Just Stop Oil

• Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass on the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez at the National Gallery in London.
• This, you might be surprised to hear, is not the first time this painting has been the target of activists.
• In March 1914, a suffragette named Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery with a butcher’s knife secreted in her sleeve.
• It’s not the first time Just Stop Oil has taken a tactic from the suffragette playbook.

Distancing themselves

• On a march in London, Just Stop Oil protesters questioned “would the suffragettes have marched on the pavement?” when asked to move.
• Extinction Rebellion activists, outside of a court where seven women were held for causing damage to Barclays Headquarters, wore suffragette outfits.
• However, both Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have made distinctions between their actions and the suffragettes’.
• Nevertheless, Just Stop Oil’s use of confetti and jigsaws pales in comparison to the suffragettes’ use of firelighters and paraffin.

Justification through history

• Pankhurst contrasted the actions of other contemporary figures throughout her speeches and her autobiography.
• Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil has followed in her footsteps, ironically adopting a suffragette tactic while distancing itself from the movement.
• Pankhurst contrasted how previous violent movements conducted by men had been rewarded in comparison to the suffragettes who were arrested.

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Louise Coyne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• This is not the first time politicians have used cars to sell themselves to voters.
• The cultural and economic importance of cars may have waned, but they remain important enough for politicians to use for electoral gain.
• And it reveals a new tactic from the political right to maintain relevance as the climate crisis unfolds.

What’s changed since 1997?

• In the lead-up to 2023, there has similarly been a lot of direct action by protesters against cars.
• Then, as now, a Conservative government lurching from crisis to crisis has sought popular issues to revive its fortunes.
• In 1997, the Tories were embroiled in a series of corruption scandals and nurturing an internal war over the EU.


Because of these changes, Sunak’s championing of motorists today works differently to the Mondeo man appeal in 1997. Then, both major parties agreed on the social and economic value of the car and sought to sideline and undermine the road protest campaigns. Both shored up this pro-car ideology and competed over who could best serve it.

Two pro-car parties

• In practice, there remains little difference between the two parties on the question of cars.
• Both assume that society will continue to be dominated by cars, but both have introduced enough (modest) policies to limit car use and promote alternatives.
• To actively promote cars now requires a clearer affirmation and creates the possibility of using it as a wedge issue to attack the opposition with.
• This rhetoric also borrows from populists undermining climate policy more generally, because the political logic of promoting cars is now one of backlash which claims “the people” have lost out from the various anti-car initiatives of both parties.

• But despite sustained growth for several years, sales of plant-based meat products are now stagnating.
• The environmental benefits of adopting a diet that is less reliant on meat have been well-established.
• However, a growing ideological divide over the environment means traditional ways of encouraging people to eat plant-based meat – promoting its green credentials – could be harming sales, according to research.

Criticism of plant-based meat

• The plant-based meat market has certainly been criticised for high prices compared with animal meat.
• As plant-based meat is a relatively new product, the long-term health implications of directly replacing animal meat with it are unknown.
• Research also warns against assuming that plant-based meat is nutritionally equivalent to animal meat.
• We analysed press releases from Beyond Meat to understand how the benefits of plant-based meat are being communicated to consumers, to see if this could be a driver of the ideological divide over plant-based meat.

Testing ads about the environment

• We developed mock Facebook ads that described either the health and environmental benefits of plant-based meat, or just the health benefits.
• We found that advertising content based on the environment turned off the conservative consumers involved in our study.
• We found that environmental messaging is incongruent to conservative consumers, meaning these ads don’t spark either their curiosity or interest.