How the greens were choked to death
Cover story
Jonathan Leake
Monday 25th April 2005

Eight years ago their ideas dominated the political agenda, but today Britain's environmental groups - and their policies - are on the sidelines, neutralised by a lack of vision, poor leadership and a naive trust in new Labour. Jonathan Leake reports

There was something very appropriate in the choice of Shap Wells Hotel in the heart of the Lake District for the start, on 19 April, of an inquiry into plans for England's biggest windfarm at Whinash in Cumbria. As political parties and all other campaigning groups across the country focused on the general election, there, surrounded by cows, sheep and birdsong, Britain's green groups fought among themselves over windmills. On one side were Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace - pushing for more and better turbines, and hence more green energy. Tilting against the scheme were the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Council for National Parks, the National Trust and others, arguing that the 400ft-high windmills will spoil a pristine landscape.

Which view is right is not the point. The battle is a microcosm of what has gone wrong in British environmentalism: what was, just eight years ago, one of the most powerful movements in British politics has become marginalised and impotent. The result is a government that gets away with endless platitudes about sustainable development, while allowing one of the biggest expansions of roads, airports, housing - and potential carbon emissions - this country has ever experienced.

Labour's election manifestos provide proof. The 1997 manifesto was threaded with ideas such as sustainable transport, climate-change mitigation and protecting the countryside. Compare this to Labour's 2005 manifesto - where climate change has become a subsection of foreign policy, and domestic environmental issues merit a few paragraphs at the end of chapter seven, after London's Olympic bid and the National Lottery.

Something disastrous has happened to Britain's green groups - and increasingly, say their critics, that something is their own naivety, lack of vision and poor collective leadership.

Among those critics is Tom Burke, formerly a director of Friends of the Earth and special adviser to John Gummer when Gummer was John Major's environment minister. He believes one of the green NGOs' fundamental mistakes was their naive trust that new Labour would keep its promises - and their willingness to be co-opted into endless committees and consultations.

"They got sucked in too close once Labour was elected," Burke says. "Since 1997, they have lost a sense of needing a mass movement to support them. Plus they got bogged down in policy and ignored the politics. On climate change, for example, they have not offered any solutions that would be attractive to politicians or voters. All they seem to offer is restrictions on things people value, like driving and flying."

This election, the Conservatives have also pushed green issues to the bottom of their manifesto. Among the main parties, only the Liberal Democrats are trying to major on the environment. At first sight, this seems bizarre. The principal non-governmental organisations campaigning for the environment boast roughly five million members; the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the National Trust alone account for roughly four-fifths of those. Friends of the Earth has about 104,000 members, and similar numbers are to be found in the Campaign to Protect Rural England, as well as in Greenpeace UK, WWF-UK and the Wildlife Trusts. Polls regularly show the environment to be one of the principal issues concerning voters, especially the young. Compare these numbers to Labour's 215,000 members, 320,000 affiliated to the Conservatives and 73,000 Liberal Democrats - a total of 608,000 - and you get a sense that maybe the environment matters to many more people than party politics.

But the political parties have done their surveys and their sums. What they have found is that although a lot of people care about the environment, they are no longer moved by green politics. And if politicians needed any more convincing, they could just look at the "mass" demonstration in February on climate change, held in central London - which attracted a turnout of between 300 and 400 people. Compare that to the 110,000 at the November 2003 Stop the War demo in London.

So why does the public no longer understand or care? Could it be the fault of the green movement itself? The NGOs say that is too simple. In the 1990s, they argue, it was easy to engage the public against the government's threat to cover the countryside with roads, runways and homes. Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, believes the environmental movement is a victim of its own success: "We have had a huge impact in solving the single-issue problems. We no longer have orange smoke pouring from factories, rivers running with purple effluent, and roads built through nature reserves. What we face now are much bigger but less tangible problems, which are often global. That means repositioning our campaign work to get people to understand there are limits on consumption and accept ecological taxation."

True, say the critics - but this is an old argument. As far as Britain is concerned, the reasons are much simpler: what has happened is that the green groups have let themselves be suckered. After 1997, filled with the euphoria of having helped eject the Conservatives, they turned their backs on the activists who had so scared the politicians. Instead, they focused on working with the new government in the belief - naive as it now seems - that they could be more effective inside Labour's "big tent" than outside it.



For a while it seemed their trust was justified. Michael Meacher, the then environment minister, was a staunch ally, and the abandonment of many road projects seemed to point to a greener future, as did John Prescott's transport white paper and a raft of green tax initiatives. By 1999, however, the promises were faltering. The pressure for new roads and less tax was building, and when it exploded into the fuel protests of 2000, the government's environmental policies were left in disarray.

As counter-protests failed to materialise, the government suddenly realised there were no longer any votes to be won - and many more to be lost - if it kept listening to the green groups. Meacher was swiftly marginalised and finally sacked in 2003, having inadvertently served, some now believe, the purpose of co-opting green groups and keeping them quiet for a few years.

Since then, those policies have been almost entirely reversed; for example, there are plans for at least 3,000 miles of motorways and trunk road. Since 1999, roughly a hundred local road schemes have been approved and a similar number is expected in the next round of local transport plans, due shortly. The national roads programme includes 130 major schemes. For aviation, the story is the same. Under Labour expansion plans, said a report from MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee, air passenger numbers would rise from 180 million a year to more than 500 million by 2030. This would push CO2 emissions from aviation from the current 30 million tonnes a year to more than 80 million tonnes.

This flies straight in the face of Labour's pledges to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from roughly 600 million tonnes now to 229 million tonnes by 2050. In the past, Labour would have got a mauling for this, but no longer. Last month, Elliot Morley, Meacher's replacement as environment minister, told a "green hustings" organised by eight leading NGOs in London that British airports "had to expand" to beat off competition from European rivals. He gave similar economic justifications for supporting more roads. What's more, both Tim Yeo and Norman Baker, respectively his Tory and Liberal Democrat shadows, said much the same. And the reaction from the 300 assembled environmentalists? No more than a resigned sigh and a swift move on to the next question.



Some believe that a key problem for the environmental movement is that it has become too enmeshed in Labour, a number of leading NGO campaigners having held posts with the party or the government - or aspiring to do so. Chris Rose, formerly a leading campaigner with Greenpeace and author of a new book, How to Win Campaigns, points out how the government has even appropriated the green movement's own language - so where the Tories built roads, Labour creates "environmental improvement schemes", while what would once have been new housing estates have become "sustainable communities".

"Many activists find it much harder to campaign against Labour than they did against the Tories," Rose says. "Overall, the NGOs spend too much time on policy and too little changing public culture, which is the one thing they are uniquely placed to do." Perhaps the biggest test of the green movement will come after the election when, if victorious, Labour is widely expected to reopen the debate on whether to build more nuclear power stations. If the green groups show the same old tepid reaction, nuclear power could be back with a vengeance.

A far-sighted green leadership might have spotted such dangers, but instead such groups as the RSPB and WWF-UK have carried on pouring their energy into compiling detailed policy documents, attending "stakeholder meetings" and replying to Labour's endless consultations. Like a jilted lover, they cannot comprehend that Tony Blair no longer cares.

Guy Thompson, the director of the left-leaning think-tank Green Alliance, knows there is a problem. He recently told Green Futures, one of the environmental movement's in-house magazines, that "NGOs could do more to mobilise their five million members and make the links between issues like conservation and wider sustainable development. Green groups must make more effort to build a space to debate the environment."

He is, however, much more sensitive about offering such views to a wider public. After being interviewed for this article, he asked for most of his views about Labour to be off the record, and also offered a new argument, saying: "The difficulty for the green groups is the lack of interest in green issues among voters."

In a sense, Thompson is right. But whose job was it to get those voters interested if not the green groups? Is it not their failure that has allowed - even forced - Labour and the Tories to push the environment to the bottom of the political agenda?

Jonathon Porritt, whose reputation as one of Britain's leading environmentalists prompted the Prime Minister to appoint him as chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, accepts that Britain's leading green groups and campaigners (possibly including himself) have been "beguiled" by Labour.

He says: "I don't think Labour ever had a planned policy of co-opting and subverting the green movement. I think it has just evolved that way, but the effect is the same and I would not exempt myself from this. We have not found a way of getting the government to listen to us.

"Overall, the green groups have been too reticent and have given Labour an easy ride. There is a lot of public confusion over issues like climate change, and a lack of leadership from the green NGOs has allowed it to slip from the agenda."

Accidentally proving the co-option point far more effectively than any quotation, Porritt embarrassedly calls later to say he has just had a letter from Brian Bender, permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, warning him that his position as chair of the Sustainable Development Commission means he cannot say anything "political" during the election campaign.

Porritt has not been silenced. His honourable solution is to ask to be cited as programme director of Forum for the Future. But how many other formerly inde-pendent campaigners have allowed themselves to be restrained through what initially appeared as a benevolent co-option?

Graham Wynne, chief executive of the RSPB and a regular on the Whitehall committee circuit, is more robust in rejecting the criticisms, pointing out how the "softly-softly" approach helped him convince the government to reform agriculture and persuade all three main parties to commit to a marine protection bill.

"Maybe we have not done enough to convince ordinary people, but the problems now are different," he says. "In the past, the environmental movement had sharp-focused issues to deal with, but things like climate change are long-term, chronic and harder to explain to most people."

Perhaps Wynne and his colleagues have too little faith in ordinary folk. Lately, there have been some signs that grass-roots activism is reappearing. As in the 1990s, however, the seeds of this are not in the nationally based green groups but in smaller projects such as local responses to the government's plans to cover swaths of countryside with roads, runways and settlements.

Nationally, there are more than 50 such groups trying to fight road projects alone. The groups might have a national voice, had Alarm UK and Road Alert!, the groups that co-ordinated the national protests of the 1990s, not disbanded once Labour won power. Yet they might soon have one again. Rebecca Lush, a Road Alert! veteran, has returned to the fray to found Road Block, aimed at uniting the new groups. "NGOs have failed to keep the public involved," she says. "But it would also be fair to criticise direct-action people like me, who were very active in the Nineties, but naively let off the pressure when we thought we had 'won'. Now we have to fight the battles of the Nineties again."

Airport expansion is prompting a similar reaction. Hacan ClearSkies - founded to fight the growing noise and pollution from Heathrow - is now working with protest groups at Stansted, Gatwick, Birmingham and elsewhere. John Stewart, chair of both AirportWatch, the movement's umbrella body, and Hacan, is recruiting a "special action group" to start a programme of direct action against the industry. He says: "We are very frustrated that the national green groups have been so ineffective. Can't they see that if the predictions made by climate-change scientists are even half true, then the species and habitats they are fighting to preserve will be wiped out within a century? The time for traditional behind-the-scenes lobbying is over. We must get the public on our side." That may be happening despite the NGOs' lack of faith in the voters. In last year's European elections, for example, more than a million people voted for the Green Party. In London, the south-east and south-west, the
 Greens won 7 per cent of the vote, so retaining their two MEPs. The Greens also have seven representatives in the Scottish Parliament, two on the London Assembly and 61 councillors across 25 different local authorities. This year they may even get an MP - in Brighton Pavilion, where they came first in the 2004 European elections.

The idea that voters are important, bright and caring enough to be worth wooing may be finally percolating through to the national NGOs, too. Just recently, some of them - Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, People & Planet, the RSPB and WWF-UK - have joined forces to set up an entirely new group, to be called the Climate Movement. They are taking it seriously, having advertised a £50,000 salary before appointing as director Ashok Sinha, who has the job of turning climate change into an issue for the masses and not just policy wonks. However, the movement's first big events are not due until autumn, well after the election. Maybe it and the other green groups will be ready for the next poll, or the one after that - but don't hold your breath.

Jonathan Leake is the Sunday Times environment editor
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.


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