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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