Just Stop.

I’m starting to think it’s about time we started to think about stopping ‘Just Stop Oil’. I mean, surely they must be getting a bit bored of themselves by now. I know I would be, certainly if I’d been recreationally derelict enough to commit more time than is healthy to the least effective protest campaign since, well, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ (a movement that could be amply summed up as a gratuitous waste of glue). Indeed, it wouldn’t take a lot of persuasion to conclude that actively supporting ‘Just Stop Oil’ is literally the biggest waste of time conceivable at this point in passing. A bigger waste of time than Nicola Sturgeon’s political ambitions. A bigger waste of time than wheelchair rugby. A bigger waste of time than wasps. Not that the members of ‘Just Stop Oil’ would admit to that, because they’re too busy taking days off being, apparently, middle class and unemployed at the same time, to perform the kinds of acts of wilful stupidity that would put the cast of Love Island to shame. They probably think they have some kind of dark, subversive, cage-rattling power agenda but behind the net curtain they are little more than frizzy haired old fuck-nuts and failed ecology students with easy access to a t-shirt printer and a limitless supply of what could be mistaken for ground-up Wotsits. They are also clearly well enough funded to buy themselves into some of the more prestigious events on the English sporting calendar, although I’m not sure they have the first clue what ‘sporting’ truly means.

The daft irony of ‘Just Stop Oil’ is that they don’t really want to do what they say they want to do; or at least not what their name suggests they want to do, which adds another level of cretin to proceedings. You would assume that with a name like ‘Just Stop Oil’ the ‘Just Stop Oil’ group would want to, er, just stop oil, but even they must know that stopping the use of oil, literally, would result in a rather quick descent towards economic meltdown, societal collapse and global anarchy. They must know this because they must know that oil is integral to the fabric of modern life and until we find a viable alternative (which it doesn’t look like we will in a hurry) we may as well just get on with getting on. Instead ‘Just Stop Oil’ are after something much more specific, which is a cessation of new fossil fuel licensing and production by the British Government. Whether by this they mean not only oil but also gas and coal is unclear, but what is clear is that ‘Just Stop Oil’ isn’t really gearing towards stopping oil but in fact is more inclined to prevent the starting of more oil and so should, for the purposes of clarity be called something like: ‘Just Stop The British Government Starting Oil (and other fossil fuels)’. Which, as names go, is crap, and therefore a far more appropriate name for their organisation, with the point being that how can they achieve their goals if they can’t even express them clearly? I really shouldn’t have to look them up on Wikipedia to see what they’re all about, and neither should you. It’s the kind of lazy protesting that makes dirty protesting suddenly seem quite an appealing way to pass the time.

This week, like an even less efficient version of what rail workers do almost every week, members of ‘Just Stop Oil’ have popped up again, this time at Wimbledon. Perhaps in an effort to insist upon the British public that they have a message worth listening to they swapped the increasingly frequent use of orange powder paint (don’t ask me why, I don’t know) for scraps of orange paper and the pieces from what was bound to have been an overpriced Wimbledon jigsaw puzzle. At some point in the recent past a room full of these idiots must have sat down and decided that, yes, definitely, this must be the best way to grab some attention and truly bolster the cause. Alas, like every other attempt in their sad annals of abject failure, it was an idea almost entirely bereft of any kind of clue and so when the two winners of the ‘Just Stop Oil’ self-righteous moron of the month award pottered out onto Court No18 to scatter their rotten oats they were already doomed to the briefest of moments in the spotlight and about as much popular acclaim as was afforded the Yorkshire Ripper. They might have seen triumph in their actions, but defeat is the better word. What once was annoying has now become sad to the point of delusion. Hapless. Retarded. Pitiful. The most pointless thing to have ever been described as having a point.

But then it hit me. Like powder paint on a snooker table. This isn’t the work of environmental campaigners or Cotswold anarchists. These people don’t want to save the world or protect the climate. All they want, really, is just get a bit of attention. To validate their empty lives. The truth is that without these dim-witted displays of public idiocy the members of ‘Just Stop Oil’ would serve no other purpose in society. They would go to coffee mornings and talk bollocks amongst themselves and then they would go home and watch the news and tut at lots of things they disapproved of and casually remark that there are a lot more blacks living on their road than there used to be. These people aren’t going out to work every day because if they were seen doing what they do in public they would be fired instantly. So they offer nothing and instead occupy the empty spaces that exist between the useful things in life. That man who calmly sat cross-legged at Wimbledon the other day might have been quietly pleased with himself for a bit but I’d like to thing he started crying the moment the bedroom door closed behind him when he got back to his parent’s house and that he hasn’t stopped since. He must know, deep down and in very real terms, that his existence is a stain on society and an affront to common sense. If he or his colleagues had any sense they would either ramp up their actions dramatically and do something stupendously reckless like kidnap Rishi Sunak or blow up Milford Haven or they should, and I mean this in the nicest sense, fuck off and do something else entirely.

But these folk don’t strike me as sharp enough to think of something else so the only other solution that makes sense is to treat them like the aforementioned wasp (or Nicola Sturgeon) and instead of flapping about and getting irritated just take the sage’s advice and ignore them. If one of them sits on a tennis court then the players should be encouraged to just carry on playing tennis, as hard as they can. The same goes for cricket – hey, it’s a front row seat that money just can’t buy – but we’d have to be clear that if a cricket ball travelling at 98 miles an hour happened to remove most of their teeth and all of their ability to see then it would be a minor tragedy all of their own making. And should a few particularly brave souls choose to link arms across the start line of a Formula 1 race then it could just be seen as a good moment to break some Silverstone lap records. Beyond sport the same rules would apply, and so the bill for the next dreary Van Gogh they cover in alphabetti spaghetti would simply be paid for by instantly stripping the assailants of all their current and future assets and earnings (and since that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to cover it they might be quickly condemned to a lifetime of community service, preferably somewhere awful like Bolton). And as for those motorway blockades, well I’m not saying I would particularly like to see the hard shoulder of the M25 scattered with limp corpses but it would be a price worth paying as long as you could still make out the faded ‘Just Stop Oil’ logo on the remnants of their torn, blood darkened t-shirts. Maybe that’s a step too far, as so often happens here, but I can’t hear anyone else coming up with a better solution. These people are boring now, and if there’s one thing worse than a protester it’s a boring protester, so if no-one else is going to do anything I think the least I could do is to start using more oil from now on. Just to be difficult. Just to be a little fucking nuisance.

G B Burton. 08.07.2023