A former council chief executive is one of two Just Stop Oil protesters charged with criminal damage after powdered paint was sprayed on Charles Darwin’s grave yesterday.
On Monday morning, the words ‘1.5 is dead’ were sprayed on the gravestone in Westminster Abbey as Just Stop Oil demanded that the Government phases out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by 2030.
The painted words refer to the news from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service last week that 2024 was the first year on record with a global average temperature 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – the ‘safe’ warming limit agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015.
Just Stop Oil identified Diane Bligh, 77 from Frome, as one of the protesters. Ms Bligh was chief executive of Reading Council from 1995-97, having previously worked as the authority’s director of housing.
The Met Police said Ms Bligh and 66-year-old Alyson Lee, a retired teaching assistant from Derby, had been bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court next month.
Ms Bligh said: ‘If we do not work together to reign in the corporations and billionaires driving us beyond our means, humanity will not be able to adapt to what is coming.
‘We are on course to lose everything, and politicians are doing nowhere near enough to prevent it.
‘How many will we have to bury as a result of climate breakdown and who will be left to mourn them?’
