UK Cracks Down On ‘Just Stop Oil’: Will Force Org To Pay For Being Disruptive And Make It Easier to Sue Them
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uk-cracks-down-just-stop-oil-will-force-org-pay-being-disruptive-make-it-easier-sue-them-1724710
Posted by Zuesssz
23 Comments
And with it the death of protesting and likely birth or more authoritarian leaders. If you can be sued for being disruptive you’d likely never protest anything.
Meanwhile the people destroying ulez cameras and even attempting to blow one up gets government endorsement.
I don’t neccessarily agree with their methods – but when literally nothing is working it is easy to see how people resort to just about anything.
And the little englanders cheered as their rights slowly get stripped away…..
If you want eco-terrorists, this is how you’d do it.
When peaceful protest is banned only violent protest remains.
Yes, this might help you drive around a little.
Yes, in a few years this same law and ruling can be used to make any other protest illegal or difficult, preventing you from protesting, ooh, idk, corruption or an illegal war or the like – because the UK has a common law system, where previous rulings affect how laws are interpreted.
Look you can exercise your democratic right to protest; as long as you do it in designated protest zone, with a licence, for no more than 30m, and so long as it doesnt upset any shareholders.
Just look at Malcom X, Mandela, Pankhurst: they all utilized peaceful and non-disruptive protest and because the govt felt so safe and unthreatened that they gave in. I hear that the partisans in occupied france simply voted out the nazis.
All while Emily Davison’s suffragette flag hangs in Parliament.
I can’t support JSO, they lost me when they were delaying ambulances, but they have every right to protest.
And yet magically we can’t sue the water companies for filling our country’s rivers with piss and shit and poisoning people with parasites, but if you throw dogshit at the houses of parliament to protest oil and gas you get locked up and sued? Interesting.
If peaceful protest is illegal violent protest is inevitable.
Functionally they are using the violence of the state against peaceful protestors.
So then it’s just a clash.
If you commit a crime or cause damage while protesting, of course you should be liable, just as you would if you did the same not during a protest. Protesting is and always should be legal, it does not however make you immune to all other laws while doing it. The government needs to just enforce its already established laws rather than make new ones, targeting the protesting itself
Nothing to see here – this is all part of the government’s plan for Net Zero.
This will end up biting the rightwing morons celebrating the crackdown on “lefties” as well. Farmers for example and NIMBYs can be shut down by the same laws. But yeah critical thinking is a commodity sorely lacking in right-winger’s brains
The idea that radical change can only come about through extreme and disruptive measures is true. I don’t consider Just stop oils tactics to be that though.
Comparisons to historic civil rights protests is weird but common in these threads, the suffragettes didn’t annoy the public into getting the vote, they terrorised it, invented the mail bomb and assassinated people. This isn’t an eminent fight for your survival you’ve faced since you were born, it’s an abstract and intangible threat we will face in the future. I don’t know the tactics that need to be adopted but you do need to get actually radical with them if you want to affect change, laws be damned.
Targeting the public can’t be beneficial to the cause when they mainly pollute out of necessity (a car to get to work, owning a smart phone in modern society), which is another reason comparisons to civil rights protests doesn’t make sense to me.
The entire country should be furious over this. If we can’t protest then the ones on top will screw us even harder than they have before.
I think it’s pretty disgusting and I hope juries start acquitting by conscious, as is their right to do so. But then again, they’ll probably specifically outlaw that too. 🤦♂️ Luckily, the tories don’t have much time left.
Unfortunately, Labour will probably not touch any “security” laws for risk of looking soft on crime, which is pathetic. Hopefully they just quietly tell the CPS not to pursue cases as a fudge rather than a fix.
Good to know that I can sue a climate protestor for delaying my journey for 20 minutes, but when a water company pumps literal shit into the river they get a small fine and told not to do it again.
Feels like these idiots have been used to take more of our freedoms away. All we ever talk about when we see them clog up a street, or spray things orange is how much we hate them, not how fucked the climate is. If anything they’ve actually harmed the movement.
I don’t know if it’s government opportunism, or if these people have been a tool from day one, either way it’s pretty genius. Use a gaggle of obnoxious rich parasites to goad the British public into happily throwing away their own right to protest.
Fantastic news. The death of JSO is in the post and yeah, Tuesday just got better.
Fuck JSO and their supporters.
There are plenty of climate activist groups not being choice cunts.
I’ll support them instead.
This probably wouldn’t be necessary if the existing laws were applied. Blocking the road is an offence and they should be moved .. protest away on the pavement, or in front of Parliament or outside BP, Shell or whatever company is the source of the complaint. Most people just want to go to work, get through the day and have a peaceful existance – it’s hard enough making ends meet as it is.
And just because you’re trying to save the Peruvian Squat-muncher does not give you the right to cover works of art in paint – that’s vandalism.
the public are really committed to that speed run toward fascism
When peaceful protest is banned there is no further downsides to…. more effective protest.