To think the judge was right to throw the book at Just Stop Oil?

[StripedPiggy]

Five Just Stop Oil activists, including leader & XR founder Roger Hallam have been sentenced to up to 5 years in jail for blocking the M25 & other main roads.
Their intention was to cause gridlock on roads in the South East. The disruption they caused resulted in people missing medical appointments, flights & business meetings.

Well done to that judge. The criminal justice system is right to pass serious sentences on these fanatics which will act as a strong deterrent to others who might try to cause mass disruption, and put people’s lives in danger, to further a political agenda, whatever it might be.

@Scammersarescum Agreed. People like this group have absolutely no worth to society.

Your post is extraordinarily unpleasant. I don't know if you're a troll trying to provoke? Or if it's very sinister humour? Or if you sincerely think this?
Whichever the case, it's very poor taste. Your 'side' has shown its true colours on this thread, and other threads about this.
It's put a lump in my throat 😔

Most of them have been big contributers to society. Roger Hallam was a farmer for years. Helping keep us all fed. One of the most important jobs of all. One is a musician studying to high level. I think one might be a GP. I'm sure all the others have made big contributions to society.
But even if they hadn't, it's just an awful thing to say about your fellow human beings.
I don't support the actions of JSO. But, they don't deserve to be spoken about in such a manner.

Your post is beyond extreme. Obviously there is something about this group that is triggering you?

in terms of the list you shared of impact the road blockages, the only example that I can see of a life and death situation is the cancer patient ? People miss appts for all sorts of reasons, absolutely awful that that person couldn’t get another apt for 2 months(!!!!!) but tbf we can hardly blame just stop oil for the desperate state of our health service.

Bloody hell. This level of vitriol is not normal.

The problem I have with the comparisons between the action taken by those protesting against the Jim Crow Laws and the suffragettes is that we're talking about people fighting for equality using the only means available to them because they didn't have a legal voice. You cannot compare people who couldn't even sit down in an cafe next to a white man, let alone stand for election with a group of people who, as we are repeatedly told, have members who are GPs, Vicars, Oxbridge graduates. People with, arguably, even more voice potentially than those they disrupt.
I think it's rather offensive to compare people who were fighting for a right to the sort of equality middle-class, white JSO protesters have never had to fight for. People who were being denied the rights to move freely in their own towns. People who were arrested for using the wrong water fountain.
It is true that the white moderate devoted to order is not the friend of those who are fighting just to have the same rights as the white moderate. But that is not what is happening, here.
Here we have people who have the same freedom and rights as everybody else using their position to prevent other people from doing what many of them do every day themselves. Driving on a road. These people can vote. They can stand for election. They have so many options available to them to be heard. They have so many legal routes available to protest that those living under Jim Crow legislation did not have. That women in the early 1900s didn't have.
Hell, it's 2024, they have ways of being heard the Greenham Common women didn't have.

So basically just the causes you agree with then?

@Allfur that's all you got from that? It's not about agreeing or disagreeing with the cause. It's about making unfair comparisons with people whose only recourse was to do what they did because they didn't have the same intrinsic rights as people of a different colour or gender. JSO aren't in that position.

On that subject of agreeing/disagreeing with causes, I wonder if we would be having the same conversation if the EDL blocked ambulances, etc? Somehow, I doubt it.

@ObelixtheGaul I hear what you are saying, but think one of the big problems with creating the change we need to see in order to avert climate disaster is that people are treating this as a local, national issue the perils of which are located somewhere in the future.

The climate emergency is global and existential; class, race and sex informing who will be most severely impacted, presently and in the future.

JSO have only ever campaigned on the issue of the renewal of fossil fuel licences, addressing the British government. They are acting on British soil, on behalf of people both within and, importantly, beyond our national borders, in the global South, who are suffering the impact of the climate emergency right now. The privilege is ours to wilfully continue to consume, all the while disregarding the impact our lifestyle choices have on those whose voices are not sufficiently amplified on a global stage. There are brilliant climate activists and organisations in the global South who are also using direct action and civil disobedience to campaign for change and urgent action: we should support them and amplify their voices. I think King's reflection on the 'white moderate' as a disruptor and barrier to change has a place in this debate, but that we need to be clear about who is who.

According to this article in The Big Issue, the vast majority of the British public think the sentences were far too harsh. I haven't met anyone in real life who thinks they were proportionate. Mumsnet is a worrying abberation it seems -

www.bigissue.com/news/activism/just-stop-oil-sentences-jail-terms-m25-backlash/

I reckon EDL are more popular on this thread, given some of the vitriolic responses

I agree, it's a bit unhinged on here

Not only do we know nothing about this research but, taking it at face value, it demonstrates how badly informed the survey participants were. Similar to those on this thread who refuse to read, or close their minds to, the very careful and full sentencing remarks.

I don’t endorse everything said on this thread in favour of the sentences or how some of it has been expressed, but I do think the pro-JSO posters are trying wilfully to mislead in their refusal to accept the seriousness of what was done, the defendants’ records and the previous imposition of an injunction.

This will only get worse. As the climate emergency deepens so the protesters will become more violent.

To quote the late John F Kennedy -

'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.'

I honestly think people will look back on JSO as very peaceful and woolly and actually miss them, when things start to really hot up, both literally and metaphorically.

I'm a pacifist by the way, and never condone violence.

I'm sorry to say, but I believe that as the climate emergency worsens, it won't be the activists who will be getting more violent. I work with families seeking asylum in the UK; some on grounds which can be traced back to conflict arising from restricted land-use and resource-scarcity as a result of climate change. Violence, threat and coercion increase as society breaks down and factions jostle for control of resources. It's very frightening. And it's happening now. Geographically, the UK looks set to face some serious challenges.

Has it occurred to nobody that if JSO kept on causing massive disruption and getting away with it, other protest groups might become emboldened? Suppose there was a "stop the boats" movement that blockaded the M25? Would they have the same sympathy as JSO? Remember the pressure group Fathers for Justice, who did similar "heroic" antics by dressing as Spiderman, and scaling cranes, bridges and the like, forcing roads to be closed? Would they have the hero's reception "their cause is so worthy, they're entitled to peaceful protest!" that JSO seem to have? Would we still be OK with one protest group after another upping the ante, until there is complete anarchy? Remember the London riots: they started with anger about a young man dying in police custody, but then escalated at alarming speed. More and more people joined in, knowing that they could easily outnumber the "feds" (their word, not mine), perhaps thinking they would get away with it, under our soft-touch justice system. The courts worked overtime to prosecute the rioters; and incidentally, a very few of them were moneyed and middle class, who were copycats of what was going on around them.

And this is the danger: copycat protests. There has to be a deterrent. Sooner or later, the line had to be drawn, and a message had to be sent "if you disrupt like this, you will be locked up"; JSO kept on causing mayhem again and again, there had to come a point when "enough is enough!", with the book thrown at them (I love that phrase), otherwise, other groups might believe themselves to be similarly invincible. They were getting away with it again, and again, and again, and I'm really surprised that so far, nobody took matters into their own hands, and drove straight through them and killed them (and such a driver would probably receive a much longer sentence than dear Cressie). Although peaceful protest is acceptable, systematically causing mayhem is not, and is very far from "peaceful". The line on acceptable protest has to be drawn somewhere.

That's not to say that the government is fair and impartial about who they lock up: let's suppose that an anti-lockdown movement had scaled the gantries instead. They would probably have been remanded at once, and given much longer sentences before their feet even touched the ground.

If we continue with the same “laws” we will. We are already very populated in urban areas. There is not plan and is not going to end up well. Massive hole in our budget for trying to keep up with all those arriving here. We should not make this our problem but I suspect once the penny drop we will be already on having a civil war over survival.

Let's also suppose the "climate change" movement changed their tune to "save the planet, don't have children", and started blockading labour wards, and entered schools to hand out condoms, and promote irreversible sterilisation. Would their worthy "it's for the good of the planet" cause receive a sympathetic reception?

Moonlight I appreciate your measured responses.

Whilst JSO may be acting on behalf of the global south, I am still not sure how throwing soup at art or blocking the M25 is really bringing that to our attention. I think that sort of action is, in and of itself, incredibly parochial. It does nothing to inform anyone of the plight of the global south. In fact, I would aver you have done more to that end on this thread.
I'd think those in the global South might be rather disappointed that in one of the multi-media capitals of the world, with so many platforms available to us, the best we can do to raise our voices in support is this.
I'm spammed every minute by bloody LadBible on Facebook. You've got a society that lives and dies on its phones. That rises to every clickbait article about nonsense crap. You have a sitting audience. An audience that will read, even if it's just to argue the toss, like the idiots who go on Vegan pages to say, 'mmm, meat.'
Why aren't I being spammed by JSO saying, basically, what you have said?
If the only time I see or hear of JSO is because they have been jailed, all I am learning is that JSO do stupid things.
OK, we are talking about it here now, because of that, I will give you that, but my goodness, this is the age where not long ago we were all talking about what colour a dress was. Why? Because it was all over the internet. So it's clear that there's other ways to get people talking.
Why are we still protesting in such a frankly analogue way? The world is literally in our hands. A huge resource, a global platform that wasn't available to the suffragettes, MLK or even the Greenham common women and the only thing JSO can think of to get attention is this. Really? We are living in an age where every single person in this country has the means in their pocket to communicate with the world. There are so many ways to get noticed, to get people talking.
It's been said, can't remember by whom, that bad people are often much better at marketing, and unfortunately I think that's true.

You really couldn't make this up.

Much of the global South is already suffering acute consequences of the changing climate, to the point of being displaced, through no fault of their own. We know these changes are anthropogenic ‐caused by man‐ and that we, here in the West, are the predominant cause of the CO² emissions which cause the greenhouse effect, on account of our dependency on fossil fuels and our rapacious appetite for consumer goods (the manufacture of which we blithely outsource to other countries such as China).

Are you really saying that "all those arriving here" are the "problem"? The very least we can do is show some kind of interest and humility in recognition of the fact that the lives of men, women and children in other parts of the world, who had no part in generating the emissions causing the climate emergency, are wrecked as a result of a problem with our Western economy.

@ObelixtheGaul This is an excellent point. Why are JSO using these methods to protest, instead of the many, many digital ones we have available? Why are those people telling children that they can be a boy one day, a girl the next, and an animal on the third day so easily able to access their desired audience?

It's true that digital protests are trickier if they don't fit the government's agenda: look how quickly any anti-vax and anti-lockdown propaganda was silenced online. (If you didn't see any, that's because it was quickly crushed.) But JSO's cause does in a way fit the government agenda; the government is saying stuff like "we are committed to net zero", is it not?

Totally agree.

What absolute nonsense.

The bollocks button needed again! If an otherwise same person chooses to sit in the middle of the road they should expect to be run over!