In the dreary corridor outside Court 10, Southwark Crown Court, Anna Holland slings a duffel bag over their shoulder and prepares to take a seat in the dock. Wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt revealing tattoo-sketched skin, Holland is packed and ready for prison.
Two years earlier Holland, 22, along with fellow Just Stop Oil activist Phoebe Plummer, 23, became the poster children for a new wave of a viral iconoclasm when they threw tomato soup over a glass-protected Van Gogh Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London. Tomato, I’m told, was an aesthetic choice, but not everyone agreed that it was complementary. In July, the pair were found guilty of criminal damage and told to prepare “practically and emotionally” for prison. Now, moments before sentencing, Holland is philosophical: “I’ve made my peace with it,” they tell me. Their parents, nervously seated nearby, seem less sure.
Going to prison was not something Holland, an English literature student at Newcastle University, would have ever imagined. Growing up, they were too lost in books and schoolwork to cause trouble. In their own words, they were “a goody two-shoes… a real rule follower”. Yet as the climate movement began to build, galvanised by a new generation, they started to recast their moral boundaries. The student strikes, in 2018, opened a door into a new world of activism. Holland snuck off from school, caught the train to Manchester and, for the first time, found themselves “surrounded by people who were the same age as me, who actually cared and talked about how messed up the world was and how broken our systems were”. It was “life changing”.
Holland joined Just Stop Oil in 2022, following a period of despondency about the potential for peaceful protests to enact change. They were “bullied” by a friend into attending a talk by the recently formed—but already notoriously disruptive—activist group. “I was reawakened,” says Holland. A fortnight later, they were in London training to be a full-time Just Stop Oil mobiliser, taking part in actions at Kingsbury Oil Terminal. From then on: “I was ready to give anything, do anything…”
The consequence of this commitment for Holland—and many Just Stop Oil activists like them—is a lengthy stint in prison. Many of these record-breaking sentences have been handed down by Judge Christopher Hehir, who is overseeing Holland’s trial. Yet even if public perception of Just Stop Oil remains negative, the sentences have raised the profile of the activists, humanising them in the process. “It turns us into people,” says Holland. “I think it is easier for a member of the public to sympathise with a young woman who is being sent to prison for two years than [with] just another faceless person in a slow march.”
As the government has cracked down on civil disobedience with new legislation such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, it has raised questions about the proportionality of sentencing—particularly following August’s far-right riots. These laws, and this strategy, may be self-defeating, reckons Holland. “We’re getting to a point where non-violent action is almost as punishable as violent action,” they say. As they see it, if someone can get the same sentence for marching down a road as smashing a shop window, “It becomes a lot more tempting to go, ‘well, I guess I’ll just go and smash a shop window.’” If true, it’s a dangerous position for the government. “We seem to be on the precipice of an escalation that could go out of control,” says Holland.
The clerks beckon and Holland shuffles into the courtroom to join Plummer—who is already being held on remand—behind a glass screen. Hehir hands Holland a 20-month sentence, and Plummer two years, for their part in the action. They hug, blow kisses to the public gallery and exit for the cells. An hour later, at the National Gallery, three Just Stop Oil activists walk in and throw soup over not one, but two, of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings. They have pleaded not guilty to criminal damage charges.
