The pipsqueaks who call themselves Just Stop Oil spent last week irritating the hell out of London commuters. They had announced in advance that their goal was to “paralyze” the city. While they didn’t accomplish that, they did bring many motorists to the verge of violence with their tactics of either slow walking or sitting in the street to block traffic.

The BBC reported the cost of policing the protesters adds up to millions of pounds.

A 13-week long campaign by Just Stop Oil (JSO) has cost the Met Police more than £7.7m, the force has revealed.

The Met said the cost of policing 515 protests carried out by JSO since April has amounted to the equivalent of 23,500 officer shifts.

Over that time more than 270 people were arrested over the demonstrations, which included slow marches and the disruption of high-profile events.

At the start of this week a couple of pranksters from the faux group “Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off” decided to turn the tables. While the Just Stop Oil folks held a big banquet in an abandoned church, the pranksters set off sirens and floated them to the very high ceilings with orange balloons.

…with the simplest of moves, Josh Pieters, 29, and Archie Manners, 30, had done what no one else had successfully managed to – they’d made a mockery of Just Stop Oil.

On Tuesday, in an artfully dilapidated church decorated with swathes of orange fabric and trailing plants (making the whole affair look like something between a summer soirée hosted by Fanta and a Christian influencer’s wedding), guests sat down to a (vegan) banquet. A harpist played as people sat at long tables. Then four paid actors burst in, setting off panic alarms attached to helium balloons which promptly floated up to the eaves…

“The people that they’re targeting are not responsible for their cause,” says Manners. “A single mother trying to get to work to feed her kids during a cost of living crisis, who might be on a zero hours contract, who might be late for work and therefore earn less money. That achieves precisely nothing when it comes to solving the climate crisis.”…

There is a sense they are even losing support among their own people. “None of us are taking them seriously — they are now just seen as posh kids on vacation,” says Jen, a former member of Extinction Rebellion, who asked to be referred to just by her first name. Jen feels Just Stop Oil is made up of people for whom protesting “seems to have become a bit of a middle class hobby”.

One satirist points out that the stunt was perfect because they literally raised an alarm on a group of climate alarmists. Here’s video of the prank.

The JSO folks did eventually get one of the balloons down.

Props to @j_s_p_p_o for their impeccable action design. We invited them to eat with us, but the alarms they let off at our banquet instead were the perfect metaphor for the urgency of the climate crisis ✊ pic.twitter.com/ohr3RSfezh

— Just Stop Oil (@JustStop_Oil) July 23, 2023

They seemed to get the joke, which is something I guess. It sounds like Josh and Archie are done with this campaign but others may be taking it up. Hopefully people will continue to peacefully ruin the day of JSO protesters for as long as they keep blocking traffic.

The balloon stunt wasn’t the only one that Josh and Archie organized. This video shows the planning behind this and an earlier prank also targeting JSO.