Two Just Stop Oil protesters aged in their 80s have smashed the glass protecting the Magna Carta and glued their hands together.
Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, appeared to use a hammer and chisel to break the glass which covers the historical document at the British Library. The pair then glued their hands together after holding up a sign reading: “The government is breaking the law. The government has been found guilty of breaking its own climate laws! What do we value more? The lives of our children? Or new oil licences? It’s time to choose!”
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson has since confirmed two people have been arrested. They said: “At 10.52 police were called to the British Library to reports of Just Stop Oil activists trying to damage the Magna Carta. Officers arrested two people on suspicion of criminal damage, both of which are currently in custody. The damage caused was to the protective case and not the exhibit itself.”
The British Library in London has two of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta, with the others held at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral. It was issued in June 1215 and was the first document to put into writing the principle that the King and his government were not above the law.
Just Stop Oil stated: Two Just Stop Oil supporters have broken the glass around the Magna Carta. They are demanding the UK government commit to an emergency plan to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. At around 10:40am, Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, an active Anglican priest, author, and retired psychotherapist from Bristol, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher from Swansea, entered the British Library and smashed the glass enclosure that surrounds the Magna Carta- the ‘Great Charter’ that is an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament."
Ms Bruce said: “This week 400 respected scientists- contributors to IPCC reports, are saying we are ‘woefully unprepared’ for what’s coming: 2.5 or more degrees of heating above pre industrial levels. Instead of acting, our dysfunctional government is like the three monkeys: ‘see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing- pretend we’ve got 25 years’.. We haven’t! We must get off our addiction to oil and gas by 2030 – starting now.”
While fellow activist Dr Parfitt said: "The Magna Carta is rightly revered, being of great importance to our history, to our freedoms and to our laws. But there will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened. We must get things in proportion. The abundance of life on earth, the climate stability that allows civilisation to continue is what must be revered and protected above all else, even above our most precious artefacts.”
A Just Stop Oil Spokesperson said: “Clause 39 of the Magna Carta is one of four clauses still enshrined in UK common law, a so-called ‘golden passage’, that states: "No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or in any other way ruined, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. Contrast that with civil law as it stands in 2024, where corporations are buying private laws in the form of injunctions that circumvent the people’s rights to a trial by jury for speaking out against the crimes of oil companies.”