Guardian lets Sodha throw Just Stop Oil under the bus

  • Post last modified:July 22, 2024
  • Reading time:7 mins read


Every Sunday, the Guardian Media Group puts out the Observer – a paper riddled with columnists who make regular Guardian contributors seem barely annoying at all. Sonia Sodha is one such columnist and this week she produced an absolute forest fire of a piece:

Harsh climate

This is the central argument in Sodha’s piece:

There are certainly questions about whether the sentences for their offences are proportionate or appropriate in the context of the wider criminal justice system. But to suggest that freedom of conscience creates an unlimited right to cause other citizens harm is to fail to engage with the nature of their offence. And, more broadly, to misunderstand what it means to live in a democracy where we enjoy a right to noisy protest, but are also bound by obligations to each other that are framed by the rule of law that applies to us all equally.

The central argument against this is that the climate crisis exists because politicians have shown ‘an unlimited right to cause other citizens harm’ through their actions on the climate, making an escalation of resistance inevitable.

You can say ‘what about the law’ all you like, but until we seriously ask ‘what about the planet’, people are going to get angry or check out completely – both of which will have a cataclysmic effect on society.

The government cannot police its way out of this. The climate is changing – both the literal one and the societal one – and the solution to both these issues is to implement serious changes – to ‘just stop oil’, if you will.

She’s no doubt acclimatised to this, but Sodha’s latest piece is drawing backlash online:

To be fair, Sodha does think five years in prison is too long. It’s not because she’s anti-authoritarian, though, it’s because she thinks prison places are too expensive:

So at the very least there needs to be a review of sentencing in this area to check its proportionality. I would go further: these protesters committed a serious offence that justifies punishment, but does this have to mean prison? Prison is an expensive, finite resource that should be reserved for criminals who pose a serious risk to the community that cannot be otherwise mitigated; our prisons are overfull to the point they cannot fulfil their rehabilitation role and so are putting society at greater risk. Why not deprive non-violent offenders of their liberty through restrictive curfews monitored through electronic tagging instead?

What a grim and austere death march these people think the future should be.

Something or nothing

We have at times criticised Just Stop Oil ourselves. A key issue with their protests is that they’ve largely targeted the public rather than the politicians and executives causing the problems. Their reasoning seems to be that the public need to be made aware of these issues, because it’s only then that change will happen. The problem is that the public by-and-large is incredibly aware of climate change and is keen to see the issue tackled; the hold up is political.

At the same time, though, there are also arguments in favour of Just Stop Oil’s approach. Climate change will cause barely-imaginable disruption to all our lives. The Just Stop Oil protests give us a small taste of that, exposing how poorly equipped we are to handle anything more severe.

The other point to make is that if any of us have a problem with how Just Stop Oil are protesting, we’re free to stage better protests ourselves (free until Starmer and the Guardian ankle-tag us anyway). The fact is that unless vast changes are made, we are all fucked – and that leaves us all with the following choices:

  1. Deny the severity of the upcoming climate catastrophe.
  2. Support Just Stop Oil or one of the other protest groups.
  3. Resist in your own way.
  4. Be slowly driven mad by what seems like a foregone climate conclusion.
  5. Accept the severity of the upcoming climate catastrophe; don’t actually do anything to try and stop it, and yet moan about the actions of activists who are getting their hands dirty.

Guardian: the sixth way

Oh, sorry, we forgot – there is a sixth option, and that’s to do everything in option five while simultaneously begging for money to fight against climate change. Because this is what it currently says at the end of every Guardian article in the section where they ask you to sign up for £12 a month (emphasis added):

This is what we’re up against
Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.

What’s more, there are lobby groups with opaque funding who are determined to undermine facts about the climate emergency and other established science.

To ‘undermine facts’, they write. Is it a fact that the climate emergency has the potential to kill millions, billions, or even all of us? If the answer is yes, then it seems like imprisoning activists right now – when the time we have to act is quickly running out – is a very, very bad idea – and that denying that reality is in itself a form of denial.

But hey, if this opinion piece wasn’t riddle with very, very bad ideas, the Observer wouldn’t have published it.

Featured image via Christian Ibarra Santillan – Flick





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