Tribune, 16 June 1989
The opinion polls suggest that when the Euro-election results are announced on Sunday, there will have been a massive surge in the Green Party’s vote. Paul Anderson looks at the greening of British politics and talks to David Gee, shortly to become director of Britain’s most important environmentalist pressure group, Friends of the Earth
The past six months have seen something unprecedented in British politics: all the major political parties trying to outdo one another in expressing their concern for the environment.
The reason is simple: opinion poll after opinion poll has shown that voters are turning environmentalist in ever-increasing numbers. Unless the major political parties can show that they share the voters’ concerns, the tiny Green Party is set to steal votes in elections.
Last month, it took an average of 8.7 per cent of the poll in the seats it contested in the county council elections; in parts of the south-west it took 14 per cent, and in much of south well over 10 per cent. An opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph last week put the Greens’ support at 5.5 per cent nationally, above the Social Democrats and not far behind the Social and Liberal Democrats.
As Tribune went to press this week, British Greens were confident of getting 1 million votes in the Euro-elections, in which they were contesting every seat in Britain and Northern Ireland.
The first-past-the-post electoral system means that the Greens are not well placed to win seats at any Level. In the county council elections they won only one, in the Isle of Wight. But the major parties are worried in the short term about the impact of substantial Green votes in marginal constituencies, and in the longer run about the possibility of a breakthrough.
The British electorate has become increasingly volatile and unpredictable as the loyalty of voters to their” parties has weakened since the war, another Chernobyl or food poisoning scare, and who’s to say that the Greens could not emulate the successes of the Social Democratic Party in the early eighties?
The growing electoral threat to the major parties posed by the Green Party is not, however, largely of its own doing. The Greens are growing fast, at a rate of .600 recruits a month. With 11,000 members the party now has more paid-up members than the Social Democrats or Communists. But it is still not big enough to be more than an electoral machine riding on changes in public opinion for which it deserves little credit.
The greening of the British electorate upon which the Green Party’s rise has depended has been the product of a gradual change in political culture in which non-party pressure groups have played the crucial role.
Of these, the two most important are Greenpeace, with 250,000 supporters, and Friends of the Earth, with just under 100,000. They share many objectives and campaign on many of the same issues; both are part of worldwide environmentalist organisations; both have highly regarded teams of expert researchers; and both have grown dramatically in the past two years.
But they differ radically in their chosen political strategies. Greenpeace has adopted spectacular direct action as its central means of gaining publicity, while FoE has concentrated on a more traditional pressure group role, aiming, in the words of Jonathon Porritt, its current director, “to provide accessible, authoritative information; to target politicians and other decision-makers to bring about appropriate policy changes; and to promote positive, sustainable alternatives to these policies which now so comprehensively threaten the environment”.
In the early days of the current environmentalist movement, when green issues were dismissed by the mainstream political parties and the media as the prerogative of sandal-wearing freaks, there can be little doubt that Greenpeace’s “stunt polities” had the greater impact on public opinion. Today, with the environment at the top of the party-political agenda and never out of the headlines, it is FoE’s strategy that is in the ascendant.
“It’s fair to say that we’re now setting the environmental agenda,” says one FoE campaigner. “On a whole series of questions, from air pollution to the tropical rain forests, we’ve got journalists and politicians – and even some industrialists – queuing up for our opinions.” On present trends FoE looks set to be one of the most influential British pressure groups of the nineties.
In such circumstances, it is rather surprising that the media hardly noticed that the man chosen earlier this year to succeed Jonathon Porritt at its helm has a very different background from that usually associated with environmentalists.
David Gee, who takes over from Mr Porritt next year after a year working as campaigns co-ordinator and director designate, has spent most of the past IS years working as a trade union official, first for the TUC and then for the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (now the GMB).
At the TUC, he was involved in launching the ten-day training scheme for workplace safety representatives in the wake of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act At the GMWU, he continued to work on workplace safety issues.
“Occupational risk and environmentalism are next-door fields,” he says.” Increasingly I found myself working on workplace issues that spilled out into the wider community.
“Perhaps the principal one was asbestos, where the union’s members had long been involved in making asbestos and in sticking it into buildings and ships. We’d had an active campaign for years. But after 1982, when a television programme alerted the wider public to the hazards of asbestos, there was a lot of community action against asbestos. We produced a leaflet to hit that market, -Asbestos in the Community. We got rid of thousands and thousands. There was no other organisation producing that sort of information.
“Then we went on to things like radiation, pesticides and other tone chemicals, the dangers of explosions in chemical plants, the transport of hazardous chemicals and so on – all workplace issues that have an impact on the community.
“In the past six or seven years, the public has come to realise that it’s in the firing tine from risks emanating from workplaces that somehow spill out. Bhopal is the classic example.”
His increasingly broad environmentalist campaigning did not go down too well with some of his colleagues, however, not least because he was a thorn in the side of British Nuclear Fuels, which employs many GMB members. He was given his cards after accompanying his wife to Australia in defiance of a union decision that he could not have unpaid leave to go.
He is unwilling to go into detail about the incident. “The only thing I’d say is that when you’re in the business of reducing risk, whether it is occupational risk or environmental risk, you do come up against some very powerful vested interests, people whose short-term interests at least in maintaining the status quo.” He is nevertheless optimistic about the possibilities of greening the trade unions: “The trade unions need to take on environmental issues because they affect their members and affect communities. They’ve tended to ignore environmentalism in the past, and there are good objective reasons that environmentalism is difficult for unions because of their stake in the status quo. But there are ways of overcoming a lot of that.
“Simultaneously, green groups have tended to ignore the trade unions, with a few notable exceptions such as the co-operation of’ Greenpeace and the National Union of Seamen over dumping at sea.
“One of my first tasks at FoE has been to draw up a strategy document on green groups and the unions, outlining why they’ve found it difficult to embrace one another, then explaining how it is in the interests of both to come together and suggesting practical steps we can be taking.”
Mr Gee is a member of the Labour Party, though by no means an uncritical one: the party’s policy review document is, he thinks, weak in many areas. He is also keen to emphasise the non-partisan nature of his new job:
“I’m happy to work with any political party as long as if s going down the right road,” he says, There’s a fundamental shift in politics going on throughout the industrialised world, and it’s going to continue for the foreseeable future.
“Labour is joining it rather late, with some outdated ideas. It hasn’t yet got to grips with some of the best and most radical thinking in the environmental movement, for example the United Nations Brandt-land report, Our Common Future, which talks about sustainable development and says that the way economies are growing in the industrialised west is just not on.
“We’ve got to replace the sterile debate of ‘growth’ versus ‘no growth’ by talking about how we can carry on improving our quality of life without consuming all the world’s resources so that there’s nothing left for the next generation.
“Labour’s policy review document is particularly weak in its thinking about the international measures needed to protect the environment. There is hardly any mention of Europe, yet almost all regulatory progress on pollution in the next decade is going to have to come out of Europe. International regulation is clearly going to be necessary to ensure that recent protocols on ozone and global warming are actually adhered to – and that means some form of global inspectorate.”
By contrast, FoE is currently planning to step up its efforts in Europe, possibly putting full-time staff into Brussels.
On nuclear power, which the policy review suggests will be kept well into the next century, Mr Gee is scathing. “Labour needs to face up to the economic reality of nuclear power. Its time is up, particularly given the fact that it is going to be privatised.
“Previously, it was cushioned from the commercial world. Now it will almost certainly go the same way as it has in America. Renewables are coming on stream and we know more and more about energy efficiency. The apparent need for nuclear power will simply disappear.
On the other hand, he believes that the left has much to gain from environmentalism. “The reason environmentalism is not now a fringe issue is that people are realising that environmentalism brings up the age-old political questions of distribution on power and resources. Unless those two political issues are addressed, you can’t be serious about environmentalism.”
This puts the Tories in a quandary. “The Tories realise that environmentalism is moving to the centre stage politically, and they want to give the impression of meaning business.”
In the next six months, he says, we can expect some token gestures – perhaps the sort of Environmental Protection Agency that’s now being suggested by Hugh Rossi, the Conservative MP for Hornsey and Wood Green. After all, Margaret Thatcher is searching for international credibility following the recent ozone conference.
“But the Tories are in deep trouble on the environment. You cannot achieve environmental standards either domestically or internationally without regulation. Even progressive capital wants regulation to get ‘a level playing field for all competitors’. You can’t achieve that just with codes of practice.
“Even more fundamentally, the Tories are m trouble over their basic philosophy of who gets what in the division of resources. You can’t get a sustainable world going without shifting a lot of resources to the Third World. The First World made the hole in the ozone layer. If we now want the Chinese and the Indians to give up certain chemicals because of the ozone layer and it’s going to cost them a lot of money, then they’ll want to be reimbursed.
“On the ‘polluter pays* principle, the First World has got no case at all for not reimbursing them. That excites me as a socialist, because instead of aid to the Third World being a moral thing, it’s suddenly in the First World’s direct interests to transfer a lot of resources to the Third World so it can develop differently and not damage the environment.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr Gee is sceptical of the “Green consumerism” that some have hailed as the way forward for the environmentalist movement. Tin not against using endorsement of a particular company’s product as environmentally sound if it’s going to act as a lever for other companies to improve their standards,” he says. “But if ‘green consumerism’ is just another marketing opportunity, which is largely what it is at the moment, it’s not going to do much to alter the fundamental problems.”
So what should FoE be doing? Mr Gee again mentions working with the unions and in Europe. “We’ve also got to go to the political parties in a more sustained way. We’ve got to be setting the agenda for two or three years hence.
“We’re now in a position where people want solutions to problems. Drawing people’s attention to problems, whether through stunts or whatever, was the task of the past decade. We have got to come up with technically sound, economically sound, detailed policies that are the answers to the current environmental crisis. That is a huge task. We’ve virtually got to create an environmental protection agency in exile to do it.”
