British environmental activist group Just Stop Oil have announced they will be ceasing activities next month (April 2025). Over their three years of operations, the group have arranged countless high-profile protests, including throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting at the National Gallery, blocking departures from Gatwick airport, spraying paint on Stonehenge and smearing chocolate cake over a wax figure of King Charles in Madame Tussauds.
Members of the group received increasingly severe punishments for causing civil disruption. In May 2024, former cover star and Just Stop Oil member Phoebe Plummer was sentenced to 27 months in prison for disrupting traffic in West London. Despite this controversy, however, the group emphasised that their initial demand of no new oil and gas is now UK government policy.
“Just Stop Oil’s initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history,” the group wrote on Instagram today (March 27). “We’ve kept 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground and the courts have ruled new gas and oil licenses unlawful.”
Still, Just Stop Oil restated the need for continued civil resistance moving forward. “So it is the end of soup on Van Gogh… but it is not the end of trials, of tagging and surveillance, of fines, probations and years in prison,” the post continued. “Just Stop Oil will continue to tell the truth in courts, speak out for political prisoners and call out the UK’s oppressive anti-protest laws. We continue to rely on small donations from the public to make this happen.”
Just Stop Oil have arranged one final protest in Parliament Square on April 26. They have also suggested that they will be succeeded by a new group in the near future, concluding their post with the line: ‘A new resistance will be coming.’
Read our 2023 cover story on Just Stop Oil here.