Plot to sabotage our democracy M

● Revealed: Hundreds of eco-zealots to bring gridlock to Parliament ● Six-week campaign to signal switch in fanatics’ tactics as Commons targeted ● Protesters want to stretch the police and clog up the courts

Rebellion brewed as we mourned the Queen

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AS THE nation mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth earlier this month, rebellion was brewing in a 19th Century meeting hall in Norfolk.

With the country transfixed on the first day of the late Monarch’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall, 50 environmental activists filed into the Norwich Quaker Meeting House to plot the final details of a six-week campaign to cause chaos in Central London.

Agitators from the militant eco-group Just Stop Oil discussed how to take their fight into the heart of Westminster by blocking key roads and bridges around Parliament Square – the scene of last week’s magnificent State Funeral procession.

What they did not know, however, was that their plot had been infiltrated by an undercover reporter from The Mail on Sunday.

Indeed this was just one of a series of meetings and workshops, both in person and online, attended by the MoS during recent weeks at which plans for an ‘October uprising’ were discussed.

The campaign, masterminded by veteran activist Roger Hallam, will be a direct challenge to Liz Truss’s Tory Government and the first major test faced by new Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley. Our undercover investigation can reveal:

● More than 1,500 people are being recruited to carry out hugely disruptive daily protests in London;

● They each aim to get arrested at least twice over six weeks to try to overwhelm the courts system;

● The campaign will start on Saturday with ‘thousands’ of protesters planning to block bridges across the River Thames;

● Protesters will later block roads near Parliament Square to grab the attention of MPs and Government Ministers;

● A Los Angeles-based organisation, backed by Hollywood

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millionaires, is raising funds to bankroll the protests.

Launched in April, Just Stop Oil held a series of hugely disruptive protests at oil refineries, petrol stations and motorways earlier this year. But in a change of tactics the group will now focus on paralysing the road network around the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street.

Protesters have been told to converge at 11am next Saturday and

Sunday at Euston, Paddington and Waterloo stations for an initial wave of action that will target London’s bridges. From October 3, protesters have been ordered to converge on Downing Street each day.

An experienced activist, a former businessman in his late 40s, outlined the plans to the activists gathered in Norwich on September 14 – the day the Queen’s coffin was moved from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.

He told the meeting: ‘There’s the march on the first of October and then after that weekend, we’re going to move into this more serious, focused road-blocking. And the idea

is we’re going to cause disruption to Parliament, by blocking the roads around Westminster. And the idea of that is to cause disruption to provoke a kind of conversation about this issue.’

He added: ‘The other part of the strategy is causing attrition to the police. The idea is every day they’re having to arrest people and remove people from the road, and that obviously consumes police resources.

‘It takes a lot of police officers to arrest one person and process them through a cell. And we’ve talked to

people in the judicial system, and they reckon the system couldn’t really cope with about 3,000 arrests. That would stress it to the point where the police would go to the Home Secretary and say: “Look, we can’t arrest our way out of this civil disobedience.” ’

Environmental scientist Dr Larch Maxey spoke passionately at the meeting for 45 minutes with the enthusiasm of an out-of-work actor relishing their first day back on set. Larch was arrested last month for occupying a tunnel under a road

to disrupt oil supplies from a terminal in Essex.

Wearing a grubby polo shirt and shorts emblazoned with the motif ‘Rebel for Life’, Dr Maxey outlined how the group aimed to replicate the tactics of the Freedom Riders – civil-rights activists in the US who rode buses in the 1960s to challenge laws on racial segregation – by staging their action in a series of waves. ‘The Freedom Riders were not popular at the point of them causing disruption,’ he said.

‘You never are. But they were doing what was necessary.’ The meeting was punctuated with doomsday warnings about the gravity of the climate crisis. ‘If we don’t sort this out, we are going to have societal collapse,’ Dr Maxey said. ‘This is terrifying.’

Later, a young activist made an unfortunate comparison between standing up for the Just Stop Oil cause and Germans resisting the Nazis. Another activist asked those present whether they held values that they would rather die for than see violated.

Such dramatic rhetoric – and the group’s militant methods – seemingly unsettled some at the meeting. Two older people shook their

‘The system couldn’t cope with 3,000 arrests’

heads as they left during an interval. ‘We’re going, I don’t agree with it,’ one said. ‘It [climate change] is not good, but I can’t see a way out of it.’

There were also misgivings voiced during an online meeting attended by an undercover reporter. During the session, designed to build trust and courage among would-be protesters, participants were asked to state their preferred pronouns before taking part in some meditation.

When asked how everyone was

feeling about the looming campaign, one woman, in her 60s, responded: ‘I think some of us feel unprepared. I need to get my finances sorted out.’

Her expression of doubt appeared to open the sluice gates for others to voice concerns.

‘I’m not at all prepared,’ added another woman.

A third woman, in her 50s, chipped in: ‘I feel I would like to have had lots of role play regarding court. We are all going to be on our own, have we had enough preparation around what the group are doing?’

But the group’s leadership remained undeterred.

Addressing around 30 would-be protesters during a meeting in a room above a Birmingham pub last week, Hallam stressed the vital importance of their civil disobedience mission. ‘What I’m going to do in this next 20 or 30 minutes is give you the most terrifying information you are going to hear in your life,’ he declared. ‘So take a deep breath.

‘On the first of October, thousands of people are going to go on to bridges in London and stay on the bridges all day.

‘And then every day from then on people will be in London sitting in the road, and they will be arrested.’

Set up by Hallam barely a year ago, Just Stop Oil has shot to prominence due to a series of stunts, including interrupting major sporting events and blocking roads with protesters gluing themselves to the ground.

Its radical tactics have been drawn up by experienced activists from more established protest groups, such as Extinction

Rebellion (XR) and Insulate Britain, both of which were co-founded by Hallam.

The bulk of Just Stop Oil’s funding is believed to come from rich backers in California.

The group has also, however, launched a fundraising drive in this country with would-be activists attending its meetings asked to donate an hour’s salary each month.

As of this week, 124 donors are registered to donate just over £1,200 per month between them.

Hallam asks donors to bankroll his activism via the fundraising website Patreon.

The Met has previously revealed that it was forced to spend £50 million policing Extinction Rebellion protests in 2019 and 2020, with former Met Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick admitting that the force was ‘stretched’.

Last night, a Met spokesman said: ‘A robust policing plan will be in place to tackle any criminal behaviour, anti-social behaviour or disorder.’

A spokesman for the Parliamentary Estate said: ‘We work closely with a number of partners to ensure that the business of Parliament can continue.’