Are Just Stop Oil saviours or fools?
I AM writing from prison, where I am serving a sentence after protesting peacefully at Kingsbury Oil Terminal in Warwickshire with Just Stop Oil against the Government’s plans for new fossil-fuel licences.
I am 51 years old, I’ve worked hard all my life, been a law-abiding citizen and played my part in the community. Last year I realised that, while the climate crisis was worsening, no one was treating it as an emergency.
If your house is on fire, you rush to put out the flames; you don’t pour petrol on them. Granting a potential 130 new fossil-fuel licences fans the flames and will make the crisis far worse. It is against all expert advice and won’t solve the energy crisis or cut our bills, but it will kill us.
The climate crisis will bring about the collapse of society: war, famine, drought, disease and millions of refugees on the move.
We can sit waiting for that to happen, or we can act now to reduce the impact. Petitions, voting, lifestyle changes? These methods don’t work and are too slow.
I sat in the road because it’s the only way left to force change. I hate disrupting people, but any disruption I caused is nothing compared with what’s coming if we don’t stop this. I was demanding a liveable future for all of us, including you, your children and your grandchildren. If you want any future for your loved ones, act now, not when it’s too late.
MARGARET REID, HMP Bronzefield, Ashford, Surrey. I CANNOT understand how Just Stop Oil eco-zealots were not spotted before they could climb the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge and grind everything to a halt. What if they had been terrorists? It’s about time they were dealt with properly, instead of the police taking a namby-pamby attitude. Well done to showroom staff at the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, for just leaving them. If they choose to glue themselves to things and are then unable to eat, drink or visit the toilet, that’s their problem.
Four weeks ago, my elderly mother was seriously ill with Covid in hospital in Kent. The hospital advised that we should get there as soon as possible, as her life was at risk, which meant travelling from Essex via the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. But these selfish morons don’t care about situations like that, or about impeding people who actually work for a living.
WHEN people are worried about winter fuel bills, food bills and mortgages, the last thing they want is a bunch of foolish, self-aggrandising Henrys, Henriettas and trustafarians gluing themselves to roads and preventing them from getting to work in order to pay those bills.
And those having to use food banks don’t want to see spoilt middle-class idiots pouring milk over supermarket floors or self-obsessed philistines throwing soup at valuable and much-loved works of art.
These people represent no one but themselves and seem to crave getting their silly faces in the paper. But they are hardly winning anyone over to their causes, in fact quite the opposite.