Youth Demand: 'The anger is already there and we're bringing it to the surface'

The political activist group Youth Demand has vowed to "shut down London" in April with a sustained schedule of rallies in the capital. Youth Demand, which started as the student-wing of the UK environmental activist group Just Stop Oil, has been slowly asserting its independence as its predecessor has officially announced it will “hang up the hi-vis.”

Now, it is Youth Demand’s turn to lead the climate fight and they are using non-violent civil resistance to get their message out. Since its inception in March 2024, Youth Demand has initiated its own suite of direct action campaigns, favouring high-profile and disruptive actions.

Despite a shared fondness for orange flares and roadblock campaigns, Youth Demand have asserted they are their own entity. The biggest way in which they differ from Just Stop Oil is their core dedication to the Pro-Palestinian movement. In fact, one of the group's two chiefs demands is to support the pro-Palestine movement by putting pressure on the UK Government to cease all trade with Israel by imposing a total trade embargo that includes arms.

The other is to make the 'super rich' pay £1 trillion by 2030 to communities most damaged by fossil fuel burning. To better understand their demands, tactics and motivations, The Mirror spoke with one of the group’s spokespeople, Chiara Sarti.

Sarti, currently a PhD student at Cambridge University, was an active member of Just Stop Oil since 2023 and joined Youth Demand when it launched in the spring of 2024. She has been a steadfast advocate for the group, even being remanded to prison for 19 days for "interference with the use or operation of key national infrastructure" under the new Section 7 Public Order Act after participating in a Just Stop Oil slow march.

"Marching down a road for twenty minutes on a couple of occasions now means a judge can put you in prison for more than two weeks," Sarti tells The Mirror. As a result, she was later sentenced to a twelve-month community order with a hundred hours of unpaid work.

Her arrest under the Public Order Act was not Sarti's first run-in with the authorities. She had previously made headlines for spray-painting King’s College in Cambridge with orange paint, having to pay a fine of £2,430 as a result. But for Sarti and other Youth Demand activists, fines and prison are a necessary by-product of the cause.

Sarti is unperturbed by the threat of prison, as she says it's all about perspective. "It doesn't matter that they put us in prison because we have a responsibility to be a resistance. Nothing that the British state can do to us compares to what our brothers and sisters in Gaza are suffering right now. None of us is going to be set on fire. None of us is going to have to carry family members that have just been blown to little bits."

Despite their conviction that they are acting for the global good, groups like Youth Demand and Just Stop Oil suffer from negative public opinion because of their high-profile demonstrations and traffic-inducing protests. On April 12, Youth Demand protestors were pelted with eggs during one of their ‘swarming’ protests in the capital.

But she is unfazed by the anger, saying it's a natural reaction and further evidence of a need for change. Sarti explains: “What we see on actions when people throw eggs at us or our supporters, it's just an expression of the kind of anger that people just carry along with themselves all the time.” She continues: “All we are doing is bringing the attention to the surface so that it can be resolved, we're not creating the anger. The anger is already there and we're bringing it out to the surface."

She asserts that Youth Demands actions are an appropriate and proportionate response to the current political climate. That said, she acknowledges the disruptions affect everyday citizens: “I'm sorry that people get caught up in [our blocks]. I really wish we didn't have to do this. But unfortunately, we've been left with no choice but to do this. When the government ignores the people, the people disrupt.”

That said, the group does have rules in place to be mindful of commuters. She says: “We try to [hold protests] in the mornings so that we're not blocking people coming back from work.” Still, she goes on to say: “But ultimately, all of that is a distraction from the real story, which is the evil that the government is perpetrating."

Youth Demand’s protests follow a legacy of civil resistance. According to Sarti: “Everyone does this when their values are being violated. Youth Demand is doing it. Just Stop Oil did it. Black Lives Matter did it. The farmers' protests did it. The suffragettes did it. Disruption is the universal language of: 'our values are being violated'."

Youth Demand will be holding open rallies until the end of the month, every Tuesday and Saturday. Despite arrests marking the launch of the month-long disruption campaign, Sarti contends it has been a huge success: “We have raised around £20,000 to support the campaign. The campaign has really gone mainstream."