Just Stop Oil activist jailed for six months for taking part in slow march [UK]
Stephen Gingell, 57, thought to be first to receive prison sentence under new Public Order Act
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The objective is to "stop oil", is it not? With oil gone, those "poor petrol station workers" are going to be out of a job anyway. They're part of the problem: they make their living selling oil. As employees working in the industry, they are legitimate targets for protest action.
You don't need to confine yourself to annoyance. Once you're actually targeting someone profiting from the sale of oil, you can escalate your protest.
Go dismantle their fuel hoses. They all have breakaway fittings to avoid causing serious damage if someone drives off with one. Go pull down some fuel hoses and put some pumps out of commission. Jam card readers. Hit E-Stop buttons. All are simple (albeit illegal) nuisances that don't actually cause property damage, but will disrupt operations and gain attention.
Want to go further? Target car dealers that sell only or mostly ICE vehicles. Go spray paint a red line separating the front and back halves of their lot. Tell them the front half of their lot is for electrics and plug-in hybrids only. Find an ICE vehicle in front of the red line,, and their dealership will be targeted for protest actions. Again, because these are legitimate targets working against your cause, you can escalate well beyond simple annoyance.
What you've laid out there are a few ideas for much less legal and much less exposure rich disruption. Annoying small businesses profiting from the sale of oil vehicles and fuel isn't going to make them pack up and start a new business and it's certainly not going to get more exposure to the cause. Sure it's an escalation, but you only want it so you don't have to sit in a traffic jam.
The article is about someone getting jail tome for a peaceful protest which is quite outrageous. Getting jail time for actual vandalism would be less outrageous.
You could pit the insurance industry against the oil industry. You could make it so expensive for a dealership to insure a brand-new ICE vehicle that they don't want the liability of having one on their lot. If an insurer had to pay out on one ICE vehicle at the same dealer every damn day, they would tell their dealer to comply with your extortion, or drop that dealer.
You are right, I don't want to sit in a completely unnecessary traffic jam. The roads are for travel. Travel is a human right, second only to the right to life itself. My right to travel extends out to the point where it intersects your right to travel. As fellow travelers, we must share the roads with each other, not deliberately impede each other.
Travel is so fundamental a right that deliberately and unnecessarily impeding traffic violates about half of the articles in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The right to travel is sacrosanct. Your right to protest does not grant you any power to detain me or impede my travel.
If you are going to insist on violating rights and privileges in an attempt to persuade the public to your cause, pick some less important ones. From a human rights perspective, violating the right to property by torching an empty car is far less injurious than violating the right to travel by impeding traffic.
You are right, I don’t want to sit in a completely unnecessary traffic jam. The roads are for travel. Travel is a human right,
Then get out of your car, and travel. Nobody is stopping you. Except the fascist government, who will ticket you.
The right is to travel. That right is not limited to "walking". The human right to travel is not restricted to those places a human can reach on foot. Further, your assumption that a particular individual is even capable of walking violates two additional human rights relating to the handicapped.
Go read each of the articles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and carefully consider whether being detained by some random "protester" while attempting to exercise the described rights would constitute an infringement.
I think you would be surprised at how many rights are predicated on the right to travel.
Is the right limited to driving in the right lane?
The right to travel extends to the point that it interferes with other people's rights. Roadways must be shared equitably.
The rules of that equitable sharing are known as the "right of way". Nothing in those rules allows protesters to claim exclusive use of a roadway.
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