Just Stop Oil: behind the scenes with the activists
In a flat in east London, on the night of 31 March, two dozen people in their early 20s are packing sleeping bags and energy bars and discussing unorthodox toilet arrangements. There are bowls of vegan curry on the table and a Fontaines DC gig on the television. You might assume that they were going to a music festival, if not for the foldable ladders. In fact, they are all members of the new campaign group Just Stop Oil, which is demanding the cessation of all new oil licences in the UK. Their plan is to bring traffic in and out of the Navigator oil terminal in Thurrock, Essex, to a grinding halt a few hours from now. From the window of the flat they can see Navigator’s vast white silos. “I saw it earlier and my stomach flipped,” says Hannah Hunt, a 23-year-old from Brighton. She calls it “the venue”.
Hunt is a veteran of Just Stop Oil’s precursors, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. In recent months she has delivered a letter containing Just Stop Oil’s demands to No 10 Downing Street, scaled the Fawley oil refinery in Southampton, and glued herself to the red carpet at the Bafta awards. She experiences anxiety before an action but once it’s happening, she enters “a weird, dreamy, calm mindset. It’s really empowering.”
Another prematurely seasoned activist is Louis McKechnie, who served half of a three-month term in jail for blocking the M25 and recently tied himself to a goalpost during a match between Everton and Newcastle. He’s a confident 21-year-old with curtained hair and large glasses. During his pitch invasion, Twitter users compared him to John Lennon and Paul Dano’s Riddler in The Batman. Most of the activists – members of the Youth Climate Swarm – have never been arrested before. “Today will be arrest number 16 for me,” McKechnie says after a legal briefing, “so if you have any questions, I’ll be here all night.”
After dinner, she produces a map
and holds an action meeting for a subgroup of 10. The plan rests on the “site-take team” blocking all transit in and out of the terminal by scaling the tankers and camping out there, which makes it illegal for the driver to move the vehicle. It’s a difficult, stressful thing they are about to do but the mood is surprisingly festive. When Hunt asks them to shout out their primary and secondary roles in the action, there are giggles. “Back and top!” “Bush and top!” When Insulate Britain blockaded motorways last autumn, each action was over in less than an hour but it takes a specialist police team to remove people from high places. The idea is to stay up there for days on end.
Sleep is minimal. Preparations don’t wrap up until 1am and the activists have to rise again at 2.30am. As they wait for a minibus on a street corner in the bitter cold, Hunt convenes a trust circle. “I trust myself, I trust you, I trust the group,” they recite. On the bus, they switch to whimsical nature-based codenames such as Broccoli and Meadow. They talk about their nerves, and about making history.
At around 4am, the minibus pulls up a little way from the terminal. The activists disembark and scurry through the roadside undergrowth towards the entrance. Suddenly, the flashing lights of a police car jangle the night. They’ve been expected. They think for a moment that it’s game over. But they press on. Three activists sit down in front of the first tanker and unfurl an orange banner reading JUST STOP OIL. Twenty-year-old Pavel Ivanov takes the role of de-escalator, talking to drivers and the police. Everyone else clambers on to one of three tankers. It all takes maybe two minutes.
After a while, a police officer approaches the second tanker and tries to reason the occupiers down. “We’re trying to raise awareness of the climate emergency,” says one, lean and bearded.
“Everybody’s aware,” the officer protests.
The activist shrugs. “There’s a difference between awareness and action.”
***
One Monday night in March, Roger Hallam is talking about the end of the world as we know it. The Leaf Hall community arts centre in Eastbourne was founded by the evangelical Christian and temperance campaigner William Leaf in 1863, so it is an apt venue for a man with the air of an apocalyptic prophet. Wiry and intense, with a greying beard and ponytail, the 55-year-old is well suited to the role of climate Jeremiah. “People are suddenly going, ‘This is it. This is the end,’” he says. “Because it is. There are ends. And it will happen unless we stop it. That’s the way it is in 2022.”
Thirty purple plastic chairs have been laid out but only 13 are occupied. “That’s totally predictable,” Hallam says. “Most people don’t want to do things.”
Hallam speaks for more than an hour without notes. He opens by quoting a speech by Sir David King, formerly the UK government’s chief scientific adviser and special envoy on climate change: “What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very, very desperate situation.” That was one year ago. Hallam says that it is already too late to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C. He predicts hundreds of millions of climate refugees by 2030, and worse. “Mass slaughter, mass rape, mass starvation,” he says. “That’s what’s coming down the line.”
Hallam likes to say that he is “just a farmer from Wales”, or at least he used to be. He blames the collapse of his organic farming business on a series of extreme weather events several years ago. Later he researched the history of civil disobedience for a PhD at King’s College London. In 2018, he co-founded Extinction Rebellion (XR), which opened a new chapter in climate activism, based on civil disobedience and mass arrests, and took off in dozens of countries. But he is a divisive figure, as a recent documentary about XR Rebellion, shows, and was “unreservedly denounced” by Extinction Rebellion UK for describing the Holocaust as “just another fuckery in human history” in a 2019 interview. I am told that he is merely an “adviser” to Just Stop Oil.
It is a surreal and disturbing experience to sit in a hall in a seaside town on a quiet Monday evening and listen to someone tell you that human civilisation is destined to collapse within your lifetime and not be able to say with any confidence that he is wrong. Hallam’s doomsday rhetoric might sometimes overshoot urgency and plunge into despair but consider the recent news items that have been overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The IPCC published a new report on the “irreversible” effects of exceeding 1.5C: heatwaves, floods, droughts, famine. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future,” said the IPCC’s HansOtto Pörtner. Scientists at the University of Manchester urged oil and gas production to end completely in richer countries by 2034 and in poorer nations by 2050. In the Arctic and Antarctic, researchers recorded temperatures that were respectively 30C and 40C above seasonal norms. You could say that the activists who drop out of their careers and actively invite arrest are going to extremes, or you could say that they are responding rationally to an existential emergency.
“I’m not sure that scaring people too much is a problem,” the writer and environmentalist George Monbiot tells me. “We’re not nearly scared enough, and that’s why we’re not acting. The complete decarbonisation of our economy is our only hope of avoiding systemic environmental collapse, and nothing like that is on the political agenda in the biggest economies.”
At conferences such as Cop26, governments pledge to reduce consumption of fossil fuels while continuing to license new production. It might seem as if anxiety over soaring fuel bills and sanctions on Russian oil and gas make Just Stop Oil’s timing unfortunate, but Monbiot argues that these crises strengthen the case for ending reliance on financially and politically volatile sources of energy. “We can achieve energy independence from dictatorships and autocracies and independence from fossil fuels at the same time and by the same means,” he says. “What’s not to like?”
Eastbourne is where I first meet Hannah Hunt, who delivers similar talks at universities and colleges, “but with a slightly softer touch than Roger’s doom-and-gloom approach,” she tells me later. The first time she saw one of Hallam’s talks, two years ago, she came home with her boyfriend and cried for two hours. “It is a tough line,” she says. “Some people think, OK, we are travelling towards the end of human civilisation and therefore I must act. Some want to bury their heads in the sand. I have been in both places, and I am sometimes in both places still, so I have empathy for both of those reactions. I tell people to channel those emotions into your desire to act.”
Hunt tells the Eastbourne audience her own story. Growing up in the Lake District, she was always close to nature and sensitive to suffering on the news. “I’ve never been able to just stand by.” She was studying clinical psychology at the University of Sussex and working on an NHS eating disorder service throughout the pandemic. “Societal breakdown is Covid times 100, for ever,” she says. Last December, she dropped out of university to become a full-time activist.
“I’m 23,” she tells me. “There are lots of other things I’d rather be doing. But we don’t have the luxury of time. We have in our house a countdown of how many days we’ve got, which is really motivating but also quite depressing. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I looked back in 10 years and I hadn’t taken action.”
After Hallam’s talk, the audience breaks into two groups to discuss the new campaign. There are some doubts. “I feel very often like I’m pissing in the wind politically,” says one woman who was part of the Greenham Common peace camp in the 1980s. Another veteran activist, with CND and Greenpeace, complains that Insulate Britain’s strategy of blockading motorways last September was “counterproductive” and says that she doesn’t understand the relationship between XR, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil. It’s a good question.
One sunny afternoon three weeks later, I meet a 27-year-old Just Stop Oil organiser called Indigo Rumbelow on a bench in north London’s Lloyd Park. Speaking with quiet intensity and great care, she describes the intersection of the three groups as a Venn diagram. Just Stop Oil was formed last December in order to rejuvenate and refocus the overall campaign. “When you’re reaching a dead end, the correct thing to do is go into a period of creation and experimentation in order to engage new people,” Rumbelow says. She describes it as a non-hierarchical coalition of organisers, scientists, lawyers and former workers in the oil industry who collaborate on both demands and tactics. Activists then operate in autonomous blocs with shared resources but no formal leadership. All funding comes from donations. The goal is to raise awareness on a massive scale.
“People have been writing petitions, going on marches, speaking to their MPs, joining NGOs, and it’s not just staying the same, it’s actually getting worse,” Rumbelow says. “People across society are really angry. We’ve tried all the democratic means of creating that change so now the only thing we can do is civil disobedience. It is upsetting to disrupt people but it’s far more upsetting to stay silent as we watch this horror unfold. If my brother woke me up because there was a fire in the middle of night, I wouldn’t be angry that he woke me up.”
“It could be described as the politics of desperation,” George Monbiot says. “They’re desperately trying to draw attention towards the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, in a society that is almost constitutionally unable to face it. We can’t leave them to do this on our behalf. We need to respond to our existential crisis with the biggest political mass movement there’s ever been.”
***
Five days after Roger Hallam’s talk in Eastbourne, I attend a nonviolence training day in a room above a Methodist church in Leicester. Mya Baines (not her real name), a 34-year-old animator, and Karen Wildin, a 57-year-old private tutor, begin by asking the dozen or so attenders to introduce themselves. There is a vicar whose brother was arrested at an XR protest; a woman whose daughter dropped out of university after seeing Hallam speak; a rapper who admires Russell Brand. Baines then puts forward various scenarios and asks the group to say whether they qualify as violent, nonviolent or not being violent. The distinction is not always clear.
“There is no proactive word for nonviolence,” writes Mark Kurlansky in Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Mahatma Gandhi coined the word satyagraha, or “truth force”, to describe his version of it. Gandhi’s example inspired Richard Gregg’s 1934 book The Power of Nonviolence, and Gregg in turn became a guiding influence on the American civil rights activists who began staging anti-segregation sit-ins in the 1940s. Gregg, a Quaker lawyer, described the strategy as “moral jiu-jitsu”: expecting physical resistance and receiving none, the opponent is unbalanced. Not being violent is passive; nonviolence is confrontational and uncomfortable. “I don’t like being disliked,” says Baines. “I’ve had to get used to being hated.”
Activists such as Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, argue that violent protest, chiefly sabotage, is legitimate. Movements for women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery and the end of apartheid all had violent flanks. Just Stop Oil, however, argues that nonviolence is both an ethical choice and a strategic one.In Why Civil Resistance Works, American academics Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan demonstrate that nonviolence has a far greater chance of realising its aims than violence. Just Stop Oil weeds out any volunteer who might not to be able to sustain nonviolence under pressure. One man at the training day demonstrates how he would take down somebody who attacked him. “Maybe you shouldn’t take part in the action,” Baines gently suggests.
Before she became an activist, Baines tells me, she was “very upset and depressed. I was trying to tell people about it and they weren’t listening. Then I saw Extinction Rebellion on the news and read about their theory of change.” She has since been arrested six times. “It’s odd what you can get used to doing. It’s not how I saw my life going but I feel like I’ve been left with no choice, and that’s how most people in Just Stop Oil feel.”
De-escalators are usually women because they receive less abuse. An hour into the training day, four people arrive furiously late, having waited in the wrong room, and the mood is suddenly tense. The skill with which Baines defuses their irritation and welcomes them into the group is a fine example of everyday de-escalation.
“Nonviolence training is an education in itself,” Wildin tells me. “When we encounter conflict within campaigns, we all try to apply our nonviolent approach to living.” Wildin threw herself into activism twoyears ago, after her children left home, and has since been arrested 22 times for a range of direct actions, including Stop HS2. “What I’ve discovered is that the laws are designed to protect property, profit and power,” she says.
Christian Murray-Leslie came to activism even later than Wildin. A gently spoken 77-year-old retired NHS consultant, he describes himself as “slightly left of centre – not a headbanger”. He keeps bees and spends his evenings rescuing toads from the roads near his home in Devon. Since his first arrest at an XR protest in Parliament Square in September 2020, he has been arrested six times with Insulate Britain. Members of the public, Murray Leslie says, are more frightening than the police because there is no set procedure. They tend to start by blowing horns and shouting abuse. Some then become violent, hitting or dragging protesters. The advice is to be apologetic but resolute, explaining why they are there. “What you do in the first two to three seconds is critical,” he says. “You need to show respect and answer their points without any trace of aggression.”
A few months after an arrest, a charging letter arrives. Protesters are free to plead guilty and accept a fine but the organisers’ advice is to file a plea of not guilty, thus insisting on the legitimacy of the protest and tying up the court system. Most climate activists have been acquitted or seen their cases dismissed but at least 18 were jailed for contempt of court last year. A few days ago, 117 of the 174 Insulate Britain activists arrested last autumn were officially charged, mostly with causing a public nuisance. Unsurprisingly, most activists are under 30 or over 60. “There tends to be people who don’t have anything to lose and then people who have the freedom and financial stability to take those risks,” Baines says. “There are a lot of people who want to do it but they need to keep a roof over their heads.”
Civil disobedience usually gets a bad press. Even people sympathetic to the cause, such as David Attenborough and Sadiq Khan, have criticised XR and Insulate Britain foralienating the general public with disruptive tactics. Activists counter that XR helped to inspire parliament to declare a climate emergency in May 2019, and Insulate Britain is the reason why Andrea Leadsom, former secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, recently described home insulation as “low-hanging fruit in the energy space”. Nonetheless, there is a sense that Just Stop Oil, by targeting the oil industry rather than the general public, will be less contentious.
“I wish there was more focus on why we’re doing it and less on the tactics,” Baines says. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be criticised – part of nonviolence training is being accountable for your actions – but we’re not disrupting people for the sake of it. We’re potentially looking at the collapse of civilisation and the government isn’t doing anything about it. If anything, I’d say we’re being quite restrained.”
After lunch, it’s role play time. Two tables are placed end to end to represent an oil tanker and protesters are assigned roles: six sitting in the road, one on top of the tanker, and two locked on to the side. “I can’t smoke during this, which would be horrible for me,” jokes a middle-aged vicar. The next scenario is a road blockade, with half the group playing the part of angry drivers. “These fucking climate protesters!” shouts Baines with alarming conviction. “Who do they think they are? Wankers! Get a job!” They prac-
tise shielding one another from blows, “going floppy” so that they are harder to lift, and protecting themselves by lying on their right sides and covering their heads, although the weapons today are only bundles of rolled-up socks. “We never retaliate,” says Wildin. “We just take it.”
At the end of the day, everyone is asked to say whether or not they’re prepared to face abuse and arrest by participating in an action. Some realise they are not ready and offer to serve in support roles. “It’s now or never but I can’t quite do it,” one woman says guiltily. “I think it’s about changing people’s hearts,” says another. “Maybe I’m a bit envious of your bravery but does it do any good?” A grey-haired woman called Viv, however, decides that she is all in. “The role play’s good because it deflects from being scared shitless,” she says cheerfully. “I’m ready to go.”
***
Witnessing the action at Navigator inspires deja vu. I recognise almost every component from either the training day or the action meeting. “It’s an unbeatable, repeatable formula,” one activist tells me. Between the first blockade and another around the bend, a total of seven tankers are crowned with activists in orange hi-vis vests bearing Just Stop Oil’s calligram of a skull. The police mill around, waiting for backup. “What if they start smoking?” asks one officer.
There’s just one deviation from the plan: one tanker driver threatens the banner-holding activists so ferociously that everyone ends up scaling a tanker for safety. In Leicester, I thought that the people role-playing angry drivers were laying it on a bit thick but if anything, they were far too mild. The abuse is astonishing: “If the police weren’t here, I’d come up and fucking throw you off myself!” “I hope one of them falls off and breaks their fucking neck.” And to an activist with a ladder: “You put that up there, mate, and I’m going to ram it down your fucking throat!”
Driving a tanker with people on top may be illegal but one driver in the second blockade does it anyway, reversing slightly to create a gap in the road. Another drags down the road a young Irish woman, who curls up and shields her head. Pavel Ivanov claims that a third grabbed him by the throat. Half a dozen terminal workers form a chorus of hecklers: “You look like you’re just out of nappies!” “Go and get a fucking job!”Following nonviolence training to the letter, the activists apologise for the disruption and explain why they believe it is necessary. The response: “Shut up, you cunt.”
After an hour, the drivers’ rage fizzles out. It’s obvious that nobody is going anywhere, and it is brutally cold. The only noises are the choppy drone of a police helicopter and the occasional crackle of a walkie-talkie. A few of the occupiers are curled up in sleeping bags. Snow is falling in light flurries.
A strange peace descends on a frozen tableau. There are similar scenes at nine more simultaneous actions staged by Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion at sites around England. By early afternoon, ExxonMobil UK has been forced to suspend operations at four terminals.
Three days later, the protests are still going on. At least 275 activists have been arrested, mostly at three sites in Essex, and there are petrol and diesel shortages across the south-east. When I catch up with Hunt and Ivanov over the phone, they tell me that a special police team erected scaffolding and began removing occupiers from the tankers on stretchers on Friday afternoon but that the last ones weren’t taken away until 3pm on Saturday. Meanwhile another team dug a tunnel under Navigator and two of them are still there. Around 35 activists were arrested for tampering with a vehicle and held in cells before being released on bail and banned from returning to Essex. “At the debrief everybody was in tears,” Ivanov says. “In a positive way. We’d held the site for 36 hours with an entirely youth-based team. Everybody’s really proud.”
A few of them went home to rest and reflect. Most returned to the safe house and began planning their next action.
I’m 23. There are lots of other things I’d rather be doing. But we don’t have the luxury of time
Hannah Hunt