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Early this morning (June 20), two Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists broke into Stansted airport and sprayed orange paint over private jets parked on the airfield where Taylor Swift’s plane landed last night.

The two activists, 28-year-old Jennifer Kowalski and 22-year-old Cole Macdonald, were arrested by Essex police on suspicion of criminal damage and interference with the use or operation of national infrastructure. 

In a post on X, JSO said the two activists had “cut the fence into the private airfield at Stansted where @taylorswift13’s jet is parked, demanding an emergency treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030”. An accompanying video captured one of the protestors cutting a hole in a fence before spraying orange paint over two planes. Neither of these two planes belonged to Swift.

26-year-old Ben Larsen is a JSO activist. Speaking to Dazed, he defended the group’s decision to target the jets. “Why have we allowed private jets to exist in the first place? The demand for the global environmental movement should be to stop burning oil, gas and coal, and people who travel by private jet should have to pay for this transition,” he says.

In February, lawyers for Taylor Swift threatened to take legal action against a student who tracks Swift’s jet use via social media. Through extensive tracking, @CelebJets had found that due to her private jet usage Swift is the biggest celebrity polluter in the world.

This latest action follows a JSO protest at Stonehenge yesterday, where two protestors sprayed an orange cornflour-based spray over the ancient stone monument. The protest sparked widespread backlash, with the leaders of the three major political parties slamming the activists’ tactics.

Larsen adds that he would ask JSO’s critics to consider what their plan is to avoid climate catastrophe. “We’re currently in an extreme situation and in this election cycle all mainstream politicians have their heads in the sand over this,” he says. “That’s why JSO are taking action to demand the UK government sign a fossil fuel treaty to stop burning oil, gas and coal, and to do so by the end of this decade. Anything less than this is just a failure of leadership and a criminal betrayal of the British public.”