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."
