Shell PR event shut down in Oxford

 

23rd Octo­ber Shell set up a fair­ly large struc­ture in Broad St yes­ter­day, an plush enclosed unit with mez­za­nine floor and car­pet, to plug their lat­est PR/recruitment scheme. They were plan­ning to be there from 10am until 6pm, but things did­n’t go accord­ing to their plans.

A protest had been called, and around lunchtime peo­ple start­ed arriv­ing and giv­ing out leaflets. Ear­li­er the Shell PR peo­ple had been roam­ing around the street chat­ting to peo­ple and giv­ing out glossy bull­shit, but once pro­test­ers arrived they seemed to with­draw a bit more into their self-built shell. One per­son heck­led them enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly.

Then, about 12:45pm, anoth­er group arrived, went inside, grabbed hand­fuls of Shell pro­pa­gan­da, poured black oily stuff every­where, and wrote anti-Shell slo­gans on their white­board (in per­ma­nent mark­er, appar­ent­ly — it looked like they weren’t able to remove it!). I heard that the oily stuff even went all over their com­put­er giz­mos, pre­sum­ably caus­ing quite a bit of dam­age.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly as they were leav­ing they got chased and grabbed by secu­ri­ty, and despite a strug­gle were hand­ed over to the cops and arrest­ed. Mean­while Shell had appar­ent­ly had enough, as not long after­wards they packed up and went home.

The 3 arrest­ed peo­ple were released about 11 hours lat­er — all 3 had been giv­en cau­tions for crim­i­nal dam­age, and 2 also had fixed penal­ty notices (£90 each) for obstruc­tion. They all seemed fine with this out­come.

Here’s an arti­cle from some of the peo­ple that organ­ised the leaflet­ting ses­sion, explain­ing why they were there:
 http://tarfreetowns.org/news/oxford-is-saying-no-to-shells-whitewashing/
…it has some decent stuff in it but does­n’t men­tion the long­stand­ing strug­gle in Ross­port, Ire­land against Shel­l’s occu­pa­tion there, which for me per­son­al­ly was near the top of my mind when I went along to the protest:
http://shelltosea.com/

Shell have been tar­get­ed plen­ty of times before when try­ing to run grad­u­ate recruit­ment events in Oxford: http://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/2009/10/440301.html  http://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/2010/03/447286.html
(as have oth­er oil com­pa­nies), but this was the first time I know of that they’d had the gall to do an event on the street (usu­al­ly they are in some kind of plush hotel).