Do we all want to Just Stop Oil?

JVL Introduction

This is an account of the creation of a broad coalition to engage in non-violent direct action to resist environmental collapse and tackle social injustice initiated by Just Stop Oil (JSO) and involving the Peace and Justice Project (PJP), sympathetic Unions, Peoples Assembly, Black Lives Matter activists, Stop the War Coalition, CND, and the participation of all other individuals and groups with shared concerns about the environment, inequality and poverty. The coalition has been made five demands concerned with ending oil and gas extraction, taxing the polluting corporations, ending fuel poverty, insulating homes, and providing cheap public transport.

It is written by Tony Booth, JVL Environment Officer, who calls on everyone to review their priorities in the light of rapid environmental decline, consider joining non-violent direct action in London in September and October 2022, and engage in continuous rebellion against the forces destroying the life support systems of the planet, wherever they are.

Tony Booth writes

I start by emphasising the dire prospects for the continuation of life on earth and the denialism in which political parties, and others, engage. I then discuss misgivings about the leadership and methods of JSO and its parent group, Extinction Rebellion. However, I suggest that they have demonstrated the necessity for mass civil disruption to render effective the decades of messages from scientific reports, articles, marches, speeches, letters, emails and the lobbying of councils, governments and corporations about the need for radical action to address climate and biodiversity breakdown.

I describe the march and a sit down outside Parliament on July 23rd followed by a mass rally in St James Park and the on-line “National Emergency” Rally on August 2nd. These events were preparation for the blocking of Parliament for an indefinite period from October 1st which follow actions organised by Extinction Rebellion at Marble Arch from September 10th.  I invite JVL members and others to respond to the imminence of unstoppable ecological breakdown and its unequal consequences by supporting these actions.

A dire situation

There is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown. It is no longer a matter of what we can do to avoid it, but of what we should expect in the decades to come, how we can adapt to a hothouse world with more extreme weather and what we can do to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further.

Bill McGuire 2022 page xv

So that is what we have to do: face the truth, take responsibility for it, and “stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further”. While we are facing the truth about more frequent extreme, life extinguishing, weather events we have to recognise the pervasive nature of environmental breakdown. We need to resist the equal threat of biodiversity loss happening at a faster rate than ever before in human history. We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Global meetings on biodiversity, like the Cops on the climate, have provided a comparable record of missed targets; punctuation marks for a story of continued and accelerating ecological deterioration.

The dire predicament of a planet on the brink of environmental collapse has made it imperative to spread action beyond traditional and emerging environmental groups to all organisations and especially those like JVL who have a commitment to removing inequality and promoting justice. It is shocking how slow some sections of the left have been to recognise the anachronism in their old mantras on poverty and class which ignore the results of incessant planetary exploitation.

Worsening environmental pressures, as for the human created “cost of living crisis”, disproportionately affect the poor and vulnerable and those for whom an inhospitable climate and biodiversity loss, already present severe challenges. Capitalism is a system, a Ponzi scheme it turns out, for the exploitation of people and the limited resources of the planet for the benefit of one class to the detriment of everyone else. As Naomi Klein expressed it, combatting ecological catastrophe requires action from an anti-capitalist movement. Environmental imperatives mean that time scales for working to achieve social justice have collapsed and action to limit climate breakdown need to be inserted as the first priority in all socialist programmes.

Propagating denial

In the face of truths about the rapid loss of our life-support systems, it can be tempting to deny what is happening, or hide from it and see action on the environment as someone else’s concern. That is not an option for us in JVL. The main UK political parties turn away from the urgency of the situation and propagate denial to others. In the week that the UK faced its highest recorded temperatures, the leader of the Labour Party failed to mention the climate in his Liverpool speech but called instead for “growth, growth, growth”. That party is over. He was following the Johnson mantra for “build, build, build”, the high emissions, concreting over of the South and East of England in order to shift jobs, homes and water from the North to the South of England in search of short term profit for developers and the treasury, mocking the reduction of inequality between North and South in the thought interrupting “levelling up agenda”. The contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party push for growth with reduced environmental regulation while claiming commitment to carbon “net zero” by 2050. Such pledges are worthless. The high court ruled in July 2022 that government plans to reach “net zero” are so imprecise as to be impossible to monitor and are hence illegal. Aiming for net-zero rather than absolute zero, hides a fantasy that the shortfall in emissions will be covered at some unspecified future date by technological fixes which Julian Allwood, Cambridge University Professor of Environmental Engineering, likens to planting “magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood”.

Questioning Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion and JSO?

There are many who dislike direct action to put pressure on government and corporations that involves blocking roads or stopping the movement of oil tankers, claiming that this inconveniences the wrong people. Fiona Godley, ex-chief-editor of the British Medical Journal has addressed such misgivings in a piece reposted on the JVL website and Andreas Malm sets out the case for direct action with considerable clarity. It is up to each of us to work out what actions we support as we reflect on their potential impact, the rapidly diminishing time left to reduce environmental catastrophes, the failure of decades of alternative approaches, and our capacity to invent new ones.

Questions have been raised by many – including some in JVL –  about Roger Hallam’s leadership of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil, partly because of the foolishly insensitive comments he made in Germany about the holocaust in an interview with Die Zeit in Germany in 2019. He listed other mass killings in the past 500 years, including the Belgians’ slaughter in the Congo and said that seen in this context, the Holocaust was “almost a normal event … just another fuckery in human history.” He should have known that to say this in Germany, of all places, would cause huge upset. XR Jews in the UK and Germany were involved in asking him to step back as a spokesperson as a result. He has apologised for his remarks and has withdrawn from a leading role in Extinction Rebellion but has moved on to push forward other direct-action groups whose participants are drawn largely from XR.

I had also become concerned about him when he supported the challenge to the emphasis Extinction Rebellion US put on social justice, including it as an additional fourth demand to the US government after the UK’s three demands of truth-telling, rapid decarbonisation and the establishment of citizen’s assemblies. Here is what Extinction Rebellion added:

We demand a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and indigenous sovereignty; establishes reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice, establishes legal rights for ecosystems to thrive and regenerate in perpetuity, and repairs the effects of ongoing ecocide to prevent extinction of human and all species, in order to maintain a liveable, just planet for all.

He encouraged, instead, the breakaway group, “XR America”, oblivious to the imperialist associations of this name for a US organisation for the peoples of Latin America, which replaced the demand for Social Justice with what XR US call an “All lives matter” demand.

In recent times, Roger Hallam has been a driving force behind Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil although others generally act as spokespeople. In my view, XR, IB and JSO have highlighted extremely well the failure of government to respond to present and impending climate catastrophes. So, I support them while I retain a critique of them. I continue to be critical of Extinction Rebellion, its structure and publicity and the political naivety of its demand for citizen assemblies without calling for a restoration of local democracy and the powers of local government reduced by a succession of Westminster governments. I also dislike its idea of periodic rebellions in London, when rebellion needs to take place continuously and everywhere if it is to match up to the scale of the disasters that are heading towards us. However, I am delighted by the mobilisation of people of all ages in direct action and particularly by the large numbers of young people involved with all three groups. They are what we have been dealt at this time as a rare and necessary force for change and we should build solidarity with and around them.

The July 23rd Action

I was at a meeting in June of the Peace and Justice Project (PJP) with Roger Hallam and others to discuss a shared action on the 23rd July. It transpired that the nature of the collaboration was a fait accompli and there was little chance of modifying the plans. It was announced on June 16th by Jeremy Corbyn in the Guardian. Essentially, it formed part of JSO’s strategy to encourage more left-leaning organisations to get involved in climate action and widen its data-base for recruitment purposes. This was clear at the preparation events on Zoom, where there was a standard, though abbreviated, Extinction Rebellion/Just Stop Oil talk with its stronger (the truth about impending climate catastrophe and advocacy of direct action) and weaker (non-participatory, dubious inaccurate references to achievements of the Civil Rights movement) points, followed by breakout rooms where the sole purpose in my group was to gather phone numbers and email addresses from participants rather than to hear their thoughts and encourage participation.

The event was to be a gentle introduction to direct action, agreed in advance with the police, with a march starting from a number of London rail stations to a sit down in Parliament square, followed by discussion groups in St James’ Park. It would involve zero chance of arrest. My preference would have been for a stronger recruitment pitch from PJP and from Unions and other organisations involved, justifying the link between socialism and direct action on the environment.

I joined the march, holding the JVL flag, as a steward, for what turned out to be a moderately sized march with a couple of thousand people. I had done my best to recruit JVL members and a few came along, including a comrade companion from my home city of Cambridge. The flag prompted many conversations with fellow marchers who wanted to express their very positive views about JVL. One young man asked if I minded being abused as part of JVL, another rushed up, as we prepared to sit down outside parliament to say how, as a left-wing Jew, he agreed with everything we said. One person wanted to display his own strong opinions, starting out by seeking advice on how to avoid saying anything that might lead to him being accused of antisemitism and ending by insisting that since I was an atheist, I couldn’t also be a Jew. Before the march started, there had been a negative reaction from one of the JSO organisers of the event who claimed there had been an agreement not to bring banners. I followed non-violent protocol in gently thanking him for his view and taking no notice of it. It seemed to be a familiar, unproductive, branding concern. There were lots of JSO banners prominently displayed on the march and a few others representing a variety of Unions and socialist groups, including ours.

The ‘National Emergency’ Zoom rally on August 2nd

The JSO organised ‘National Emergency’ Zoom rally recruiting for the October blockade, was attended by perhaps three thousand people in total, on Zoom and YouTube. It included a succession of speakers who, in combination, made a powerful argument for the necessity of a broad coalition to respond to ecological emergencies.

I would have preferred it if JSO had controlled the messaging less tightly. There was no plenary discussion where reservations could be shared about joining mass civil disobedience, or the approach of the organisers. In my break-out group, for example, a woman found there was too much pressure at the start, “like being on the receiving end of a direct-selling pitch”, urging participants to do one of four things: make a monthly donation; become active in the coalition partner organisations; help to mobilise people to get involved in direct action; and engage in non-violent civil disobedience. In the break-out group we made sure her view was respected and discussed.

A full summary of the speaker contributions can be found here. After the JSO introductions Jeremy Corbyn called for rapid weaning from oil dependence and the ending of any new extraction of oil and gas including fracking. He talked of the massive destructive influence of oil companies on life in Britain documented in “Crude Britannia: how oil shaped a nation”.

Bill McGuire author of Hothouse Earth said that it is “impossible to sidestep catastrophic breakdown so we will “have to adapt” as well as “slash emissions”. He reported that hopes to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees centigrade are “dead in the water”.

Chantelle Lunt, from the Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality recognised that we are in the “endgame” and insisted that civil rights movements and the Black Lives Matters movement had to stand with environmental action groups linking climate, social and racial justice in a movement “to dismantle capitalism”.

Lee Jasper, senior policy adviser on equalities to Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London and co-founder of Black social movement BlackSox, said the coalition being formed was “one of the most exciting moments in my political lifetime” coming at “a defining moment in history”.  He asked organisations to come out of their individual silos.

Chris Packham spoke of his fear, anger and desperation about the steep decline in animal populations. In the UK this decline is being measured with an accuracy, “better than any nation on earth”, documenting “one of the most nature deprived countries on earth”. He asked people to take “a last stand for the natural world”.

Kerry Abel is as a member of the campaigns team for the Transport and Salaried Staff Union (TSSA). She pointed out that the transport sector was the biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions. She called for a recognition of the pivotal role of rail travel for a green industrial transition at a time when rail jobs continued to be axed and agreements to replace diesel trains with electrification, were dropped.

Zoe Cohen is part of the “media messaging team” for JSO.  She conveyed a question from Joshua Smith 29-year-old bricklayer from Manchester, imprisoned without trial for many weeks for his climate action: “when you look back in a decade from now will you be able to say you tried everything you possibly could?”

Moving forward?

Will you join the action in Parliament Square starting on October 1st or the Extinction Rebellion actions around Marble Arch between September 10th and the 13th? These actions will have stewards, police liaison, legal observers and comrades experienced in de-escalation. Preparation for non-violent direct action is available. It would be good to have a strong JVL presence, particularly on the October 1st blockade, which would demonstrate JVL’s recognition of the imperative to link social and racial justice with climate action and our participation in the endgame to secure a liveable planet for future generations. But for those for whom direct action is not feasible, facing the truth about impending catastrophes and refusing the option of denial are important in themselves, helping even at this late stage to spread the words that make action possible for others.

Tony Booth, JVL Environment Officer, August 2022