The environmental group has already thrown soup at a Van Gogh painting and has gained relevance in the United Kingdom with its disruptive protests
Two activists from the group Just Stop Oil have been arrested after spraying the megalithic monument of Stonehenge with orange spray, in protest against the government’s environmental policies and against the lack of a debate on climate change in the British election campaign.
The ‘premier’ Rishi Sunak condemned the incident as “a disgraceful act of vandalism against one of the United Kingdom’s oldest and most important monuments.”
Labor opposition leader and former attorney general, Keir Starmerfavorite in the polls as the next prime minister, has also ruthlessly criticized what happened as “pathetic” and has predicted that those responsible will face “the full weight of the law.”
Several visitors who were at Stonehenge at that time attempted to get in time between the activists and the Neolithic monument, one of the main tourist attractions on the British Isle.
Wiltshire County Police arrived at the scene a few minutes later and arrested the two suspects, accused of “causing damage” to the ancient monument. The incident occurred in the middle of the countdown to the Summer Solstice, which attracts dozens of druids to the venerated place.
“What has happened is devastating,” he told Guardian the local guide Sean Moran. “There are live lichens on those stones. Biologists from all over the world come to study them. Did the activists take that into account?”
Just Stop Oil is the group that in the fall of 2022 took part in the action against Van Gogh’s ‘The Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery, splashed with a jar of Campbell’s soup, the first in a series of interventions against works of art in Europe demanding action against climate change, which have had a counterproductive impact in public opinion.
