Beneath the Pall of Misery, a New Movement Is Born

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Beneath the Pall of Misery, a New Movement Is Born

This Is Now a Protest for Democracy

By George Monbiot, The Guardian, August 21, 2007

There are plenty of people at the Heathrow climate camp who say they are campaigning on behalf of their children. But when Alf Pereira spoke on Sunday outside the church in Harmondsworth, we knew he meant it. His daughter died of bronchial problems, caused, he believes, by pollution from the airport. She was buried in the graveyard behind us. He fears that if a third runway is built, the developers will disinter her.

Until this week, Mr Pereira’s voice was drowned by the roar of jet engines. The people of the villages around the airport have been campaigning for years against the threat of expansion, but no one in power has listened. Both the government and the airports operator BAA appear determined to evict the living and raise the dead.

Heathrow is already the busiest international airport on earth. The new runway and the terminal and approach roads it needs would demolish around 1200 homes(1). One primary school will be flattened; six others will be permanently blighted by noise. Separated from the rest of Heathrow, this would, in effect, be a second airport.

The government hopes to have the new airport built "as soon as practicable"(2) on the grounds that it will "generate the largest direct net economic benefits of any new runway"(3). The Times reveals that BAA has been allowed to influence the tests which will determine whether or not the runway would breach the legal limits for pollution and noise. The government has also given the company the results of its air pollution studies, while withholding them from the public(4).

It seems pretty obvious that this scheme could go ahead only if the government is prepared to rip up both its agreements with the public and the EU’s pollution laws. When Heathrow’s fifth terminal was approved, a planning condition capped the number of flights using the airport at 480,000 a year. The new runway would raise them to 720,000(5). BAA also wants to end the "alternation agreement" which regulates flights at Heathrow’s existing runways: planes leaving the airport currently switch directions at 3pm in order to give the people of West London a break from the noise. If the policy changes, the airport could take a further 72,000 flights a year(6).

The government has promised that the area of land subject to noise levels which the World Health Organisation defines as causing "serious annoyance" (57 decibels or more) will not increase. But its own forecasts suggest the new runway will expand this zone by at least 12%(7). This is almost certainly an underestimate, which is perhaps why it has refused to publish maps of the flight paths to and from a third runway. A consortium of local authorities has drawn up its own maps. They show a massive northern expansion of the noise zone, sweeping over much of London and the counties to the west of Heathrow(8).

The airlines say that they will make their planes quieter in order to meet the government’s promise. But they also say they will make them more efficient to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, and the method favoured by some of them is to swap the current engine design for "open rotor" turbines, which are much noisier(9). They can’t have it both ways.

Already the planes and their associated traffic have been breaching the EU’s limits for nitrogen dioxide pollution, which suggests that current airport activities are unlawful (remember that when you hear ministers fulminating about our illegal protest)(10). Now we are expected to believe that air pollutants can be reduced to below the legal limits while the number of flights almost doubles. It looks as if our civil servants will be busy with what they call "statisitical interpretations of the target"(11). The rest of us call it lying.

Camping in the fields north of the airport this week, I found that I fell asleep promptly at 11, when the flights mostly cease, and woke - despite my wax ear plugs - promptly at 6, when they resume. My throat swelled and my eyes itched, and I am sure that my headache was not just the result of a few too many bottles of Pitfield’s Eco Warrior. Even if we were to put climate change to one side, who can honestly claim that new runways, for all their economic benefits, improve the quality of our lives? A pall of skull-scraping misery hangs over the catchment of every major airport. But the business plan cannot be faulted: the more hellish our lives become, the more we seek to escape from them.

Of course we cannot put climate change to one side. In a previous article I showed that, depending on whether you believe the government’s figures or those produced by academic researchers, by 2050 the greenhouse gases produced by the UK’s air passengers will equate to between 91% and 258% of the carbon dioxide the government says the whole economy should be producing(12). Its airport expansion plans, in conjunction with those of other nations, will cause runaway climate change even if we were to spend the rest of our lives shivering in the dark. So much for the economic benefits of new runways.

The people seeking to prevent this expansion know that when the government supports a development, explaining your objections at its public inquiries is about as much use as shaking your fist at the sky. An elaborate theatre of consultation and democracy is designed only to hide the fact that the decision has already been made.

So what else do the critics of direct action expect us to do? How else do they suggest we drag this issue out of the shadows and thrust it to the front of the public mind?

We did not get everything right. The media strategy was hopeless: sympathetic journalists were excluded; unsympathetic journalists went undercover and stayed in the camp for as long as they wanted. But in other respects it was better organised, more democratic and more disciplined that any I have seen before. It drew on the protests of the 1990s but introduced two new elements: much better logistics and a model of popular democracy imported from Latin America. All the facilities that 1500 people would need - including running water, sanitation, hot food twice a day, banks of computers and walkie-talkies, stage lighting, sound systems, even a cinema - were set up in a few hours on unfamiliar ground, in the teeth of police blockades. A system of affinity groups and neighbourhoods, feeding their decisions upwards to general meetings, permitted a genuine participatory democracy of the kind you will never encounter in British public life. The actions themselves were disciplined and remained non-violent even when the police got heavy. I left the camp on Sunday evening convinced that a new political movement has been born.

We haven’t prevented runaway climate change by camping beside Heathrow and surrounding the offices of BAA, nor did we expect to do so. But we have made it harder for Alf Pereira and the other unheard people to be swept aside, and harder for the government to forget that its plan for perpetual growth in corporate utopia is also a plan for the destruction of life on earth.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. See http://www.notrag.org/notrag-information.php

2. Department for Transport, December 2003. The Future of Air Transport White Paper, para 11.63. http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/whitepapers/air/chapter11thesoutheast

3. ibid, para 11.50.

4. Ben Webster, 6th June 2007. ‘Secret pact’ over Heathrow’s third runway. The Times.

5. Gillian Merron MP, 10th May 2007, parliamentary answer. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070510/text/70510w0025.htm

6. ibid.

7. The maximum zone agreed by the government is 127km2. It projects the third runway will increase this zone to 143km2. This is explained, with references, by
Tim Johnson and Peter Lockley, February 2006. Emissions: Impossible. An assessment of the noise and air pollution problems at Heathrow airport and the measures proposed to tackle them. Aviation Environment Federation. http://www.aef.org.uk/downloads/EmissionsImpos.pdf

8. The maps can be seen here: http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/Home/MyWandsworth/Newsextra/2mgroup.htm

9. David Gow and Dan Milmo, 15th June 2007. Airbus and easyJet float radical plan to cut emissions by half. The Guardian.

10. Tim Johnson and Peter Lockley, February 2006 - see note 7.

11. This phrase is used in a memo about energy policy that can be read here: The memo can be read here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/08/13/RenewablesTargetDocument.pdf

12. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/12/19/preparing-for-take-off/

By George Monbiot, The Guardian, August 7, 2007

All we are doing, says the airport operator BAA, is seeking to prevent unlawful protest. But under the act it used in the High Court yesterday, all protest is arguably unlawful. The 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, amended by the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, creates an offence of trying "to persuade any person … not to do something that he is entitled or required to do" or "to do something that he is not under any obligation to do", if in so doing you are deemed to be harassing him(1). Harassment is defined as "alarming the person or causing the person distress"(2). No definition of alarm or distress is given. The purpose of the planned climate camp at Heathrow Airport next week is to make people alarmed about climate change.

The harassment act has been used many times against peaceful campaigners. In 2001, for example, protesters outside the US intelligence base at Menwith Hill were prosecuted for distressing American servicemen - by holding up a placard reading "George W Bush? Oh dear!"(3). In the same year, a protestor in Hull was arrested for harassment, on the grounds that he had been "staring at a building"(4). In 2004, police in Kent arrested a woman who had sent two polite emails to an executive at a drugs company, begging him not to test his products on animals(5). This year, the residents of a village in Oxfordshire were banned from protesting against RWE npower’s plan to turn their beautiful Thrupp Lake into a dump for fly ash. The stated purpose of the injunction is to prevent them from causing alarm or distress to the burly security guards the company has employed(6). No protest, however polite, is now safe from prosecution under this monstrous act.

Neither government nor parliamentarians give a stuff about how this legislation - intended to protect people from stalkers - is being misused. The amendments to the act in 2005 were not debated in either house of parliament, though some of us wrote to MPs, lords and bishops explaining the implications for protest. In his celebrated constitutional speech last month, Gordon Brown proposed "to change the laws that now restrict the right to demonstrate in Parliament Square"(7). This - the first rolling back of repressive legislation in three decades - is important both practically and symbolically. But it also acknowledges the power shift that has taken place. Parliament no longer counts for much, so we will again be allowed to make a noise outside it. But whisper dissent outside a corporate HQ and you might find yourself charged with harassment, obstruction, aggravated trespass, anti-social behaviour or even terrorism: the fruits of 20 years of draconian laws, beginning with the 1986 Public Order Act.

So why, given the legal risks, have the climate campers vowed to go ahead with their protest? Because it is hard to see what else could possibly work. A leading article in the Guardian last week sniffed that "raising awareness is fine; causing disruption to no particular end is pointless."(8) But the point of causing disruption is to raise awareness. In 1997, when Swampy was hauled blinking out of the tunnel he had dug beneath the route of a planned trunk road in Devon, he was greeted by a crowd of reporters. Why, they asked him, had he not used the usual political channels to try to stop the road? "If I had written a letter to my MP," he answered, "would you all be here now? I think not." If the climate camp protesters were not threatening disruption at Heathrow, would the Guardian have written a leader about the environmental impacts of flying? I think not.

Direct action is a demonstration in two senses of the word: a protest and an exposition. It drags neglected issues out of obscurity and thrusts them into the political domain. Whatever journalists might think of the demonstrators, they cannot help giving them the oxygen of publicity. The storm of repugnance that disruptive protest at Heathrow will cause will keep the issue of flying and climate change high on the news agenda.

This was how, in the mid-1990s, we stopped the Tory road building programme. The newspapers huffed and puffed, but the coverage they gave the protests meant that people couldn’t help becoming aware of the destruction of some of Britain’s most beautiful places. The howls of execration directed against the protesters soon turned against the government, and the Conservatives, in one of the most dramatic policy reversals of recent years, cut their programme by 80%(9).

How else do the critics of direct action propose that we should respond to this issue? The growth of air travel in the United Kingdom is being driven not only by the market but also by the government. It has demanded that the airports publish "master plans" to accommodate a doubling in the number of flights between now and 2030(10). It assists this process with tax breaks and subsidies for creating new routes from regional airports(11).

Now it has shut down one of the few formal means by which we could challenge its policy of airport expansion. Last month, in a paper scarcely anyone has noticed, the Treasury announced that it is closing England’s regional assemblies(12). The assemblies gave civil society (represented by local authorities and NGOs) a statutory means of restraining the regional development agencies, which are led by corporations. The assemblies drew up the regional spatial strategies, which spell out the kind of development a region needs, including its transport links.

Without public debate, this role has now been given to the regional development agencies. The businesses that run them will always demand more roads and more airports (not least because their construction provides lucrative contracts) and there is now no statutory way of challenging them. The purpose of such changes is spelt out by the Treasury with breathtaking frankness: "to deliver accountability to business."(13)

This coup against the wider public interest is consistent with Brown’s strategy so far: to talk about a renewal of values, then to appoint the former head of the CBI as minister for trade and investment; to make bold speeches about entrusting more power to parliament, then to rush out 76 policy announcements as parliament goes into recess; to pose as a critical friend of the US president, then to agree to host his missile defence programme without parliamentary debate. Gordon Brown is beginning to look more autocratic than Tony Blair.

Oh, we can keep signing our petitions and writing our letters to MPs and making earnest appeals to common sense, but we know that we will be fobbed off until it is too late to prevent runaway climate change. Only those who have not grasped the implications could argue that the need to avoid disrupting a few holiday flights outweighs the need to reverse the growth in aviation.

By joining the climate camp at Heathrow next week, you will be making a stand not only against climate change, but also against the attempt by BAA to stop people from agitating for a better world. What began as an environmental demonstration has now also become a protest for democracy. I will be there. What about you?

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, Section 125.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/

2. Protection from Harassment Act 1997, Section 7. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/

3. Yorkshire CND, 16th January 2001. Menwith Hill news diary.
http://www.cndyorks.gn.apc.org/caab/articles/caabspmhs.htm

4. Schnews, 16th February 2001. Issue 293.

5. Simon Dally, pers comm, 4th August 2004 and 21st February 2005. Simon Dally acted as legal adviser in this case.

6. You can read the injunction here: http://www.epuk.org/News/475/the-npower-injunction-in-full

7. Gordon Brown, 3rd July 2007. Statement to Parliament. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070703/debtext/70703-0003.htm

8. Leader, 2nd August 2007. The high cost of cheap flights. The Guardian.

9. From £23bn to £4.5bn.

10. Department for Transport, December 2003. White Paper: The Future of Air Transport.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_aviation/documents/page/dft_aviation_031516.pdf

11. Department for Transport, 14th December 2006. The Future of Air Transport Progress Report.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_aviation/documents/pdf/dft_aviation_pdf_613840.pdf

12. HM Treasury, July 2007. Review of sub-national economic development and
regeneration. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/9/5/subnational_econ_review170707.pdf

13. ibid.