The environmental activist group, which encourages supporters to cause unrest through non-violent political disobedience, will return to the city on Saturday with new tactics that it claims will “create the most roadblocks we have ever had”. He told supporters to book work week and meet in Hyde Park on Saturday morning, promising them “a simple non-stop uprising plan” that would “facilitate a massive influx of people to stop the capital”. Some actions have already begun. At 7 a.m. Friday, activists blocked the Tower Bridge, with two people hanging from the bridge with drawstrings and others hanging a huge banner next to it, demanding “No more fossil fuels now.” XR said in a statement: “The action took place at the gateway to the City of London – the UK’s main source of funding for fossil fuels – and on the eve of the April Uprising which starts tomorrow at 10 am in Hyde Park.” Since April 1, XR activists have been blocking an Esso distribution terminal in west London as part of the Just Stop Oil campaign. XR described these actions as a “prelude” to the mass demonstrations it has planned for this weekend and next week. “We will be back on the streets day by day until our immediate request is met – the UK government to immediately end all new investment in fossil fuels,” the group said in a recent statement. Police are working to remove Extinction Rebellion activists from Tower Bridge. Photo: Victoria Jones / PA He called on supporters to make sure they were free by April 17, making the “uprising” smaller than the group’s previous fortnightly protests, but organizers say they hope to return to the streets next weekend. Since 2018, XR has launched four large-scale subversive protest campaigns in the streets of London, calling on the government to take action on climate and biodiversity crises. The team has been successful in inspiring a range of spin-off movements and in raising awareness and concern about environmental issues to the general public at hitherto unseen levels. But every time protesters returned to the streets en masse, the impact of their actions diminished as police learned to crack down on blockades of bridges and key junctions. And, as with many social movements, the long rule of the Covid pandemic and its limitations on social interaction hampered the XR’s ability to organize. The XR organizers hope that a new strategy will allow them to avoid the police and cause a major uproar in London again. Efforts to seize and detain large junctions of protest infrastructure, which police had learned to isolate and remove quickly, will be replaced by more mobile and adaptive blocks. “We are not going to come up with huge items necessarily, but the plan is to persuade a lot of people to keep areas using their bodies, stay on the streets and keep space,” said an XR source. “We will try to be really mobile as well.” There would be “people moving around and trying to hold the space, holding spaces that are particularly annoying and taking immediate action. We want to be mobile so we can go to different areas if we want to.” “We want to be super mobile and hard to spot, but we also want it to be really comprehensive, easy to find and engage.” Breaking the law and getting arrested is likely to remain a basic tactic. In posts on Telegram’s messaging app to supporters, XR says to bring lawyers’ phone numbers and cards and leave ID at home. In addition to the oil terminal actions, the XR-affiliated teams launched campaigns this week. On Wednesday, scientists and academics with the Scientists Rebellion poured fake oil on Shell headquarters in London, while on Thursday, XR Doctors blocked the road outside HM’s Treasury in Westminster. On Thursday morning, Juliette Brown, a 51-year-old psychiatrist from London who was sitting on the street next to St James’s Park outside the government building, said: “We know the climate and ecological crisis is a health crisis. Global warming [and] Air pollution is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels. “The government has declared a state of emergency on climate change, but it is still considering licensing new oil and gas fields. [and] “financing fossil fuels through tax breaks, despite clear evidence and expert advice that we must immediately end all new investment in fossil fuels.”
