Just Stop Oil’s Stonehenge stunt betrays the Romantic vision

For all the outrage they provoke, the targets of Just Stop Oil’s vandalism up until now have at least made a certain kind of sense. Art galleries can (almost) plausibly be seen to represent Western decadence; the Chelsea Flower Show a display of bourgeois excess; and historic monuments symbols of imperialism and colonialism. All of these, however tenuously, fit within a stock narrative of the West and modern capitalism as drivers of environmental destruction.

The same cannot be said of an ancient pagan site in the middle of the verdant Salisbury Plain. And yet this was to be the victim of their latest publicity stunt. Yesterday a group of protesters stormed Stonehenge, spraying the 5,000-year-old megaliths with their signature orange coating (in this case cornflour). This came just one day ahead of the summer solstice, when thousands will gather around the site to watch the sunrise on the longest day of the year.