Dear Boris Johnson and Priti Patel,
Just Stop Oil will not be stopped by your threats, we will continue our campaign of peaceful civil resistance until the government agrees to end new oil and gas.
To continue a policy to expand fossil fuel extraction, a policy that is opposed by the United Nations, the International Energy Agency and every Climate Scientist, is to knowingly plan for the deaths of countless millions, to plan for billions to lose their homes, to plan for the end of ordered society and with it democracy.
You know this, you have been told. Choosing to ignore this is to be complicit in acts of genocide. To accept entire nations going underwater. To accept monsoons that displace 33 million people and cause the deaths of many thousands. To accept that food and water will become increasingly scarce, causing widespread starvation.
Just Stop Oil refuses to roll over and accept our fate. We love our brothers and sisters around the world, and the people that struggled to win our freedoms. There isn’t anywhere else we would rather be right now than sitting on a motorway or High St, blocking an oil depot or digging a tunnel because that is the right thing to do at this point in history. We are currently planning the biggest act of peaceful civil resistance in modern British history to begin in October. We are many and you are few and you cannot stop ordinary people from resisting the destruction of their lives, families, community and country. We are going to resist you.
Democracy is threatened, not by ordinary people taking part in nonviolent civil resistance, but by governments who are condemning their people to unimaginable suffering so that a few can hoard their riches. Peaceful civil resistance is the bedrock of ordered civil society and has won us our rights, freedoms, holidays and pensions. We are proud to follow in the footsteps of the Suffragettes, Gandhi and the Civil Rights movement. Our democracy is threatened by politicians who refuse to protect their citizens from the cost of living crisis driven by fossil fuels causing widespread poverty or from the climate crisis, the irreversible impacts of which will be felt for the next 10,000 years.
You are facilitating the collapse of our society that allows democracy to function. The Public Order Bill will be useless against a wildfire, against 40C heat and against dried up rivers. You can’t fine crop failure, you can’t arrest a heat dome, you can’t imprison a flood.
The disruption caused by Just Stop Oil will end when the government upholds its primary responsibility and acts to end new oil and gas and in doing so defends democracy, freedom and the safety of its people and future generations.
Just Stop Oil
August 31st 2022
