BREAKING: Just Stop Oil protesters left with injuries after altercation at refinery
[PUBLISHED 16:56 SATURDAY 12TH OCTOBER 2024]
Just Stop Oil protesters blockading a main road heading to the Fawley oil refinery near Southampton have sustained injuries, with one taken to hospital, after a physical altercation broke out.
A dozen protesters had glued themselves to the roads serving the refinery, forcing the refinery to halt almost all of its operations. Tensions at the event between Just Stop Oil protesters (not all of which had glued themselves to roads) and workers at the refinery had been running high, with some participating in a shouting match: some workers accused the protesters of being terrorists and accused Just Stop Oil of being a terrorist group, whereas some protesters shouted that the workers at the refinery are complicit in climate change and that their job is destroying the Earth.
For the first few hours, despite the high tensions and the shouting and the clear anger, the blockade of the road had been completely peaceful without any violence occurring. This evening, however, one of the workers tried to grab one of the protesters glued to the road in an attempt to forcefully end the blockade. A few other workers joined in, leading to a physical altercation wherein the workers were attempting to forcefully remove the protesters from the road they were glued to while the protesters were trying to defend themselves.
At this point, the police, who were present and had been attempting to lower the tensions and to bring about a peaceful end to the blockade, stepped in. They quickly separated the fighting protesters and workers, ended the fighting, and arrested them. One of the protesters sustained serious but non-fatal injuries and was taken to hospital, while the others sustained minor injuries which did not require hospital attention.
One refinery worker who was not involved in the fighting told an Independent journalist who was at the protest that he believes his colleagues were justified in using force to end the blockade because “Just Stop Oil are terrorists” and because their actions here were going to “damage the UK”.
A Just Stop Oil protester who was present but did not take part in the road blockade told the journalist that she had never seen anything like this in all the protests she had attended, added that “those workers are the real terrorists if anyone is”, and blamed politicians who labelled Just Stop Oil as terrorists and politicians who called for the blockade to end for causing this physical altercation.
This is not the first Just Stop Oil protest where the public intervened to forcefully end their protest: for example, in November 2022, some members of the public forcefully dragged some Just Stop Oil protesters off a road in London they had glued themselves to. But, with the arrests of the Just Stop Oil protesters, this blockade seems to be over, and the refinery will be able to resume production.