To quote only from Greenpeace and JSO’s most recent actions: Greenpeace scaled the Intercontinental Hotel in Park Lane in London’s West End, unfurling a banner with a pithy message (good for gaining attention and for publicity photos) ‘Make Big Oil Pay’ and blocking entrances to keep delegates out of a gas and oil conference. Early this month, Greenpeace placed on the riverbank at the foot of Big Ben a giant inflatable purple octopus, a week ahead of the King’s Speech. Again, the same themes: of something visually arresting (which duly got pictured in the mainstream media) that required some skill (whether abseiling or motoring down the Thames in a boat). Again, activists in boats carried hand banners that read “Protect the Oceans”. Protesting as outdoors and invigorating, even playful, to make a point (in the case of the octopus, Greenpeace seeks a moratorium on deep sea mining).
The actions go on, regularly: a ‘living artwork made of seed paper’ displayed at Westminster; another living artwork ‘guerrilla-plated’ by volunteers at a disused Tesco-owned site in Liverpool. Protest and demos have their own lexicon, even. Much ingenuity, even art, goes into these stunts: the planning to find the right site, the time to go about the action. Arguably the pick of the year was the draping of black fabric around Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s property in North Yorkshire, again requiring climbing – ladders and ropes, and which prompted much spluttering and comment; which was part of the purpose of the drapery.
To stay with the Sunak property example, Philip Evans of Greenpeace UK commented afterwards, when four from Greenpeace were arrested that they had been ‘entirely peaceful and we were diligent in ensuring that no one was home and that no damage would be done to the property. We have cooperated fully with the police’. If only fraudsters, shoplifters, burglars and car thieves were as considerate!?
The Home Office’s and successive Home Secretaries’ legislative efforts to combat such protest appear to have made not the slightest difference. If a new public order law is made to combat one protest tactic (tunnelling, such as under Euston Gardens against HS2, in the winter of 2020-21; or blockading of newspaper print works; sit-downs on bridges or motorway gantries, or ‘slow marching’ on main roads; ‘locking on’ to a gate – criminalised under the Public Order Act 2023), protesters will come up with another. Met Police have this month indeed (as Just Stop Oil have stated) used a section seven order from the Public Order Act 2023, to arrest slow marchers in central London. Just Stop Oil is undeterred; JSO is calling on ‘everyone’ to join daily at midday in Trafalgar Square to march in London, from November 20.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has shown interest in such protests, for example in July holding a ’roundtable’, of event organisers and police, after Just Stop Oil protesters targeted such high-profile events as the Wimbledon tennis fortnight, and a Test match at Lord’s cricket ground. As is her wont, she spoke extravagantly of such actions being ‘unacceptable’ (although as they carry on regardless there comes a point when they are accepted?) and promised to be ‘uncompromisingly tough’ against such disruption.
As for who and where protesters will make demos, it’s striking how just about anywhere, even an organisation that may take no view on the protest topic, can be a target. It’s worth quoting the celebrity Swedish climate change protester Greta Thunberg. On attending that demo at Park Lane she said: “Behind these closed doors at the Oil and Money conference spineless politicians are making deals and compromises with lobbyists from destructive industries; the fossil fuel industry. People all over the world are suffering and dying from the consequences of the climate crisis caused by these industries who we allow to meet with our politicians and have privileged access to.” She added: “That is why we have to take direct action to stop this and to kick oily money out of politics.” In other words, given such global topics, any organisation can be at fault or called to order for having a connection with the topic, in this case a hired venue.
Just as (performance) art is hinted at in protest, so is history. Just Stop Oil supporters recently at The National Gallery in London – wearing appropriate JSO white t-shirts for suitable pictures during and after the act – broke the glass covering The Rokeby Venus, a painting by Diego Velázquez as slashed by a women’s suffrage campaigner, Mary Richardson, in 1914. Also targets: the Natural History Museum in Kensington, west London. A further tactic is to demonstrate outside secondary or even tertiary targets: such as the London law firm DLA Piper, for taking on the Government’s case, in the National Highways Ltd M25 structures injunction. Insurers, also, remain a key target for protests by climate activist groups, security consultancies report.
As that shows, a branch of the private security industry is finding regular work in the field of tracking protest groups online, to get open-source intelligence (OSINT), and social media intelligence (SOCMINT) about where and when protesters may demo next (even a minute’s warning can be the difference between a guard force locking the foyer entrance and keeping protesters out, and protesters entering and occupying a foyer, requiring much more time and effort to remove them, and causing far more damage to brand and reputation, than if protesters are merely foiled at the door and spray-paint or put up posters or glue themselves to something). Hashtags in use by activist groups can be a particularly useful source.
It’s a commentary on the criminal law that in other cases those protested against have taken a civil route, such as last year HS2 which gained an injunction to ban protest on its land. Shell, for one, has gone legal against Greenpeace. It’s a front in the wider conflict, whereby each side may seek to wear out the other financially in legal costs.
JSO, Greenpeace, protesters against HS2, nuclear power, cruelty to animals and numerous other competing causes have accommodated themselves to the Government’s changes in public order law. Protesters as JSO puts it slow march ‘to the point of arrest’,. Again, it serves as a wider front in the conflict. JSO know well that police have only a finite capacity to make arrests, process people, just as the criminal justice system only has so much capacity (or as JSO put it recently, ‘the wheels of justice grind on‘); the prisons are full. Even if the courts do jail protesters (for only the most serious cases, more typical is a ‘community’, or suspended prison, sentence) for some that will be a badge of honour; something for the protest CV. As Just Stop Oil have framed it earlier this month, ‘defiant’ protesters ‘risk prison’. JSO have been articulate about their stance, of ‘civil resistance’.
Truly there’s nothing new under the sun: protesters against unemployment blocked central London in the 1930s, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) people marched in the 1960s, anti-Vietnam War students demo’d in Grosvenor Square in ’68. This year’s most noteworthy protests show that only a handful of determined organisers by comparison with those past causes can get across their message and have no reason to stop.
Photo by Mark Rowe: 2017 protest, Grosvenor Square, London
