LONDON (Reuters) -British climate protest group Just Stop Oil, whose high-profile stunts have included throwing soup at a Van Gogh painting and disrupting sporting and theatre events, said on Thursday that it would end its campaign of direct action.
The group, which campaigns for Britain to end the extraction of oil and gas by 2030 and has become one of the country’s best-known protest organisations over the last few years, said it would be “hanging up the hi vis” at the end of April.
In the last few months, its activists have poured liquid latex over a robot at a Tesla store, sprayed orange paint on a section of the U.S. embassy building in London and painted over the grave of British naturalist Charles Darwin at London’s Westminster Abbey.
Previous stunts have included spraying paint on Stonehenge while two protesters were jailed for throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” paintings in London’s National Gallery.
Many of its activists have been given long jail terms for their protests, and critics have derided their actions, saying the disruptions were pointless and just inconvenienced ordinary people.
“So it is the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets,” Just Stop Oil said in a statement.
“As corporations and billionaires corrupt political systems across the world, we need a different approach,” it said, vowing it would hold a final protest outside parliament on April 26.
The group said the decision came because the Labour Party, which came to power in Britain last year, had made ending new gas and oil projects a government policy.
However, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected that suggestion.
The spokesperson said the group had created “a significant amount of disruption and public nuisance,” including spoiling a few oil paintings, but the government planned to continue using oil and gas in the coming decades.
(Reporting by Michael Holden and Andrew MacAskill; editing by Sarah Young and Catarina Demony)
