Everyone’s fed up with Just Stop Oil. The eco-extremist troupe’s recent stunts – bringing traffic to a standstill with their ‘slow marches’ through London; disrupting play at the snooker, the cricket and now the tennis – have turned off even its natural allies. Last week, Californian millionaire Trevor Neilson, who once helped bankroll the group, said its activities had become ‘performative’ and ‘counterproductive’. Even Swampy (aka Daniel Hooper), the notorious, tunnel-digging eco-warrior of the 1990s, has distanced himself from Just Stop Oil. When asked by The Sunday Times whether he would storm the pitch at Lord’s, as JSO did last week, he said ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no’, adding that greens today should focus on ‘bringing communities together’. When Swampy is telling you to tone it down, you know you’ve lost the room.
The penny finally seems to be dropping among the chattering classes that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and all its other spawn aren’t the wonderful campaigners they once thought. Working-class people, of course, had their number from the beginning, given their antics disproportionately affected those with real jobs. But since JSO decided to switch from disrupting the lives and leisure activities of the working class to those of the upper-middle class, from blockading builders to storming Harrods, from ruining the snooker to interrupting the Glyndebourne opera festival, it seems its support among the bourgeois set is starting to waver, too. Its latest exploits certainly haven’t received the gushing, uncritical coverage that Extinction Rebellion first enjoyed when it burst on to the scene, blocking roads and bridges, in 2018.
But there’s a problem. The media seem to talk endlessly about Just Stop Oil’s tactics, about whether or not they are turning people off, even though they quite obviously are and have been from the beginning, all with barely a mention of what this group actually stands for – of what sort of society it is agitating to bring about, and what principles guide its irksome activism. The great and good seem to take it as read that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion et al have their hearts in the right place. Tennis star Andy Murray summed up this sentiment ahead of Wimbledon this week: ‘I agree with the cause – just not always how they go about expressing it.’
Hellbound and Down 