Back in June, Just Stop Oil caused a ruckus by splattering their trademark orange all over Stonehenge. A chorus of “how predictable” was heard across the country. 

The month prior to this assault on the nation’s most famous megalithic structure, two more of the organisation’s followers attempted to break through the glass surrounding the Magna Carta at the British Library, where two of its four surviving copies are held. There is something rather quaint and typically English in its own way about two octogenarians — one of whom was a Reverend Dr. no less — carrying out such an “attack”. 

If we were being generous, it is part of a tradition of genteel, and rather amateurish, anarchism. Take a razor blade to Lord Balfour’s portrait, throw some mash potato at Monet, thwack Veláquez’s sumptuous “Rokeby Venus” with a cleaver! Welcome to the new age of activism in which destruction is the medium no matter the message. 

Just Stop Oil claims that its minions target cherished artefacts because they “love our history and culture too much to just allow it to be destroyed by the breakdown of society”. What was it Yeats said? “The worst are full of passionate intensity”. Admittedly, protestors rarely if ever actually do any real damage, or — let’s be honest — mean to. But the deep irony of this kind of annihilative activism is that the overall strategy has all the aesthetic intent of a cow pat, even if its catastrophic aspirations are play-pretend.

If activists want to understand their own history, they should look to a genuinely great Briton, the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, for inspiration. Thirty years on from his tragic death from AIDs-related illnesses, Jarman can now be reassessed as a provocative and quixotic Englishman in the finest tradition, who achieved far more with his canvases and camera than these young pretenders ever can with hammers and gorilla glue. 

In fact, Jarman was uniquely obsessed by Stonehenge and the many other mysterious stone circles he found dotted throughout the British Isles. His short film, Journey to Avebury (1971) charts a walking trip he took through the Wiltshire countryside to witness the impenetrable Neolithic “standing stones” there. He even replicated them in the pebble garden of his cottage on the beach of Dungeness.

So what would Jarman make of Just Stop Oil’s most recent attack?

By his own standards, Jarman was no kind of Conservative. He was a “radical” queer left-wing artist and filmmaker who gained equal plaudits for protesting Thatcher’s Article 28 (Britain’s equivalent of “Don’t say gay”) and for his avant-garde, arthouse cinema. He also directed music videos for the likes of the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths. Yet a self-styled “antiquarian” who loved history — and studied art and literature at King’s London — Jarman would probably have found all this bang-bang smashy-smashy dreadfully boring and unimaginative. 

His contemporary legacy is a peculiar one, though. Speak to most art graduates today and they’ll gush over Jarman as a trendsetting “iconoclast”. But this is reductive. Widely considered a radical and provocateur, Jarman also celebrated, poked fun at, and indulged a very English inheritance. 

It is not for nothing that one of his best-known pictures is the dystopian The Last of England (1987) in which he lambasts Thatcher’s legacy of “malevolent bureaucracies” and “authoritarian populism”. The film is shot in grainy Super 8, and its documentary-style footage, depicting brutal sex on a Union Jack, dilapidated buildings and public executions, is an eclectic and often challenging watch. 

Yet the appeal of the film is in an erudition quite lacking in today’s brutish activist sphere. Jarman’s melancholy voiceover, narrated by the actor Nigel Terry — who himself played King Arthur in John Boorman’s Excalibur — recites Alan Ginsberg’s Howl (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”), extracts from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, and esoterically mourns the death of the Swan of Avon (Shakespeare). The film’s own title is a reference to the pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown’s arresting painting of 1855 portraying a couple leaving the shores of Dover for the last time. Beowulf, Bede’s mediaeval Ecclesiastical History, William Blake, and The Book of Revelation are yet more influences upon The Last of England. It is ripe with allusions to England’s past whilst imaginatively (if pessimistically) prophesying its future.

Jarman excelled at this kind of palimpsest, in layering meanings. Some find his juxtapositions of the eloquent against the apish (“wit against shit”) to be garish and blunt. But no one can say that a Jarman film doesn’t get people talking. He was, by no means, a strait-laced conformist. His feature films in particular are snide and reactionary, and can be on-the-nose; his postmodern 1991 adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II pats itself on the back for adding homosexual overtones  while ignoring the subtler subtext present in the original play. But they are also — and this might upset the modern activist — patriotic, but never jingoistic. Jarman could launch ferocious attacks on contemporary British politics while simultaneously embracing the vivid tapestry that is British history, art and culture. 

What’s more, he approached his art-come-activism with a sense of quirky, camp humour. This was, of course, the man whose dying wish was for “the world to be filled with fluffy white duckies”. His 1978 ultra-low-budget cult classic film Jubilee is, in this strain, one of his most accessible and entertaining. Here, Elizabeth I time travels alongside her faithful mathematician, John Dee, to an anarchical 1970s London gripped by the rise of Punk culture. The Virgin Queen is shocked to find that nihilism and brutality reigns. Gangs roam the capital bludgeoning coppers and innocent waitresses alike. Amyl Nitrate (a character named after the chemical compound of the party drug “poppers”), hilariously sums up this barbaric new world order when she laments that “no one’s interested in the ballet anymore”. Later she reappears as Britain’s entry to the Eurovision song contest to sing “Rule Britannia”, which she does equipped with traditional Corinthian helmet and trident while also gyrating in her underwear and neon green stockings. It’s all a bit livelier than anything Just Stop Oil would produce. 

He was certainly a critic of post-industrial neoliberalism but he had a deep affinity for mediaeval romance and localities

Like many activists today — and many people — Jarman loathed populism. But unlike them, he creatively reappropriated populism’s motifs and icons in order to mock it. The result is the best of both worlds: provocative and funny. Jarman should not be billed simply as an iconoclast. He was certainly a critic of post-industrial neoliberalism but he had a deep affinity for mediaeval romance and localities; he was almost the Fisher King of legend, and his Holy Grail was nothing less than the legacy of England and Englishness.

In Jubilee, he depicted a deranged character, played by punk rocker-turned-television presenter Toyah Willcox, called “Mad” as a personification of the Punk movement who “thinks she’s a revolutionary out to better the world”, but is in reality just a pyromaniac. Punk’s penchant for defacement was equally unappealing to Jarman. His unattractive portrayal of punk rockers in the film sparked backlash at the time from the fashion designer and Queen of Punk herself, Vivienne Westwood. 

On a now infamous “open t-shirt”, Westwood penned a vitriolic letter to Jarman calling the film the most “boring” and “disgusting” thing she had ever seen. The iconic exchange saw her call it an “insult to [her] virility” and in turn insult Jarman’s output as “masochistic tremblings”. These zingers are not only mordantly hilarious but speak to a wild, freaky creative spur in the activism of both camps. On the one hand we have a film, on the other a T-shirt. Each laying claim to the Union Jack in weird and unexpected ways.

Jarman revelled in the epithet “a very English rebel”, a label most today would perhaps assume was an EDL catchphrase. This is upsetting, not least because Jarman’s art was anything but reductive. Wishing mankind to “consider the world’s diversity and worship it”, he was constantly juxtaposing images and ideas that were often shocking to see together. Perhaps the most enduring of this kind of Jarman’s art came in the form of Prospect Cottage on the Kent coastline where he spent the last years of his life. This rugged fisherman’s dwelling, on whose tar black southern wall John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” is inscribed, stands in stark contrast to the nearby Dungeness nuclear power station. The cottage’s fascinating, homespun interior has only recently been made public by Gilbert McCarragher in his new photography book, Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House. The house itself became a metaphor for Jarman’s life and work; when he took possession of the cottage, it represented an older way of life standing valiantly in opposition to but also in harmony with the new.

If Just Stop Oil wishes to save itself from its abysmal national popularity ratings, they ought to try their hand at some more interesting and varied narratives. Monolithic activism only recognisable by a flash of orange paint and a frenzied launch at cultural icons or events is, I hate to say it, just a little too basic. Give us some credit and get creative. Otherwise it’s not so much The Last of England as The Least of England.