“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
Their disruptive tactics just alienate the public and distract from climate goals, even though the underlying aim of tackling climate change has broad support
Target the polluters and private jets, not delivery drivers and nurses trying to make a living. Just because a protest is near Parliament doesn't mean it's just inconveniencing the govt. The problem with these protests is it just turns climate change into a culture war focusing on traffic jams instead of corporate greed.
Trying to convince non-believers by terrorising them (or at least making their life miserable) is not the best way. But again Left politics and logic are quite separated from each other.
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.
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.
Middle-class performative muppets who have no concept of the real world and their impact on working people's lives should stay home and knit tofu.
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.
The behaviour of this group has seriously undermined support among the broader population. Demonstration is one thing, serious disruption and criminal damage another. The group has put itself onto the lunatic fringe
If I was trying to educate and convince people to join my cause, antagonising them wouldn't necessarily be the wisest way to do so.
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.