“Target the polluters and private jets, not delivery drivers and nurses” was the floor’s sharpest summary of this decisive Yes verdict. The question was not whether climate change mattered, but whether this method of protest helped its cause; voters here answered that it did not.
The winning side’s argument was strikingly consistent. Its most-respected case said, “Their disruptive tactics just alienate the public and distract from climate goals”, while another warned that the campaign made climate change “a culture war focusing on traffic jams instead of corporate greed”.
No voters offered a smaller, more divided case. One of their strongest voices dismissed the protests as “performative nonsense”, but another drew a line between disruption and legitimate dissent: “a peaceful protest should always be welcomed”; the two sides were arguing not only about tactics, but about whether urgency could justify them.
That disagreement places the result inside the wider struggle over climate politics and public consent. Even some Yes voters accepted the underlying aim, while describing the group as “a net-negative to the left and the prevention of climate change”; the chamber rated that practical objection more highly than the claim that provocation might be necessary.
The verdict was emphatic, but its reasoning was less about climate scepticism than about persuasion. On this page, the traffic blockade was judged not a lever for climate action but a liability attached to it.
24 Opinions
A decent, good & functioning government can carry on with it's agenda no matter what is happening. I don't support violent, disruptive or vandalism as protests, but it won't distract from the facts regarding climate changes that are having serious consequences on our livelihoods. At the end of the day, the planet will be fine, it's us humans who refuse to change. I am okay if we are outlived by the animal & plant kingdoms if we have to always beg some of you to grow up.
Champagne socialists who can afford “clean” energy alternatives, pontificating to people who are pretty much tied to fossil fuels, whether they like it or not, inherently only tend to alienate the very people they should be trying to convince.
JSO has been a net-negative to the left and the prevention of climate change. Disrupting the lives of ordinary people does not make them like or support the cause, and feeds propaganda to the right wing media.
The Just stop oil activist group just never seem to learn that their annoying activism is now a lost cause and is so irrelevant in which it only causes anger and frustration amongst the general public that are trying to live their lives normally without having a very small group getting in the way because of their own opinions.
It's the old argument - did the suffragists (violent) or the suffragettes (not) tip the scale? Malcolm X or MLK? The problem is that the violent ones never seem to know where to stop. They seem to enjoy it for its own sake. The state does not negotiate with terrorists.
Nothing to do with supposed climate goals wherever they protest. They undermine themselves by the way they behave and the hypocrisy is their actions.
It’s just performative nonsense. Climate Emergency is a complete & demonstrable hoax pushed by the media. Arrest, jail & ignore them. They are irrelevant to anything real and they have no demonstrable morality.
Since they had no particular statement on policy that made any coherent sense to anyone its main affect was alienating the public and seeing climate people as nutcases
Quite simply their protests are counter-productive. You don't get people on side by disrupting their lives. The same goes for any protest group. They lose mainstream support by doing so.
If people want to protest peacefully to make their point. If they attempt to damage property or become aggressive then yes it would alienate the debate. But a peaceful protest should always be welcomed whether you agree with its aims or not.