline Times’ Josiah Mortimer (JM) spoke to Just Stop Oil spokesperson Mel Carrington (MC), who has been a core activist with the group from the beginning. 

It’s the end of an era for the opinion-dividing climate action group. But what’s next? 

JM: What’s behind this decision to ‘hang up your hi-vis’? 

MC: It was something we’d been thinking about for a while, probably since we claimed a win when Labour came to power, but it didn’t really make much of a splash, and we were thinking about what we’d do from there. 

It just became ever more apparent that our current focus is not achieving what we need. 

Looking at the science, looking at what’s going on, looking at the global environment post Trump. We’ve got a poly-crisis, and we need a much broader based approach to resist. 

So we’ve been thinking about ending the campaign for a while, and it just seemed like a good moment to do it.

JM: Does it also reflect that a lot of JSO activists have been imprisoned? It must have been a very tiring couple of years as a movement.

MC: I think the whole climate movement has been up against it for years. It’s run by volunteers and individuals, and little groups across the country. Just Stop Oil is no different. We’re now mainly funded by individual donations, small donations, and people have thrown their heart and soul into it, and you can’t keep doing that up against the might of the fossil fuel industry and the violent apparatus of the state. Inevitably, I think there’s a bit of fatigue.

But we’re really keen to frame this as a win for the climate movement as a whole. And I will be the first to say that the credit isn’t all down to Just Stop Oil. Obviously, there are lots of groups. I was speaking to the Weald Action Group this morning, who are frankly hopping mad about our statement, because they’ve had some fantastic wins in the courts, and they do great work. 

JM: Who made this decision? Is it collectively, from a group of volunteers? Was it a steering group? Most people won’t understand how those decisions are made.

MC: There are working groups with different jobs. The group that determines strategy makes decisions at the strategic level. We look at everything, how we’re mobilising, what kind of press we’re getting, the finances, the energy in the system. All of that feeds into the decision-making.

We’ve just got to the point where we feel the external environment has changed so much, particularly with Trump, with the new Labour government, with the evident rise of right-[wing] billionaires corrupting our politics. We need a new approach that is very multi-faceted, and we need to think about how we mobilise masses of people to resist.

The repression means that street movements are struggling. When you can get arrested and get six months in prison for marching in the street, you have to say that authoritarianism is alive and well in this country. 

It’s astonishing how little outrage there is about that, because Just Stop Oil is hated. So who cares if Just Stop Oil supporters get imprisoned?

There’s a clear need to address all of this. We felt we should adopt a new approach, a new brand, a new way of mobilising, a new way of fundraising, a new strategy, a new demand. We want to wipe the slate clean and think about what’s best in these new circumstances.

JM: You mentioned being hated: is closing shop a recognition that the direct action approach of JSO isn’t the right approach? That you need to actually get the public to support the organisation itself, as well as its aims?

MC: It’s not that so much as we need civil resistance that encompasses multiple different tactics. Given the state of repression, small groups of people can’t take those sorts of actions without severe consequences, but larger groups of people can. Clearly you need to mobilise more people to have a street level protest. You need to organise more people to mobilise more people.

The problem is that there are many people who support our aims, but who don’t want to come and take action because of fear of consequences, and the consequences are now much more severe.

It’s not that our approach was wrong, it’s that the circumstances have changed. That’s not to say there won’t be civil resistance in future. It’s just that I can’t pre-judge what form it will take, because we need to do that analysis of what we can and can’t do, and what people will be prepared to do in future.

I’ve talked to journalists who asked, ‘What next? Where are people going to go?’ You can see it already. There are lots of little groups popping up as Just Stop Oil has been less active in the last six months or so. There are groups experimenting with different approaches. There’s one called SOS who are deflating tyres of SUVs. There’s a Citizens Arrest project where they’re “arresting” CEOs of water companies and oil companies – it’s a media stunt, because the oil executives are scurrying away or refusing to be stopped.

Creativity is flowering, and Just Stop Oil fading away is a good thing because it means other groups can step forward. We can think about what we want to do next, and who we want to do it with, and who we want to mobilise and how we do that. It’s all good, but it’s clear that civil resistance has to continue, and if it’s not us, it’ll be other people.

JM: So there will be a new organisation that comes out of this?

MC: Absolutely. I think most people just want to have a break first, and then do some consideration. We can’t take too long about it, clearly, because the crisis is what it is, but people do need some downtime.

JM:
The anti-protest laws, some of them were specifically targeted at XR and Just Stop Oil. With this announcement, is it not the case that they’ve done what they intended to do? In a way, they’ve worked.

MC:
You could say that, but I think we should all be very concerned. The Government is going to review these laws this year, but there’s no indication they’re going to row back on them.

They hit everybody else as well as Just Stop Oil. It’s a very worrying sign, but it’s in common with a lot of Western democracies. This is happening across Europe, which now has some quite draconian laws. Developments in the States suggest that centrist governments are emboldened by what’s going on there. It’s not something to be celebrated.

JM: What should we expect from the April action? Are you hoping to get as many numbers on the streets by Parliament as possible?

MC: We’re not aiming to get major press for it. It’s to bring our community together. Everyone who’s ever taken action with us – it’s not arrestable, we hope. 

Come down, get together, we’ll do a bit of swarming, and have a get-together afterwards, and we’ll consider what’s next. It’s just an open invite to get together and have those discussions.

Last year, we launched the ‘Umbrella’ strategy, and there are affiliated groups that come together under this. The idea was that this strategy works together a bit like a pincer. We’ve got ‘Assemble’ on one hand, which is looking at setting up parallel institutions through citizens assemblies and deliberative democracy. 

They’re running assemblies around the country, and these assemblies are coming up with various demands. Groups of people going through this deliberative democracy process are saying they want to take action based on their local or national demands.

At some point, if they manage to get funding for it, there will be a House of the People, which is representatives from all these citizens assemblies, which will come out with some demands. 

Then you might see the civil resistance movement taking action based on those demands. It’s a very interesting moment, and we’ll see how that develops. That might set a course for us going forward, or it might be too early for that.

JM: And Assemble is backing independent candidates?

MC: They did back a few independent candidates in the last election. They got quite a bit of funding from the Climate Emergency Fund to run lots of assemblies around the country, which is what they’re focusing on now. Working with the Sortition Foundation and others, they’re trying to get this House of the People set up and funded. 

The demand is to replace the House of Lords with the House of the People. It’s interesting and quite exciting. 

All the left-wing politicians like Corbyn and Feinstein are quite excited by it. 

JM: Will JSO core activists scatter into these other existing groups then?

MC: I think the most obvious leap is supporting Assemble, but also Defend Our Juries, which is doing lots of action around some of the court cases our people are going through. They sit outside courts upholding ‘jury equity’ [the ability of juries to acquit based on conscience]. 

We’ve got sentencing coming up for Heathrow and Manchester Airport actions. They might be sitting outside those cases. They did that for the Whole Truth Five appeal hearing. They had 1,000 people sitting in the Strand.

Because it’s non-arrestable it’s a useful thing that people can do while we think up the next radical movement. That seems an obvious link and Just Stop Oil will continue to exist in the sense of all the court cases going on long into the future. We need to keep supporting those people and our people in prison. 

JM: Do you have any reflections on the past few years of Just Stop Oil? Any regrets or things that JSO could or should have done differently?

MC: I think it’s probably too early for that. We’re still in the thick of it. There have been interesting pivots, most of those explained by mobilisation. If you look at the first actions we did at the oil terminals, we completely failed to get the kind of press coverage that we would have liked. That is a matter of regret, because that was really effective – blockading oil terminals. 

We did have some data to suggest that we’d contributed to shortages at petrol stations and the closure of petrol stations, I think a third of them in the South East. It was really impactful on the ground. But we didn’t get the press for that.

Then the oil companies and some local authorities brought multiple injunctions against us that saw people imprisoned for contempt of court when protesting outside oil terminals. That did not get a lot of press.

Then someone goes and throws soup on a painting and suddenly we’re a global phenomenon.

How do you make sure it points the finger at the climate crisis and not at individual activists? It’s a cat and mouse game.

JM: You have to operate in a pretty hostile media environment. 

MC: Exactly. But fewer and fewer people are reading the mainstream press. They’re getting their news in other ways. Maybe that’s a good thing.  And Byline, of course, doing fabulous work. So thanks.

JM: Is there any thinking among climate activists about how to build your own media networks, or circumvent the mainstream press?

MC: There’s lots of people chatting about it. I know that [XR co-founder] Robin Boardman is thinking about setting up a publishing house. [XR and JSO co-founder] Roger Hallam has just self-published a book from prison, which is out now. Jonathan Porritt is self-publishing a book about Just Stop Oil. There’s that stuff going on.

We’ve been talking for a while about an alternative to Novara, run by the climate movement. I’m not sure what’s happening with that, because we’re all volunteers, and none of us are media trained, and we don’t really know what we’re doing. It seems a bit fanciful, but maybe someone will come along with that deep media experience, who knows how to do it and can make it happen.