Priest, 82, and retired teacher, 85, smash Magna Carta glass in latest Just Stop Oil environmental stunt

10 May 2024, 11:58 | Updated: 10 May 2024, 12:40

Two protesters in their eighties have smashed the glass surrounding the Magna Carta in the British Library.

The two women used a mallet and chisel to crack the security glass that encases the historical artefact.

Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, an active Anglican priest from Bristol, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher from Swansea, entered the British Library at 10:40 this morning.

Just Stop Oil break Magna Carta glass

After they smashed the glass, Reverend Parfitt and Mrs Bruce then glued their hands together, demanding an emergency plan to just stop oil by 2030.

Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher from Swansea, 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.” 

Reverend Dr Sue 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.”

There are four surviving copies of the Magna Carta. The British Library holds two and the others are held at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.

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.”