A JSO spokesman said the encounter ended cordially, and that while the counter-protesters “didn’t understand the necessity in the mechanics of society for social disruption’, the two sides “were broadly in agreement”. Jen was one of the founding members of her XR group in a small market town. “What I liked about it was that it was properly organised to disrupt but not upset. MORE : From trains to doctors, strikes will grip London in July 2023. But who is staging industrial action?

And earlier this week another car user got out to remonstrate with JSO activists holding up traffic in Westminster. The funniest thing about that sketch was the fact that they ‘raised the alarm’,” says Heydon Prowse, the satirist best known for handing George Osborne a maths GCSE textbook at a dinner at Mansion House, and convincing Jeremy Corbyn, in a prank call in 2017, that he was Stormzy and they should make a grime video together. The achievements of JSO are questionable. Have they succeeded in garnering widespread media coverage? Yes. But in doing so they have lost support. Dr Oscar Berglund, a specialist in climate change activism at University of Bristol, says Just Stop Oil is not popular. “It is disliked by about 60 per cent of the population.Footage shows the environmental protesters sitting on the floor, encircled by a group of 15 to 20 people standing around them while they try to explain why they are slow marching in the capital. I’m slightly nervous we’ve given them an idea,” says Manners of his prank, which has been viewed nearly 450,000 times in two days, and was designed to mimic the sorts of antics that JSO has made their bread and butter. The people that they’re targeting are not responsible for their cause,” says Manners. “A single mother trying to get to work to feed her kids during a cost of living crisis, who might be on a zero hours contract, who might be late for work and therefore earn less money. That achieves precisely nothing when it comes to solving the climate crisis.”

I’m a working-class woman who really cares about the environment for my child and their future. It’s losing people like me — mums who care because we’ve got kids.” Yeah but rush hour will be over”, a counter-protester replies. Another says: “There’s an election this time next year. If you don’t like this government, why don’t you stand for election?” In a YouGov poll in April, just 4 per cent of the people surveyed said they looked “very favourably” upon the group. Yesterday, climate campaigner Daniel Knorr, 21, was punched to the ground by one furious motorist who blamed one of the slow protests for crashing his car with his pregnant partner inside. A cause like this “has to bring people with you”, says Manners. “We spoke to a lot of people who are quite senior in the environmental cause […] who said even within the cause [JSO] are hated because they’re not achieving anything.It comes as public frustration with the group, which has vowed to ‘paralyse London’ with slow-marching columns in a bid to force the government to scrap new domestic oil and gas licences, has started to boil over into violence. I’m sure they’re probably paid by the Daily Mail,” one Just Stop Oil member can be heard saying through a microphone, “and they’ve left us, with a very difficult problem to solve.”