Just Stop Oil, the Farmers Protests and a Lost Inheritance

Last week on Twitter/X Jeremy Clarkson posted “It seems if you are from Just Stop Oil or protesting about Gaza, you can do what you want.” Yesterday, in response the online media outlet The Canary published a piece entitled Jeremy Clarkson schooled by Just Stop Oil over political prisoners. This references the 40 Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action supporters who are currently in prison, some of whom have received sentences of four or five years. It’s hard to see this as avoiding the consequences of your actions.

Today (14/11/24) the Telegraph carries a piece in which a former police officer advises “the public do not want to see a contrast between the way the farmers are policed and the way more fashionable left-wing protesters are treated”.

So what would equal treatment for protesting farmers look like? That would mean farmers being arrested after two minutes on the road, their homes raided, their phones and laptops seized multiple times, being held on remand for many months ahead of trial and sentenced to multiple years in prison.

The Chancellor’s tax changes have hit the legacy small scale farmers can leave to their children, however the realisation that our inheritance is not going to be what we expected is going to hit us all, very soon. Food production, the rural and urban economies, our health, education and transport system have been designed for a climate that no longer exists. There is no evidence that we can survive the 2C of heating that is now predicted, whatever we do, for the 2030’s. That’s everyone’s inheritance down the pan.

Just Stop Oil recognises that UK farmers are going to be on the sharp end as we enter this era of consequences. Farmers should be on the streets, as farming cannot adapt to a future in which the weather will be either too hot, too dry, too wet or too cold to grow food. The crisis in farming is about so much more than inheritance tax. As an alarmed Clarkson tweeted about the lack of insects this summer: ‘something is afoot‘.

If Jeremy Clarkson or any other farmer would like to understand more about resisting a government that is intent on doing harm, and what is needed to protect all of our children’s inheritance, Just Stop Oil would be pleased to hear from them.