LUDI SIMPSON and I were at university together in the 1970s, connected by our involvement in left politics. Then we lost touch. In recent years we found each other again and were relieved to discover that, unlike a number of our contemporaries, we have not drifted to the political centre. Our radical roots remain firmly anchored.

Ludi’s, though, flowered in a more courageous way than mine. Last Friday, he was arrested, not for the first time, alongside two other Just Stop Oil activists, after throwing vegetable soup on two of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings in the National Gallery. 

The paintings are being featured as part of the Poets and Lovers exhibition there. Just Stop Oil uses non-violent civil disobedience and direct action to achieve its objective — an end to oil, gas and coal by 2030.

“My action is from the heart and the head,” Ludi wrote before his arrest. “I know politicians can do the right thing if they listen to the facts, but their inaction is burning up our lives. Is it too much to ask for a safe future?”

Ludi, 71, and a retired professor of population studies, was arrested alongside Mollie Somerville, a 77-year-old retired teacher and grandmother and Phil Green, 24, a community worker from Cornwall.

On Monday all three appeared in court charged with criminal damage exceeding £5,000. They were released on bail and are due back in court in 28 days’ time. Currently there are 14 Just Stop Oil activists in prison and 11 on remand.

The latest soup-throwing action came just hours after two other Just Stop Oil activists — Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland — had been sentenced for their action two years ago when they splashed tomato soup on one of the same glass-enclosed Van Gogh sunflower paintings that was hit on Friday.

That action, the first of its kind at the time, drew international attention and launched what has now become a pattern of targeting works of art. Plummer was sentenced to two years in prison and Holland received 20 months. Simpson described their act as “worthy of applause, not the criminal conviction they received.”

In sentencing the pair on Friday, Judge Christopher Hehir, missing the point entirely, scolded the women for coming “within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

The “priceless treasure” that is planet Earth, however, can continue to burn. As it does, it will take with it not only the precious works of Van Gogh but everything else that matters. The sentence Hehir actually passed was to try to silence those who might yet save us.

After all, as Ludi pointed out, “Soup on sunflowers is a splash of protest. The treasured pictures remain unharmed.”

Simpson and Somerville, both from the Bradford area, have been arrested together before at a protest at Gatwick Airport last July, shortly after Labour returned to power. While the Starmer government has pledged not to allow new licences for oil exploration, “it is clear that it hasn’t planned to address the climate crisis,” said Simpson. No charges for that action have yet been brought.

Ludi was also among 79 activists arrested last November simply for walking along Whitehall with other Just Stop Oil protesters. “We were acquitted of willful obstruction of the highway, consistent with our right to protest,” he said.

That same right to protest has led to crackdowns on those supporting the Palestinian cause, leading to greater alliances between climate activists and human rights advocates.

“There is a network of civil resistance organisations and we work very closely with all of them,” said Aabhinav Tyagi, a human rights lawyer and spokesperson for Just Stop Oil. “We feel that all the groups are part of the same struggle.”

Last month, Ludi opened his Shipley home to four Palestine Action activists during their trial for occupying the Shipley premises of Teledyne Defence and Space for 14 hours last April. Teledyne supplies arms to the Israeli military.

“They argued that they intended to stop harm to civilians in Gaza, and they argued so clearly that the jury did not agree to convict them of criminal damage,” noted Ludi of the “Shipley Four” who will now face a retrial.

In an unpublished letter to the Bradford newspaper, Ludi wrote: “I take my hat off to all who have highlighted this disgrace, including those protesting on the street, those attempting to disrupt the production of weapons components, and those jurors agreeing that it is not a crime to try to prevent massacres in a population of over two million herded and imprisoned in their own land of Palestine.”

As the late American historian and civil rights advocate Howard Zinn once said: “Far more violence to human life has been done in human history by people obeying the law than by people breaking the law.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She was at Warwick University with Ludi Simpson in the early to mid-1970s.