‘It’s important we take some responsibility’: Why pensioners are joining Just Stop Oil

As climate activists go, the pair of them met almost all the usual criteria. Their target was a priceless artefact in a public institution; in their bags were tools to help them inflict some light, headline-grabbing damage; they wore oversized T-shirts bearing the name of the organisation they’re a part of; and for the benefit of the inevitable mobile-phone cameras capturing the whole thing, they unfurled a handmade sign, then fluently recited the demands of their cause.

But in the case of the two Just Stop Oil protesters who took a hammer and chisel to one of the two Magna Cartas in the British Library on Friday morning, one thing might have struck alarmed onlookers (and security guards sent to tackle them) as a little unusual: their combined age of 167.

The Rev Sue Parfitt, 82, from Bristol, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher from Swansea, were arrested on Friday morning and have been charged with criminal damage, the Metropolitan Police have said. The two women had targeted the protective case around the document – one holding the chisel, the other bashing away with a lump hammer – to argue the Government is breaking the law.

“The Magna Carta is rightly revered, being of great importance to our history, to our freedoms and to our laws,” Rev Parfitt, a Church of England vicar, said. “But there will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened.”

They glued themselves to the case, before security removed them. The damage was, the British Library said, “minimal” and that version of the Magna Carta was untouched. The culprits will appear in court next month.

If the whole saga sounds like something from a quaint Richard Osman novel, and destined to be adapted with Dames Penelope Wilton and Eileen Atkins in the lead roles, you perhaps haven’t been keeping up to date with the changing age demographic of our most disruptive and committed climate protesters. Increasingly, the charge is being led by the over 60s.

The eco-zealots Boris Johnson had in mind in 2019, when he called climate activists “uncooperative crusties” who block London streets of the capital with their “heaving hemp-smelling bivouacs”, were probably dreadlocked twentysomethings with a ready supply of body paint and subpar bongo-playing skills, rather than octogenarian vicars and retired teachers.

But even in that year, some 23 per cent of those who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s capital-halting protests were aged above 56, according to researchers at Aston University. One was the then 77-year-old Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, who knelt down in Lombard Street opposite the Bank of England, leading a Shacharit service.

That figure is likely far higher in the case of Just Stop Oil, which is now the pre-eminent and certainly liveliest climate activist group in the UK. It has a simple demand: for the UK government to end all new fossil fuel licences. Just Stop Oil sprang up in early 2022 with a core membership made up largely of veterans of other climate protest organisations, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.

Though it doesn’t release exact demographic breakdowns of its ranks, it seems to skew in two directions – under 25s and over 60s. Now, whenever a new Just Stop Oil protest crops up in the news, be it a slow march through London or a high-profile stage invasion, it invariably features an older activist – or what’s come to be known as a “grey protester”.

In May 2023, for instance, among 10 Just Stop Oil protesters arrested after refusing to leave the road and stop slow-marching around Parliament Square were a 73-year-old woman in a wheelchair, an 81-year-old priest and a 71-year-old retired cook.

In the previous October, several pensioner protesters were among some 30 arrested for a sit-in that brought Trafalgar Square to a standstill. The “British Library Two” are merely the latest.

“I have 18 grandchildren, and I have a WhatsApp group with them, and as a gift to them this year I joined Just Stop Oil,” said Jean, an 80-year-old caller to Natasha Devon’s LBC show, on Saturday. “I said it’s really important that we, my age group, get active and take some responsibility, and demonstrate.

“That doesn’t mean to say I love the idea about it, but it does mean I feel passionate about it. I was heartened to hear of the two [Magna Carta protesters] who got arrested, not because they got arrested but [because] it takes a lot of courage for our age group to go out and do something.”

In Jean’s case, she equated climate protesting at her age to gardening: that even if you don’t necessarily see the plant flower, it’s still worth sowing the seed so that others can enjoy it. Many people, she said, have looked at her “strangely”, but she is far from alone.

Judy Bruce – she of the Magna Carta stunt – has given various interviews about her personal motivations as a climate activist. A former Extinction Rebellion member, she became a radical protester after realising non-disruptive marches, including the one she joined in the streets of St Ives during the G7 summit three years ago, were largely ineffectual.

“Did the government take any notice? No,” she told The Times last year. “After that I realised there’s no point doing peaceful protests.” Bruce has no grandchildren, and described herself as “not really political” or “a hippy or an anarchist”, but as a biologist she had become concerned about the loss of biodiversity in the UK.

As is the case with many grey protesters, she grew up in a time of political activism. “I supported Greenpeace in the 1970s, but felt the government pretty much fixed the ozone layer issue. I vaguely expected the same would happen with carbon emissions,” she told The I. “After Extinction Rebellion erupted in 2019, I used lockdown to educate myself on what is really happening and was horrified.

“The facts are incontrovertible: humans, especially Westerners, are living a lifestyle which has led to greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of living systems. We are heading for disaster, literally wiping out four billion years of evolution by 100 years of carelessness.”

Initially she was reticent about being too extreme, she said. “Gosh – be arrested? Heavens, no, I don’t want a criminal record… But then you begin to realise that you’ve got to do something radical.”

The following year she sat on the M25 for Insulate Britain, and found herself in handcuffs. Friday’s arrest was at least her seventh. She’d be prepared to go to jail. “We’ve contributed to years of exuberance. Young people now have to face the consequences of what we’ve done.”

From the Aldermaston marches to Faslane peace camp, older people have always involved themselves in protests that are remembered chiefly for being led by young radicals. Now, some of those young radicals in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are back. Other older protesters have led lives entirely respectful of authority and without flirting with civil disobedience in the slightest.

But when it comes to the climate, Bruce’s point about “the consequences of what we’ve done” is perhaps the dominant aspect of the latest demographic change: some retirees feel a sense of guilt that decades of unchecked emissions in their lifetimes may have grave ramifications for future generations.

In 2022, a poll of Conservative Party members found only 4 per cent thought climate change was important. Responding, Chris Skidmore, who resigned the whip as an MP in January in protest over Rishi Sunak’s bill to allow new oil and gas licences, was dismissive. “They would say that, because when you cast the question as net zero by 2050, probably 90 per cent of them will be dead.”

The reverse is also true for many older people, though: it’s precisely because they won’t be around to see the worst of the damage that motivates them to lend a hand – and in some cases, especially those of lawyers and scientists, to activist groups. They also simply have the time and money to turn up on the frontline.

As one Just Stop Oil member explained it a few years ago: “There tends to be people who don’t have anything to lose and then people who have the freedom and financial stability to take those risks. There are a lot of people who want to do it but they need to keep a roof over their heads.”

This is sometimes referred to, a little condescendingly, as “protest privilege” – but it makes far more sense for a group like Just Stop Oil to ask those with the broadest shoulders to take on the weight of fines, arrests and sheer man-hours involved in some stunts, especially since the Public Order Act was enhanced to give the police greater powers against protesters.

One 75-year-old Just Stop Oil activist revealed last year that he’d spent £10,000 on fines, injunctions and lawyers’ fees in recent years, which he has the means to pay. “We’re lucky,” he said. “There are people who will be paying off fines for the rest of their lives.”

In America, a group called Third Act specifically tries to engage people over the age of 60 (people in their “third act” of life) in environmental activism. Launched by the author and activist Bill McKibben in 2021, its mission statement is to “harness an unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” Last year it protested against the four largest US banks by staging a sit-in using rocking chairs.

McKibben, 63, sees fighting for climate justice as his generation’s responsibility just as much as Greta Thunberg’s. “If you’re 65 now, you’ve been on this planet for something like 80 percent of the carbon dioxide that’s ever been emitted,” he told The Washington Post. “There’s a debt to be paid, and there are ways to pay it.”

Here, there seems no need for such a group. The new age of protest is mature, but the eco-zealot pensioners are more than happy to fight alongside the young. On Friday night, Rev Sue Parfitt and Judy Bruce were released from police custody. They posed for a photograph outside the station, which Just Stop Oil posted on social media with a thoroughly approving fire emoji.

In the image, the pair beamed after what they clearly deemed a thoroughly successful day’s work. Anoraks on, bags packed, eyes bright – they looked like they were already looking forward to the next one.

It’s one way to spend retirement.

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