Being a Just Stop Oil activist only makes sense if you’ve been pampered by Mummy and Daddy
Just Stop Oil #JustStopOil
The picture of the Just Stop Oil protester who jumped on to a table at the World Snooker Championship at the Sheffield Crucible and scattered orange powder is hugely damaging. And I don’t mean for the table. (How much do you love the fact that master of ceremonies and BBC commentator, Rob Walker, emerged with Marigold gloves and a hoover to clear up after the little blighter?) It’s the green cause, not the green baize, that comes out of it worst. Full marks to a member of the audience who surely spoke for the nation when he shouted, “You p—-.”
Public patience with this kind of selfish stunt is just about exhausted, I think. Frankly, the Just Stop Oil brat was lucky the audience didn’t brain him with a red followed by a colour. The green ball would have dealt a perfect kind of poetic justice.
Just look at the stony faces of the spectators behind the brat. He kneels there, mouth agape, fancying himself a martyr while more closely resembling a bawling toddler who has been told he has to eat his broccoli before having a Petits Filous fromage frais. Those people in the audience paid their hard-earned money to watch a game between Joe Perry and Robert Milkins; it was a treat, an absorbing pleasure to be saved up for and savoured. But Edred Whittingham – or as I prefer to think of him, Crispian Entitled-Pratt – thinks it’s OK to sabotage the recreation of ordinary working people because he can’t be bothered to make his case against new fossil fuel projects through argument and persuasion, the traditional route in a democracy.
Instead of producing a rational case against oil and gas, Entitled-Pratt and his pampered pals stage a series of attention-seeking disruptions which target mass sports (Grand National, snooker, the London Marathon is rumoured to be the next target) and the industries (energy, finance) that afford them the luxury of deluded thinking. More and more, Just Stop Oil and its doolally sibling Extinction Rebellion start to look like a spiteful, class-based attack on hard-working families. Families that are already reeling from high fuel bills caused by the UK’s parlous lack of energy security.
To force the Government to stop giving out permits for new oil and gas wells, making us more dependent on erratic renewables when there is a real danger the lights might go out, is the kind of irrationality which only makes sense to a select few who are going to inherit £3 million houses from Mummy and Daddy in Barnes.
Then there are the middle-aged virtuosi like Cathy Eastburn. Mrs Eastburn, who is currently on trial accused of being part of the Insulate Britain protest at the Swanley Interchange, is the wife of a former director of Transport for London. Of course she is. She lives in a £1.5 million house in London with her husband Benedict, an Oxford-educated descendant of William the Conqueror. Of course she does. Benedict – brace yourself, dear reader, for the most exquisitely perfect detail – was given responsibility to get traffic moving again after the Covid pandemic. Not easy, obviously, when the missus has glued herself to the M25.
On the first day of the trial, involving Mrs Eastburn and three other numpties who are accused of blocking the motorway, jurors heard from a woman who was desperately trying to reach a dying friend in hospital.
Just Stop Oil protesters don’t care. They don’t care how much grief they cause – ambulances attempting to collect the desperately ill, carers trying to travel between their patients or simply white man van needing to get his tools to a job so he can earn enough to pay the gas bill. All practical considerations are piffling to these stunningly selfish people in their rarefied eco-bubble. Environmentalist Marie Antoinettes, they yawn: “Let them ride bikes.”
Another infuriatingly smug type turned up in Monday night’s Panorama, called Road Wars: Neighbourhood Traffic Chaos. Justin Rowlatt reported from Oxford where the imposition of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) is causing public anger and street clashes with an obstruction on Howard Street becoming “probably the most abused bollard in the UK”.
One resident, a Guardian reader judging by her superiority complex, told Rowlatt that vehicles were interfering with her “freedom” to ride a bike safely in car-free streets. Would those be the same cars, Ms Antoinette, that are bringing much-needed custom to local shops owned and staffed by people who can’t afford to ferry organic root vegetables from a bijou grocer in the wicker basket of their Pashley Tricycle (yours for a very reasonable £995)?
The Panorama programme billed itself as “featuring stories from both sides of the debate”. Of course, that debate is already settled as far as the Corporation is concerned. That’s why Rowlatt holds the title of BBC climate editor and people who spoke out against LTNs and the 15-minute city idea (in which you have to give the authorities a reason to grant you an exemption for leaving your area) were branded “climate-change deniers”. Perhaps they would just like a debate before life as we know it is returned to the pre-industrial age in pursuit of a goal that will make not a gnat’s bite of difference to global CO2 levels?
Personally, I prefer to call Just Stop Oil and LTN fanatics “human life deniers”. Protect the planet, sod the people!
I notice there is now a man with the creepy-sounding job of BBC climate disinformation specialist. Let’s hope he has a watertight explanation as to how we are going to abandon oil, coal and gas in short order and get all our power from renewables. Except, oh dear, to achieve that we need to find a way to store electricity in very large quantities at very low cost. But there is no viable technology to do that at present, nor will there be in the foreseeable future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is talking bollards.
Yet, complete and utter bollards is now the settled policy of all major political parties. Trust me, this is going to turn very nasty, once people grasp the full implications for their lifestyles.
Funnily enough, on Saturday I had my own run-in with a Just Stop Oil protester whose group was doing a slow march that was completely blocking our town centre on what should have been the busiest day of the week for beleaguered retailers. I was incensed because the police, instead of wrestling the protesters to the kerb and clearing the road for traffic, were providing a cheery escort. The protester, who looked like Catweazle’s vegan grandson, handed me an apocalyptic leaflet warning of the hellfire we would be plunged into if we didn’t stop drilling for oil. I refused the leaflet with a loud, No!
“You are angry, lady,” he said.
Too right. I’m angry that spoilt, callow kids like him are assuming the moral high ground while our country is morally blackmailed into a self-inflicted disaster that will bring down the standard of living for millions who didn’t know they’d voted to be poorer or colder. Or have less fun in their lives.
Here’s a suggestion. As Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and so many of our politicians and opinion formers are convinced of the rightness of their cause, why not let them go first? Call it a pilot scheme for net zero. They can’t own a car, they can’t fly, they can’t take a foreign holiday (in fact, let’s ban them from leaving their country). They mustn’t use, eat or wear any product which has had oil involved in its manufacture. Nor must they consume any foodstuff which hasn’t been produced within 15 minutes of their front door. Their homes must be warmed by heat pump only (gas boilers and electric heaters will be confiscated) and they aren’t permitted to use any electricity which wasn’t generated by wind or solar power. We may need an island for the control group – all suggestions welcome.
Let’s give them two years living like the Amish and see how keen they are on decarbonisation, eh?
I’m delighted to say that the World Championship resumed at the Sheffield Crucible to a standing ovation. Judging by the hostile public reaction to the brat, it’s Just Stop Oil that got snookered.
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