Just Stop Oil Return and Block Parliament Square; Can You Blame Them?

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On Wednesday, as I cycled to Parliament Square for the 44th successive monthly vigil for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay (part of monthly vigils that take place across the US and around the world), I suddenly felt that I had stepped back in time.

Like a phoenix reborn from the ashes of political repression, 60 Just Stop Oil activists, in hi-vis jackets bearing the climate action group’s distinctive logo, were sitting in the road outside the Houses of Parliament, having brought traffic to a halt.

The occasion for Just Stop Oil’s revival was the first PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions) of Andy Burnham, Britain’s new and unelected Prime Minister, anointed by the Labour Party’s Zionist elite to try to undo the electoral armageddon augured by his failed predecessor, Keir Starmer, less animated and less convincing than a packet of lard, but a Zionist of such formidable enthusiasm that, despite having been a human rights lawyer, he told LBC in October 2023 that Israel had the right to cut off water and fuel to an entire civilian population.

Andy Burnham has uttered some soothing words about Gaza, about how the government had made some mistakes, even though words mean nothing without concerted action to isolate and punish Israel. On climate collapse, however, after the hottest summer in the UK’s history, when many of us could do nothing more, for weeks on end, than to cower indoors in the hope of getting some relief from the inescapable furnace-like heat, he chose to condemn disposable barbecues as the main problem, and to promise to open up new oil and gas drilling, at Rosebank and Jackdaw, in the North Atlantic and the North Sea.

It was this latter threat that prompted Just Stop Oil’s return, because the group’s primary focus, since its founding in 2022, has been to get the UK to fulfil its climate agreements by refusing to embark on any new fossil fuel extraction programmes in the UK.

The history of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil first emerged as a high-profile climate action group highlighting the requirement for the government to refuse to undertake any new oil and gas extraction projects in March 2022, when supporters disrupted the 75th British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and then undertook pitch invasions at various football grounds. In April, they carried out countrywide blockades of ten critical oil facilities, although these were swiftly subjected to sweepingly effective civil injunctions.

Prevented from taking direct action against the source of the problem, the group then undertook numerous high-profile actions designed to secure maximum publicity, including, most notoriously, an action in October 2022, when two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, threw tomato soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s ’Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery. Although they succeeded in securing worldwide media coverage, much of it was negative, and even hysterical, even though the painting, protected behind glass, wasn’t damaged in the slightest.

The negative responses undoubtedly helped to encourage the government — headed by Boris Johnson, and with the hideously authoritarian Priti Patel as home secretary — to begin taking steps to rein in the protestors via punitive legal means.

When high-profile climate action began in 2018 and 2019, via the campaigning group Extinction Rebellion, the government was caught by surprise. Riding a wave of concern about climate change, which was also driven by the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her wildly successful ‘School Strike for Climate’ movement, the government bowed to the zeitgeist by declaring a climate emergency in May 2019.

However, when public protest was abruptly curtailed by the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, both the fossil fuel companies and the fossil fuel-supporting officials in the government who had regarded the declaration of a climate emergency with contempt, took the opportunity to find a way to suppress this growing movement of environmental awareness. The fossil fuel companies began pumping out dangerous misinformation through social media, and Priti Patel began drafting legislation to outlaw all forms of protest that were even mildly disruptive, in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and its swift follow-up, the Public Order Act 2023.

Patel’s draconian legal manoeuvering was so extreme that, when campaigners stepped off a kerb to undertake the “slow marches”, to mildly disrupt traffic, which had become a favoured tactic, they could immediately be arrested.

For more serious and effective disruptive action, as typified by the blocking of the M25 in November 2022, her innovations involved punitive prison sentences, not only for those who had climbed up the gantries on London’s orbital motorway, but also for five others who had engaged in a Zoom call at the time of its planning, including Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Four of the activists received four-year prison sentences, while Hallam was given a five-year sentence, under Patel’s new law of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” For more information, see my article here.

The heavily biased judge, Christopher Hehir, claimed in court that the five had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”, in a trial that also brought to the fore how, increasingly, judges were preventing defendants from explaining the reasons for their actions, and denying the jury the right, established in 1670, to acquit on the basis of their consciences.

As disruptions to the “status quo” were being nudged ever closer towards being regarded as terrorism, a new campaigning group, Defend Our Juries, focused on the right to acquit under “jury equity”, assumed a prominent role, one which they were to continue in the darkening days ahead, as similar tactics were used in connection with the activists of Palestine Action, whose target was Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company, and whose weapons — and armed quadcopter drones in particular — have played such a crucial role in facilitating Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

In July 2025, the Labour government finally took the step that Patel had signalled, sickeningly and unjustifiably proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, as I discussed in an article at the time, entitled, Why We Are All Palestine Action, and Why Direct Action to Prevent Genocide Is the Opposite of Terrorism.

Expressing support for the group then became a terrorist offence, and, since last summer, over 3,500 campaigners have been arrested for nothing more than holding up hand-written cardboard placards declaring, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, making the government an international laughing stock, but also signalling an even darker turn in the British establishment’s intolerance of dissent.

In March 2025, Just Stop Oil announced an end to its active campaigning, largely because meaningful protest had become impossible, although they didn’t state that openly. Publicly, the group trumpeted the success of its actions — and that of numerous other campaigning groups — in persuading the government to stop all new oil and gas drilling, which finally happened in November 2025.

Unfortunately, although the government’s ‘North Sea Future Plan for fair, managed and prosperous transition’ contained a promise “not to issue new licences to explore new fields”, the proposals for the Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfields were already in existence, waiting only for pressure to reignite them, which Andy Burnham seems to have provided.

The return of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil announced its return via a suitably urgent message on its website, which read as follows: “FOR F*CK’S SAKE JUST STOP OIL! Think this summer was bad? It was just the start. Every new oil and gas project will make things worse. We do not consent to plans that will result in 3°C of warming and mass death. If you feel the same, now is the time to resist.”

That was suitably rousing, given the circumstances of our impending extinction — or, at least, the imminent arrival of the collapse of civilization — although its manifestation in Parliament Square was much more low key. The 60 protestors — many elderly, and including the formidable if entirely mild-mannered 84-year old retired Reverend Sue Parfitt, sitting in a camping chair — were all in the road, seated and motionless, flanked, on both sides of the road by supporters holding placards, two of which particularly stood out, and which are posted below.

By the time I arrived, the police had arrived too, and were calmly and politely beginning to carry the protestors away to waiting police vans — a protracted process as some of them had glued themselves to the road.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the urgency with which, when my colleagues, who were wearing orange jumpsuits, began unfurling our ‘Close Guantánamo Now’ banner, a number of policemen ran over, aggressively demanding they they stop immediately, and allow the police to check their bags and pockets.

It immediately became apparent that the colour orange — associated with Guantánamo long before Just Stop Oil came into being — had triggered them into thinking that we were dangerous subversives hell-bent on escalating what was otherwise a stubborn but sedate protest.

After remonstrations and the outcome of futile searches — only punctuated by some tense moments when one of our number, so rattled by the intensity of the police aggression — was handcuffed for non-compliance and came close to being arrested, the police evidently realized that they had overreacted, and left us alone.

In one conversation I had with one of them, however, it became apparent to me how the engineered hysteria regarding Palestine Action, and the activists — the Filton 4 — who had engaged in direct action and caused criminal damage at a factory owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company, and had recently, and outrageously, been convicted as terrorists by a malignant judge, had spilled over into the policing of this particular protest.

The policeman informed me that they had been alarmed that my colleagues might have had lock-on equipment, frequently used by climate activists, with which they might, presumably, have been intending to lock on to the barriers, or even that they were concealing weapons that they were intending to use to engage in criminal damage.

At that moment, I realized how the “terrorism connection” cynically used by the judge in the case of the Palestine Action activists to sentence them as terrorists had spilled over into a suspicion that other activists might also be suddenly wielding hammers in public, even though that was a groundless inference. Climate activists have damaged property on numerous occasions previously, but sit-down protests are, very deliberately and intentionally, peaceful interventions in which the activists use their bodies alone and offer no resistance when arrested and carried away.

Will climate activists be proscribed as terrorists?

Although I’m grateful that the clampdown on climate activists under the last Tory government, though draconian and unacceptable, was at least less damaging than the full-blown derangement of the subsequent Labour government — and, specifically, the shameful home secretary Yvette Cooper, who introduced the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization — I’m not reassured that this is a fundamentally unchanging legal landscape.

After all, once you’ve jettisoned all sense of proportionality by proscribing one direct action group as a terrorist organization, what’s to stop you from getting your next dopamine authoritarian rush by revisiting the climate activists who started the whole process of legal hysteria in the first place, and pushing for them to become terrorists too?

Troublingly, while the Reverend Sue Parfitt was sitting peacefully in her camping chair, awaiting arrest, police raided her home, and it’s hard to escape the inference that, as she is also a prominent Palestine Action supporter, and was recently arrested for urging people to support them, which is a terrorist offence potentially punishable by 14 years in prison, efforts may be underway to try to suggest a connection between Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil that would justify designating the latter as a terrorist organization.

This is especially troubling right now, because the government is currently being ridiculed in the courts. In recent months, numerous cases against climate activists charged with criminal damage or “slow marching”, some dating back to 2023 and 2024, have resulted in acquittals (see here, here and here), in costs and community probation being handed down, rather than a prison sentence, and, in one case, via a hung jury being unable to reach a decision.

Noticeably, these cases have been decided since the outrageous sentencing of the Filton 4, after which numerous efforts to prosecute anti-genocide activists have also failed in court, with the jury unable to reach a verdict in the second Filton trial, with activists at Elbit’s Shenstone facility given a conditional discharge, and with a judge wisely refusing to add a “terrorism connection” to the sentencing of activists convicted of causing mild criminal damage to a provincial branch of Barclays Bank.

My inference from this is that juries are so sickened by the Filton 4 overreach that they have become wary of delivering guilty verdicts. This ought to be a wake-up call for the government that it has gone too far, but it may be that, instead of backing down, they will decide to redouble their efforts.

As for Just Stop Oil, their activists were inconvenienced as much as possible after Wednesday’s action. As the group explained, those arrested were subjected to draconian bail conditions on their release, under Priti Patel’s obnoxious Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, including being prohibited from entering Westminster, and being told “not to participate in, organize, facilitate, promote or attend any protest, demonstration or assembly connected to Just Stop Oil”, while some are “being banned from communicating with their co-defendants.”

Just Stop Oil also reported that numerous protestors “had their train tickets, senior railcards and Oyster cards confiscated, before being released between 3-5am with no means of communication or way home.” When asked why, one custody officer told an arrestee that they didn’t know, but that the orders “came from on high.”

Will the government resist the dopamine authoritarian hit of proscription, and, presumably, the whining of fossil fuel company executives who want to know why Israel has more influence than them, or will sense prevail?

Because, of course, behind all the authoritarian bluster, and the puerile, irresponsible so-called “journalism” of the mainstream media, in which activism is permanently belittled and disparaged, both Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil are standing up for the law against a government that is behaving with fundamental and unacceptable lawlessness.

Palestine Action is highlighting the government’s obligation, under international law, not to be complicit in an ongoing genocide, while Just Stop Oil are demanding, appropriately, that the government doesn’t backslide on its promise not to approve new drilling for oil and gas, which is an essential component of its legal responsibility, under the Paris Agreement of 2015, to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” (an effort that is already doomed), whereby greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest (they didn’t) and must be reduced by 43% by 2030.

On this latter point, absolutely nothing indicates that, even after the hottest summer in British history, and an unprecedented drought that is going to lead to food shortages, the government has any intention of doing anything at all, let alone nearly halving emissions in the next three and a half years. Just today, the mainstream media is reporting that drilling at the “controversial” Jackdaw gas field might be approved within the next few weeks, despite the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruling last year that Rosebank and Jackdaw “had been unlawfully approved because the government had failed to take into account the climate impact of burning extracted oil and gas from the sites.”

If anything was designed to get climate activists back on the streets in significant numbers, it would be an unconscionable decision by Andy Burnham to approve drilling at the Jackdaw gas field. So what’s more important? Telling the truth and radically restructuring the prevailing economic model, to give us a chance to at least mitigate the coming climate apocalypse, or recklessly and suicidally putting aside those concerns, and pretending that the Reverend Sue Parfitt is a terrorist?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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