Activists from the Just Stop Oil environmental movement broke the protective glass of a Velazquez painting at the National Gallery in London on Monday, November 6, multiplying shock actions against the British government’s fossil fuel projects.
The organization with controversial methods has launched, a week ago, a month of mobilization for the immediate cessation of new oil and gas projects in the United Kingdom, going against the grain of the policy of the Conservative executive which on the contrary wishes to encourage hydrocarbon production.
Monday alone was marked, according to the police, by around a hundred arrests of members of the movement, now familiar with the courts. Most spectacular operation: two activists, aged 20 and 22, entered the National Gallery around 10:45 a.m. (11:45 a.m. in Paris) and struck with a hammer the protective glass of Venus in the Mirror, a well-known painting in the United Kingdom under the name Rokeby Venus, the organization reported in a press release.
The Diego Velazquez painting in question, which dates from the mid-17th century, is considered the Spanish painter’s only remaining nude. In 1914, he was slashed with a cleaver by Canadian suffragist Mary Richardson. She was protesting against the imprisonment of another activist for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. “Women were not given the right to vote through the ballot box. The time is no longer for words but for actions,” the activists said after their action, according to Just Stop Oil.
The National Gallery confirmed the action, saying it had evacuated visitors from the room and called the police, while the painting was removed for examination by museum curators. London police announced they had arrested the two activists for damage.
More than a hundred demonstrators arrested
In 2022, Just Stop Oil activists had already targeted the National Gallery, throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, as well as the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, where they glued themselves to the window of The Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Vermeer. In both cases, the canvases were protected by glass and had not suffered damage. The organization most often attacks motorists by blocking traffic and has attracted the hostility of the British Conservative government, which has toughened legislation to prevent their actions.
On Monday, around a hundred protesters were arrested for obstructing traffic near Downing Street, and twenty-five others, “mothers and grandmothers” demanding “a better future for their children”, were arrested for the same reason. between Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, an area of ??the capital where the main ministries are located.
Just Stop Oil, however, denied that the demonstrators wanted to attack the Cenotaph – a memorial erected at the end of the First World War – as several elected officials have accused. The activists, she said, were moved near the site by the police themselves.
New hydrocarbon exploration and drilling licenses
These new actions come as the executive has decided to award new hydrocarbon exploration and drilling licenses in the North Sea, which has led to it being accused of going back on its climate commitments. He announced on Monday that he wanted to enshrine in law the examination of potential new licenses every year, in the name of energy security.
The government assures that it will not give up its objective of carbon neutrality in 2050 but wants to do so in a “pragmatic” and “realistic” way, explaining that the British will continue to consume oil and gas in the years to come and do not want to depend on “Hostile States” for supplies.
This recent change of heart by the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who now poses as a defender of motorists, has been commented on by many political scientists as a way, in the run-up to the elections expected in 2024, of responding to the concerns of the popular electorate and to stand out from the Labor opposition, which wants to invest massively in green energies.