Elderly Just Stop Oil protesters target Magna Carta at British Library
Two members of the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, entered the British Library and smashed the glass surrounding the historic Magna Carta.
The two protestors have been identified as Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, aged 82, and Judy Bruce, aged 85, who formerly worked as a biology teacher. According to Just Stop Oil, after breaking the glass, Parfitt and Bruce glued themselves to the case, holding a sign which read “the government is breaking the law”.
Additionally, the duo stated, “Is the government above the law?” The British library is home to two of the surviving four copies of the Magna Carta, the other two are stored at Salisbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral.
A Just Stop Oil Spokesperson said of the protest: “Clause 39 of the Magna Carta is one of four clauses still enshrined in UK common law, a so-called ‘golden passage’, that states: ‘No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or in any other way ruined, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.'”
Their statement continued: “Contrast that with civil law as it stands in 2024, where corporations are buying private laws in the form of injunctions that circumvent the people’s rights to a trial by jury for speaking out against the crimes of oil companies.”
Meanwhile, Bruce remarked of the statement: “This week 400 respected scientists- contributors to IPCC reports, are saying we are ‘woefully unprepared’ for what’s coming: 2.5 or more degrees of heating above pre industrial levels.”
The retired teacher continued: “Instead of acting, our dysfunctional government is like the three monkeys: ‘see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing- pretend we’ve got 25 years’.. We haven’t! We must get off our addiction to oil and gas by 2030 – starting now.”
While Parfitt said the Magna Carta is a “rightly revered” document which is “of great importance to our history, to our freedoms and to our laws”, she warned, “there will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened.”
Parfitt added: “We must get things in proportion. The abundance of life on earth, the climate stability that allows civilisation to continue is what must be revered and protected above all else, even above our most precious artefacts.”
Notably, last year, protestors from Just Stop Oil have smashed the protective glass of a painting at The National Gallery in London. The ‘Rokeby Venus’ painting was created by Diego Velazquez in the 1600s. Notably, the artwork was previously hacked by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914 at the same historic gallery in London.
