The protests began following the announcement in May by Balfour Beatty and another seven of the UK’s 14 major electrical contractors (Crown House, NG Baileys, T. Clarkes, MJN Colston, Gratte Brothers, Shepherds Engineering, Matthew Hall) that they would impose new contracts upon their electricians, and in doing so scrapping the Joint Industry Board (JIB) agreement which has for the past 40 years been the basis for setting pay and working conditions. The firms have drawn up a replacement, the Building and Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA), and issued notice to employees in August that their current contracts will be terminated on December 7, leaving them with the option of taking up the new contracts or accepting unemployment.

According to Unite, which represents UK electricians, BESNA will have a number of negative effects on the trade. Contractors will be able to continually raise and lower hourly pay according to specific tasks workers undertake at any point in time, rather than maintaining a standard wage for skilled work. For some electricians this will entail a lowering of the hourly rate from £16.25 to £10 – a 35 per cent pay cut.

Unite say that both travel and overtime pay will be cut and made payable only at the employer’s discretion, the ability to claim for unfair dismissal will be reduced, while employers will simultaneously be enabled to make redundancies while agency temp workers are still engaged on projects. As one electrician analysing the agreement put it: “People are going to be losing a lot. Every single term in BESNA gives all the power to the employer. They get final say on everything.”

The JIB agreement has been in place for over 40 years, and part of the reason for its creation was the avoidance of labour unrest. The prospect of its removal is now fuelling some of the most potent labour militancy of recent years.

Protests by rank and file union members have shut down building sites across the country. In September a group of around 1,500 electricians workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire walked out to join demonstrating electricians and Unite officials, while sites in London have been blockaded and occupied by workers several times in recent weeks.

“We’ve got to have mass walkouts, whether it’s official or not, it’s our very futures at stake,” explained Steve Acheson, Branch secretary for Unite from Manchester.

He said in view of the fast-approaching December deadline, electricians “aren’t prepared to wait for the union to decide what they’re going to do. Time is not permitting. The rank and file are saying we haven’t got enough time and they’re taking action.”

Acheson, himself a victim of Balfour Beatty’s past union blacklisting activity, accused building firms of lacking commitment to negotiations with their workforces.

“They’re just moving the goalposts so they can get the rate down by £3. This is a 43 year agreement they’re walking away from. The root cause of everything is insatiable greed for greater profit.

“The only language these companies seem to understand is industrial action. There’s no dialogue, they don’t want dialogue.”

One of the original eight companies proposing to scrap the JIB, MJN Colston, has already backed down in response to the protests, and the workers are confident that others can be forced into the same decision.

Balfour Beatty, a firm with a recent history of illegal union blacklisting, is viewed as the driving force behind BESNA and as such is being targeted by Unite for the first wave of official strike action. The decision to ballot the 1,000 Unite members employed by Balfour Beatty was announced on October 18. While Balfour Beatty have claimed that the scrapping of the JIB is a response to competitive pressures, Unite point out that the companies orders have risen 6 per cent this year, with £15.5bn worth of projects underway since last year, yielding pre-tax profits of £50.5m. Ian Tyler, the company’s chief executive, received a total pay package of £979,994.

Unite national officer, Bernard McAulay said: “We believe Balfour Beatty is the main aggressor among a group of companies trying to bully their workers into signing away their livelihoods so Unite is balloting them first. We have warned them repeatedly that their greed will bring mayhem to an industry desperately trying to steer a path through the recession, but they refuse to listen.

“The failure of the senior management at Balfour Beatty to withdraw the threats of dismissal has left Unite with no choice than to prepare for an industrial action ballot with Balfour Beatty, the ring-leader of these break-away firms.

“This is a vastly profitable company. It has no need whatsoever to rob its employees in order to satisfy its shareholders. Perhaps the threat of strike action will bring Balfour Beatty to its senses and back to the negotiating table.”

In Manchester, as well as the Carrington Paper Mill construction site run by Balfour Beatty, the other major target of protest has been the Town Hall refurbishment project. The contractor chosen for the project, NG Bailey, is one of the seven firms still seeking to implement BESNA. July’s Manchester People, the council’s news publication, quoted deputy leader Sue Murphy praising the project for its role in creating jobs and apprenticeships for local youngsters, saying as well as “preserving these heritage buildings for the future and ensuring they can deliver improved services in the years ahead, we are also helping give these people a promising future”.

This future now looks decidedly less promising for those hired by NG Bailey, which will, under the terms of BESNA, also no longer be offering specialist electricians’ apprenticeships.

Balfour Beatty were contacted for comment and supplied the following statement:

“Balfour Beatty Engineering Services (BBES) remain committed to the HVCA and the introduction of the Building Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA) which will introduce one consistent set of terms and conditions for electrical, mechanical and plumbing operatives who are currently employed under a number of existing industry agreements.

“The UK construction industry is under pressure to increase efficiency, to improve productivity and to minimise costs. We are in the process of consulting with our workforce on the proposed introduction of the BESNA, this process includes providing the opportunity for our employees to ask questions to fully understand the detail and benefits of a single agreement for BBES and the industry as a whole.

“We believe that by implementing the new agreement we will create a more modern structure, better able to respond to the market place and to safeguard employment, without eroding the terms and conditions of our employees. No employee will have their wages cut, electricians will earn the same rate under the BESNA and mechanical and plumbing operatives will see an increase in their hourly rate to create a level playing field.”

A report on Manchester City Council’s reaction to the protests against NG Bailey will follow in the coming weeks.

This piece originally appeared on the Manchester Mule site.

In The Guardian, Tariq Ali comments on the striking centrality of Tharir Square to the revolution – he writes that it is ‘as if to say, “we are showing our strength, we don’t want to test it because we are neither organised for that nor are we prepared, but if you mow us down remember the world is watching.”’ This is, he argues, ultimately a sign of the weakness of the movement: heavily reliant on symbolism and, thus far, achieving largely symbolic gains. The Egyptian regime, a dense web of shared elite interests, was ultimately about much more than just Mubarak. Who or what can ultimately carry the momentum of the protests forward to effect change that is more than cosmetic?

The lack of conventional political leadership on display has created hysteria in the west over the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood seizing control of Egypt. They are the strongest organised political opposition to Mubarak. However, as Robert Dreyfuss explains in Mother Jones, the Brotherhood were Mubarak’s means of staying in power and garnering international support -  likewise, they were the West’s means of justifying support for Mubarak’s regime. Their power and influence  – while still considerable – has been exaggerated, as their sluggish response to recent events demonstrates. Though certain now to be a strongerl force in Egyptian politics, and one which amplifies anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment, talk of the protests being co-opted by the Brotherhood are, Dreyfuss argues, unrealistic. The protests have remained secular in character, and it is unforeseeable that the youth and modernising middle classes which instigated the protests would tamely bow to a theocracy.

Amer el-Zant writes in the Egyptian newspaper Almasry Alyoum of his experiences of one of the most remarkable features of the protests – the cooperative harmony between Islamists, secular youths and Christians:

In the terminology of political philosopher John Rawls, this is the sort of interaction that, if nurtured, could form the nucleus of an “overlapping consensus” concerning the future of Egypt’s factious society–a consensus that excludes political positions and practices that are completely unacceptable to some segments of society.

Islamism, he claims, will be best contained within a more open society: ‘[I]t’s the persistence of the status quo that is the more likely harbinger of theocracy.’ Should the regime continue to cling on, he suggests, the next uprisings could well be ‘led by those willing to pay the price of resistance in the form of martyrdom. And they will be unlikely to want to share power following an eventual victory.’

Power rests for now with the army’s generals – ‘men of the old order’, as Robert Fisk calls them in The Independent, a wealthy and privileged elite who have gained much from the Mubarak regime and a close relationship with the United States and Israel. They have promised free and fair elections, but have also told the protestors to ‘resume a normal way of life’ and have begun clearing them from the streets. Fisk’s question gets to the heart of the matter, ‘The army has decided to protect the people. But who will curb the power of the army?’

Certainly not the US and EU, who have praised the army’s handling of events, and labelled them ‘guardians’ of the transition. They will doubtless continue to supply the generals with copious amounts of military aid to serve their strategic interests in the region. Writing as the demonstrations were escalating Noam Chomsky pointed out,

There’s a kind of a standard routine—Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, strongly supported by the United States and Britain, Suharto: keep supporting them as long as possible; then, when it becomes unsustainable—typically, say, if the army shifts sides—switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names.

Glenn Kessler, ‘fact checker’ for The Washington Post, backs up this arguement by succinctly tracing the about-turn in US rhetoric with regards to Egypt. Gilbert Achar, from the London School of Oriental and African studies, meanwhile explains how powerful interest groups are now attempting to recuperate the revolution. For Achar, genuine democracy will hinge on the ability of protestors to keep fighting.

According to the Egyptian journalist Hossam El-Hamalawy there is a danger now emerging of the moderate elements of the protest movement – the middle class professionals that ultimately comprise the apparatus of the state – siding with the army in search of ‘order’. The result of the protest movement allowing the military to engineer the transition to a new government would result, he argues:

[in] a government that will guarantee the continuation of a system that will never touch the army’s privileges, keep the armed forces as the institution that will have the final say in politics [and] guarantee Egypt will continue to follow the US foreign policy.

In the long term, the potential for progressive change, he argues, lies with the Egyptian workers movement, which outside the attention of the world’s media has been becoming ever more politicized in recent years. The economic aspects of the revolution have been largely overlooked in favour of the political, but the deep inequalities and harsh poverty created by Egypt’s neoliberal policies were what brought people onto the streets in such large numbers. With Egypt’s new finance minister pledging not to change course as regards economic policy, this fault line will not disappear. It was the mass strikes which began three days before Mubarak’s resignation, El-Hamalawy  asserts, that forced the army to topple Mubarak before the economy collapsed: ‘there lies the hope of changing the system.’

Though the revolution came to include people from all walks of Egyptian society, the role of young people in initiating the revolts is unmistakable. Sam Graham-Felsen writes in The Nation of how the wave of protests unleashed on January 25 were to a great extent planned by online activists in the preceding months who had been working hard to spread information, organize demonstrations and foster solidarity networks. Regarding what route the politicised youth of Egypt will take, sociologist Mohammed A. Bamyeh asserts:

Undoubtedly this revolution, which is continuing to unfold, will be the formative event in the lives of the millions of youth who spearheaded it in Egypt, and perhaps also the many more millions of youth who followed it throughout the Arab world. It is clear that it is providing a new generation with a grand spectacle of the type that had shaped the political consciousness of every generation before them in modern Arab history.

The apparent spontaneity of the protests (albeit planned spontaneity) reflects the fact that as yet this new emerging political consciousness has no formal manifestation. While this spontaneity was a key strength in outmaneuvering Mubarak’s forces, again it may also mean the transition to a new order will be controlled by pre-existing groups. Most protestors, Bamyeh says, ‘seemed less concerned about those details than with basic demands the fulfillment of which, it appeared, guaranteed the more just nature of any subsequent system.’ However, it is pessimistic indeed to believe that this concrete experience of collective empowerment would be forgotten so quickly as to allow a simple change of figureheads to pass unopposed, as Bamyeh describes:

[P]opular committees in the neighborhood, with their rudimentary weapons and total absence of illusions, represented what society had already become with this revolution: a real body, controlling its present with its own hands, and learning that it could likewise make a future itself, in the present and from below.

What is certain regarding Egypt is that the reverberations will be felt further afield, and not just in the Arab world – where authorities in Algeria, Yemen and Jordan are struggling to contain unrest. As Adar Primor notes in Haaretz, authorities in Russia and China are right to look nervously at recent events in Egypt – ‘people power has never been more exciting.’  A collapse in the economic growth based social contract in either country could have similar catalytic effects to the rising food prices in the Arab world.

Mary Kaldor on Open-democracy argues that the protests are completing the revolutions of 1989, reclaiming the values of Solidinarosc and the Czech Civil Forum from the neo-liberals who usurped them, alongside the idea of civil society as an exclusively western phenomenon. The need for a total rethinking of western security, foreign, and economic policies is clearer now than ever before. More than this though, the Egyptian uprisings are, as John Pilger puts it ‘our theatre of the possible’, writing:

In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience and try imagining it could not happen.

For the fourth successive August, a thousand or so assorted environmentalists were once again squatting land and filling newspaper pages. The camp is becoming as much a part of the summertime as crop circles and cricket – and many on the left seem keen to place it alongside such silly-season phenomena, as an inconsequential curiosity. They’re wrong.

The camp has made a significant impact on some major government planning decisions, brought a radical message on climate change to a mass audience, and employed innovative forms of organisation that the traditional left would do well to learn from. Additionally, through acts of large-scale civil disobedience, it has pushed at the limits of state control over protest.

Confront and sabotage them all

The camp is nothing if not hard to pin down. Commentators struggle to place it in pre-existing categories – social movement or pressure group? Pragmatic reformists or utopian revolutionaries? Green umbrella organisation or radical fringe?

Understanding it better requires going back to the roots. The first Camp for Climate Action was in August 2006. Around 600 people pitched next to Drax coal fired power station in Yorkshire – the biggest source of CO2 in the UK. The camp was based around four aims (which remain today): demonstrating sustainable living, providing popular education through workshops, building a mass movement against climate change on the premise that ‘government and corporations are not the answer’, and direct action – in this case, shutting down Drax.

The audacity captured the attention of the press, and the police – the latter outnumbered protesters three to one. The militancy of the protest seemed to mark a new phase in the politics of climate change. Politicians had sat on the problem for two decades, with little to show for it. Real change, camp organisers deduced, would come from below. Ruth Simpson (a pseudonym) was involved in organising Drax, and is concerned that its origins aren’t forgotten.

Ruth explains that the camp process began after the Gleneagles G8 protest mobilisation, and particularly the Horizon eco-village, created to counter claims that the G8 meeting was taking climate change seriously and provide a base for action. ‘Afterwards,’ Ruth says, ‘people thought, we shouldn’t just do that when there’s a major summit, we can do it on our own terms and pick our own targets.’

‘The camp was anarchist-leaning from the start, but it wasn’t urban class struggle anarchism – it was based around green anarchism and the DIY culture of the anti-roads movement and Reclaim the Streets. Consensus decision making was inspired by feminism, and the ‘Barrio’ form of organisation [the camp is divided into 'neighbourhoods,' which feed decisions into central meetings] and non-hierarchy came from the 2001 Piqueteros Rebellion in Argentina.’

‘It was clear we needed a radical perspective looking at the root causes,’ she continues. This led the camp into territory where most other environmental organisations feared to tread: ‘The thinking was that to stop the emissions, we have to stop the mode of production that creates them, the big companies that profit from them and the political system which maintains this situation – the idea was to confront and sabotage them all.’

Into the spotlight

When the camp announced in spring 2007 that its next target was Heathrow airport, alarm bells started ringing in high places. The protest laid bare government hypocrisy. Should the proposed third runway go ahead and air travel grow as projected, emissions cuts in other areas would be meaningless, even according to the government’s own targets. This was, a camp media spokesperson proclaimed on live television, the ‘prioritisation of economic growth above the future of the planet.’

As the camp allied with residents organisations in nearby villages, Heathrow’s owners, BAA, applied for the biggest injunction in British legal history to stop the protest. Police invoked anti-terror legislation, but couldn’t prevent multiple autonomous blockades and occupations of companies and government departments linked to aviation expansion. It was a media feeding frenzy. Despite little more than a thousand people being on site at any one time, the protest got more attention than anything since the million-strong anti-war demonstration on 15 February 2003.

The tabloids had a revived ‘eco-terrorist’ folk devil, while the liberal media swooned. Guardian columnist George Monbiot called it ‘better organised, more democratic and more disciplined that any [protest] I have seen … 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 … I left the camp convinced that a new political movement has been born.’

Maintaining the pressure

The camp is an evolving project, with no mapped out direction. Robbie Gillett, a Plane Stupid activist who is now part of the camp’s media team, was among those who felt the success of Heathrow should be built upon with another camp: ‘The government thought the third runway was a done deal, then suddenly they had 2,000 people on the land saying “this isn’t going to happen.”‘ He sees the event’s importance not just in terms of immediate political impacts, but how the experience inspires activists.

‘Some people go on gap years and come back with changed horizons,’ he says. ‘I went to a field in East Riding aged 19 and came away transformed. Since then I’ve been totally focused on climate change.’

Outside the camp, monthly open meetings allow participants from the different regions that form the ‘neighbourhoods’ to collectively plan the way forward. Open working groups, separate but accountable to the main group, implement decisions practically. Their remit ranges from educational workshops to media, police liaison to international networking. Professionals lending their expertise work alongside amateurs learning by doing.

This empowering, horizontal structure inspires many new participants. Robbie explains, ‘you can get involved in all aspects of the organisation – from cooking to the big political decisions. And if, for instance, you’re not happy about the line the media team is taking, you can join their working group and chip in.’ This is more significant, he asserts, than movement micro-politics. ‘My generation grew up with New Labour, and never saw alternatives or potential for change from parliamentary politics. The camp is about people wanting to take responsibility themselves, rather than deferring to politicians. It shows politics isn’t about men in grey suits.’

In 2008, a decision was made to target Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which energy giant E.On plans to replace with the UK’s first new coal station in 20 years. The camp announced it would attempt to shut down Kingsnorth, and launch rolling blockades should construction work begin. The state launched its most strident attacks yet. Police seized kitchen equipment, sanitation infrastructure and even creche toys. Blanket stop and searches were imposed around the site. Dozens were arrested for petty or entirely spurious offences. Helicopters and amplified music deprived campers of sleep, and violent dawn raids hospitalised several people. Similar scenes followed at the G20 protests in April 2009, when climate campers surrounded London’s Carbon Exchange to highlight the ‘false solution’ of carbon-trading. When news cameras left in the evening, riot police beat their way through the crowd.

This much police attention is usually a sign of effectiveness. The government has indeed stalled on the construction of the third runway and the new Kingsnorth. The camp has also been at the forefront of struggles for freedom to protest, with the police reeling from a year of bad publicity at the hands of the camp’s media and legal teams.

Paths not taken

There’s much to celebrate – but it’s not a simple success story, and the strongest criticisms come from within the camp. Marc Hudson, a Manchester based climate activist, is among several former participants who feel bread and butter aspects of movement building have been neglected. Numbers participating in the organisation haven’t kept pace with the rising public profile. The climate camp movement is growing, but it’s far from a ‘mass movement.’

‘Although more people are involved in the camp,’ Marc says, ‘it is generally more of the same. It has got deeper, but not wider. It tends to be your white, middle-class, university educated, public sector type people.’

‘On one level the camps are successful. New people are excited by the effectiveness of non-hierarchical organising, and they garner lots of media attention and raise awareness.’

‘But,’ he continues, ‘climate change isn’t a problem of awareness – most people know it’s serious. It’s a problem of there not being local avenues for people to put their concerns into action. The camp is a spasm, and what we need is year-round pressure.’ As the anti-globalisation movement found, this tactic precludes true mass participation. ‘If climate camp could use its humour, organisational prowess, daring, courage and imagination to create more local opportunities, then we might get somewhere,’ Marc concludes.

Others feel the radical focus of the camp is in danger of being lost. For Lauren Wroe, co-founder of the critical journal Shift, the experience of Heathrow brought concerns as much as inspiration. ‘All the ideas about austerity, forcibly limiting people’s lifestyles and restricting their movement – it didn’t fit with a radical politics of climate change.’ The camp’s direct action, Lauren felt, was also becoming problematic. ‘It was being used more as a government lobby tool. The urgency of the situation was making people turn toward the state for solutions, and put aside questions of social change – it was effectiveness first, equity second.’

‘Rather than walking away, we thought, “how can we encourage more critical engagement on these issues?” The result was Shift. Since then we’ve tried to keep engaging to push for a more radical approach, and counter reactionary tendencies.’

The pressure-cooker atmosphere created by the preparation of mass direct action and resisting police repression has sometimes drowned out political differences, and the difficult questions raised by people like Marc and Lauren. ‘At Kingsnorth,’ Lauren continues, ‘ideas like just transition, capitalism and class came up, but people didn’t embrace them and push forward, because everyone was preoccupied.’

New directions

With this year’s main action delayed until October (‘The Great Climate Swoop’ on Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station), and the Met keeping a low profile, there was greater opportunity to reflect at the camp. Economics was on the agenda as never before. The recession has opened new space for anti-capitalism, but the main inspiration for this change seemed to come from events on the Isle of Wight this summer. Sometimes small sparks start big fires, and the workers’ occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory may have added a new dimension to radical green politics.

In numerous workshop discussions, people were suggesting that Vestas points the way to a climate movement that really could become ‘mass,’ challenging environmental destruction and the logic of capitalism in people’s everyday life rather than one-off media stunts.

Talk of red-green coalitions is nothing new, though in recent years the camp has mostly produced examples of barriers which prevent them, notably at Kingsnorth. The National Union of Mineworkers was incensed by a perceived disregard for the fate of energy industry workers. Arthur Scargill came to the camp to remonstrate. In an interview with Shift, NUM representative Dave Douglass explained, ‘the green movement, we foolishly thought, was our ally … whole communities of working class people fought the cops to stop pit closures. Now the climate camp shouts “Leave It In The Ground,” and de facto “Shut The Pits” … They need to engage us more and confront us less.’

Nowadays, the NUM are more symbolic than material representatives of working class politics, but identical arguments over priorities have been raging with the Unite union over the future of Heathrow. The response from campers has been to stand behind the science, but these encounters did prompt more serious consideration of ‘just transition’ models.

Ongoing collaborations around the Vestas dispute are the outcome of this engagement with left politics. Luke Evans went to the Isle of Wight with other campers from the South Coast neighbourhood. Socialists, Green Party members, and trade unionists were all there at the factory. ‘At first,’ he says, ‘it was really split. Everyone had respect for each other, but thought their own way was best. The divide broke down as time went on though, because we realised everyone had different types of experience to offer, and we were all after fairly similar results.’

Several Vestas occupiers attended this year’s camp, holding packed daily meetings to encourage support, and participating in discussions about the overlap between workplace struggle and environmentalism. Ian Terry, a worker from the factory, stressed the potential of meshing the direct action tactics and dynamism of the climate camp with the wide organisation of the unions (see interview in Red Pepper’s October/November issue).

The Workers Climate Action (WCA) network shares Ian’s optimism. They were instrumental in the Vestas occupation, having leafleted workers after their redundancies were announced with material pointing to the success of the Visteon occupation earlier this year. WCA was founded by socialists from the Alliance for Workers Liberty to bring class politics into the nascent climate movement, and members of the network have been active in the camp.

Heathrow was a formative political experience for WCA’s Bob Sutton, and he feels that the conventional left should learn from the camp. ‘The British left in the conventional sense couldn’t pull off something like climate camp,’ he says. ‘The climate camp way of organising, independently sorting out the infrastructure of struggles and decent meetings, food, childcare – you can be sectarian about what climate camp can bring to workers’ struggle, but actually these things are of concrete importance.’

There is also a lot he feels the camp can gain from socialist politics. The camp’s anti-capitalism focuses on building alternative economic systems rather than trying to gain control of the existing means of production and use them for different purposes – small scale artisan cooperatives, ‘grow your own’ schemes, localisation and rural living are particularly popular initiatives.

‘Many of us in this camp weren’t even alive when the working class was last a really powerful force in society,’ Bob points out, ‘and this anti-capitalism that is external to capitalism is born of living through a period in which capitalism has total hegemony. It’s also born out of people’s largely middle class backgrounds – there isn’t a good sense of the amount of choice most people have.’

Vestas, whilst encouraging, remains unique: the workers there produce things greens want to see produced. Will we see greens engaging with workplace struggles at car factories, or shrinking back to safe-havens?

Communicating across difference

Gayle O’Donovan, secretary of Manchester Green Party and north west representative for the Green Left, is optimistic about the challenge. ‘An effective social movement won’t be based on individual issues, parties or organisations – we need many different groups working together. Climate camp is a model for getting people from different perspectives and organisations to work together. It is tuned in to communicating across difference and that’s important at a time when the left is so fragmented.’

She feels the most common criticism of the camp, that it is middle class student adventurism, is unjustified: ‘People criticise the camp for having this bourgeois hippy feel, but the people who will most be affected by runaway climate change are the poorest, the working class – on a national and global level. It’s a social justice issue that can’t be sidelined as the realm of sandal wearing, organic food eating hippies – it’s bigger than that.’

Climate change is indeed now much bigger than that. Since the first camp, the terrain of climate politics has shifted dramatically. Demands to end coal-fired electricity generation and short-haul flights look increasingly pragmatic rather than utopian. And, as the camp began calling for people to get to Copenhagen this December, it was joined by Ed Miliband, who told the media the leaders ‘need to be pushed’.

Coping with success

Perhaps it’s a measure of success that climate change is now being taken seriously – in word if not deed – across society in a way that those on the Drax camp would scarcely have believed possible. But where does this leave an organisation seeking to create a radical, anti-capitalist politics of climate change?

During Red Pepper’s workshop at this year’s camp, the writer and campaigner Kat Ainger neatly encapsulated the issues now facing the organisation as it looks forward. ‘Success is dangerous. Just at the moment when you are shifting the terms of mainstream debate, you encounter the sticky embrace of corporations and the state who will say, “we want the same things as you.” There’s a classic PR tactic of defusing movements by co-opting the moderates and isolating the radicals. And success is heady; it can lead to repetition of tactics that worked once. A movement needs to innovate; literally, to keep moving.’

With the camp’s upcoming agenda involving another mass action against coal, and another summit mobilisation (Copenhagen), this statement seems particularly pertinent. Innovation will no doubt be made easier by the camp’s fluid organisational system, but as Vestas seems to have shown, the real opportunities for the way ahead lie in collaboration and cross-pollination with other movements.

www.climatecamp.org.uk
This article is part of our series on emerging political movements, made possible with the help of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

In Britain, the workers’ occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight – supported by green, trade union and socialist campaigners across the country – has provided a practical challenge to the government. The Vestas workers’ argument, committed as ministers say they are to green investment, is that here is an exemplary case: so intervene and save green jobs, creating a base and a beacon for further action in the same direction.

Before the Vestas occupation, Ed Miliband, the minister responsible for action on climate change, made a welcome call for public pressure to achieve tougher action. But when faced with a request from the Vestas workers to talk, the government showed no interest in practical collaboration with real-life pressure – particular and complex as it invariably is. Why didn’t the government pick up on this opportunity to support a strategically-placed group of citizens who were responding to the need for everyone to take responsibility for climate change?

Strategic choices

Was it just political caution, a wariness of giving legitimacy to a campaigning alliance that includes political forces New Labour considers beyond the pale? Or is there a deeper divide at stake? A divide between those who believe that reversing the destructive momentum of the present economy is mainly a matter of appealing to the interests of private business, cajoling them to invest in green technologies as new profit opportunities; and, on the other hand, those who believe that a green transition will at times conflict with the priority of profits and require a strong alliance with workers and citizens with the technical and social know-how and potential power to rebalance the economy with the needs of the public and the planet to the fore.

Vestas symbolises how we can’t rely on the motor forces of the capitalist market. Here were green products but low profits; hence, in a capitalist market, the result is closure and ‘rationalisation’. How can the passions and reflections stimulated by the Vestas campaign be turned into the strategy we need for an effective and socially just green transition?

There are serious gaps in our knowledge as to how, practically speaking, a socialised green energy industry might be achieved. Vestas remains a special case – what about the polluting industries that the majority of workers are engaged in? There’s a need for some quick thinking, and the excavation of relevant lessons from the past. The words on many people’s lips are ‘Lucas Aerospace’. They are remembering the plan for socially useful and environmentally desirable products drawn up in 1975/76 by workers facing the threat of closure in a company involved in military production. They were supported by the industry minister of the time, Tony Benn.

Meet the shop stewards combine committee

Flashback to January 1975 and a meeting of the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards combine committee. The management of Lucas Aerospace was reacting to economic crisis by cutting jobs. Listen in as 60 delegates from 13 factories discuss what is to be done at a specially-convened meeting at a stately home turned trade union education centre just outside Sheffield.

The differences between their situation and that of the Vestas workers will be obvious. They include the existence of a strong trade union organisation and some initial encouragement from a government minister – but on the other hand a green movement that was only embryonic.

Similarities emerge, however, and new insights can be gained as to how today’s green movement can make common cause with workers to redirect the economy towards sustainability without loss of livelihoods. By the end of that January weekend, the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards – a powerful mix of some of the best aerospace designers in the country, highly skilled shop floor engineers and so-called ‘unskilled’ workers with a strong class and community consciousness – had taken a pioneering decision. They decided to go back to their workplaces and involve their members in drawing up and campaigning for ‘an alternative corporate plan for socially useful and environmentally desirable production’.

‘Let’s draw up a plan without management,’ said Mike Reynolds, a shop steward from Liverpool, at this historic meeting. ‘Lets start here from this combine committee. It has grown and grown. It has ability not only in industrial disputes but also to tackle wider problems. Let’s get down to working on how we’d draw up a plan, on our terms, to meet the needs of our community.’

The theme of using their skills to meet social needs – and demonstrating that their skills (used mainly to make components for military aircraft) were not redundant – was fundamental to their initiative.

‘There’s talk of crisis wherever you turn,’ said Mike Cooley, an inspirational designer then working at the Willesden factory (and later sacked by the company for his involvement in the combine committee), describing an aspect of the context familiar to us now. ‘We have to stand back … for it is the present economy that has a crisis. We don’t. We are just as skilled as we were, we can still design and produce things.’

Judging by the way that Lucas workers responded to the proposal to draw up an alternative corporate plan, Mike Cooley was voicing a widely shared ethos. The combine committee sent round a detailed questionnaire to every factory to draw up an inventory of skills and machinery and to ask fellow trade union members what they should be making. ‘Ideas poured in within three or four weeks,’ remembers Cooley, as we talk to him about the experience nearly 35 years on. ‘In a short time we had 150 ideas for products which we could make with the existing machine tools and skills we had in Lucas Aerospace.’

Demonstrating alternatives in practice

The specific ideas are worth returning to; they illustrate in a very vivid way the principles guiding the methodology of the shop stewards – principles that continue to have relevance today. The ideas were presented as drawings and models more often than written proposals. “Can do” rather than “can analyse” was the emphasis of the combine committee. They insisted, against the conventional emphasis (including by much of the left) on linguistic skills and propositional and codified scientific knowledge, on the importance of tacit knowledge, of “things we know but cannot tell”.

This approach also illustrates the strong sense that the Lucas Aerospace workers had of the choices to be made in both the development and the application of technology. Technology is not value-neutral; it involves choices and alternative directions. ‘There is no single best way,’ as the introduction to the plan put it.

Guided by these kinds of principles, some product ideas addressed medical needs: kidney machines for the thousands who die through lack of available equipment; a light, portable life-support system for ambulances; a simple heat exchanger and pumping system for maintaining the blood at a constant optimum temperature and flow during critical operations.

Another range of proposals concerned alternative energy sources, including proposals for storing energy produced during periods when it is not required for times when it is; solar collecting equipment for low-energy housing; a range of wind generators drawing on the workers’ know-how of aerodynamics. Others addressed the transport system and destructive nature of the automotive industry.

One proposal that was developed into a working ‘prototype’, which they used as a form of technological agitprop, was a ‘road-rail’ vehicle capable of driving through the city on roads and then running on the national rail network, with a capability of going up much steeper inclines than normal rolling stock. Another idea involved a power pack with a small combustion engine that would enhance the efficacy of battery-driven cars, improve fuel consumption and radically reduce toxic emissions.

A final set of proposals were for tele-archic devices, which mimic the motions of a human being, in real time but at a distance. They enable workers to use and develop their skill by working with the challenges of the physical world in a way that no simple robot would be capable of – as miners, oil drillers and so on – but in a safe and secure environment.

Significantly, the plan put forward democratic alternatives in relation to the organisation of production process, as well as the end products. In emphasising the social usefulness and environmental beneficence of these products, it also challenged the imperative to accumulate and maximise profits.

Some of the products would make a profit within a capitalist market economy – some have indeed been taken up by profit-maximising companies in Japan and Germany, for example – while others would not.

Implicit was the possibility of a different notion of growth, not driven by the logic of what has been called ‘the bicycle economy’ with its driving necessity to accumulate simply to keep going.

Management’s refusal to negotiate

It was a radical initiative, then, but pragmatic too, drawn up to be part of the collective bargaining process with management and government. The Lucas Aerospace management danced around it but refused to negotiate seriously – because the alternative plan would have taken collective bargaining onto a level that challenged management’s sole prerogative to manage.

The combine committee initially hoped the government would engage. Talk of public ownership was in the air. In November 1974, a combine committee delegation crowded into Tony Benn’s office when he was minister for industry to discuss the future of the industry. He said he didn’t have the power to nationalise but stressed the importance of diversification and ‘producing our way through the slump’. It was Benn who planted the seed of the idea of an alternative corporate plan. He offered the possibility of a meeting between government, the company and the combine to discuss it (is there a lesson here for our current minister for climate change?)

By the time the plan was ready in January 1976, Harold Wilson had sacked Tony Benn from the sensitive post of industry minister in response to pressure from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The doors of the ministry were all but closed to the workplace trade union reps – the people who knew what could be done to produce a way out of an economic crisis and had a vested interest in seeing such plans develop.

In a sense, the alternative plan and the combine committee were a classic product of the co-operative, egalitarian creativity of the late 1960s and 1970s: challenging authority and seeking individual realisation, but through a social movement – in this instance the labour movement – and all the more potent as a result. It came up against trade union, government and management institutions stuck in the command and control mentalities of the 1950s, and the power of the movement was destroyed by Thatcher’s onslaught against the unions and radical local government in the 1980s. It could be said that the creative spirit of the 1970s got separated from the social critique and organised movements in which it was initially embedded and was appropriated by the more sophisticated sections of corporate management.

What relevance for today?

With the challenge of diverse social forces now coming together in search of an alternative red-green economic strategy, is this a moment when that spirit of creativity and autonomy can be recombined with the organised power of the workers and citizens struggling for democratic control over the future? What new forms could this recombination take in the 21st century, when trade unions are generally weak and the left fragmented? What new alliances could be created as consciousness of the need for a socially and environmentally responsible alternative grows?

The Lucas shop stewards showed that the most effective challenges to the dominance of the capitalist market were not abstract principles but concrete actions, the most important of which being the formulation of alternative ways of doing things. The Green New Deal comes from the same realisation, but as a response to different circumstances.

Nonetheless, with the urgency provided by climate change, the growing influence of green movements and a labour movement in need of invigoration, maybe the Lucas plan’s time really has come?

Mike Cooley points out that the subtitle of the Lucas plan was ‘A positive alternative to recession and redundancy’. ‘The underlying ideas are even more relevant now than they were 35 years ago,’ he argues.

‘Once again we are told that for many there is no work. Are our hospitals so well staffed and equipped, our public transport services so frequent, safe and environmentally desirable, our housing stock so adequate and well maintained that there is no work to be done? Just look around. There is work to be done on all sides. What is lacking is the imagination and courage to creatively address it.”

A renewed Green New Deal that involved such painstaking attention to grass-roots participation would be a worthy successor indeed. And, with the speed at which things are changing in environmental politics at the moment, who knows how far such radicalism might go in a few years time?

The Lucas Plan; a new trade unionism in the making? by Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, first published by Allison & Busby in 1981, is available second hand from amazon.co.uk, abebooks.co.uk and other bookshops

The G20, by contrast, arrived suddenly, and in the midst of a recession. It produced more confused head scratching than bold political strategies. With the world’s attention soon to be focused upon London, those seeking to steal the limelight with opposition and alternatives were scrambling to prepare.

Political meetings in the early months of this year – from liberal NGOs to anarchist forums and everything in between – were filled with a sense of panic, but also expectation. Would this be the turning point, the mass outpouring of popular discontent over the government’s handling of the recession? From this expectation emerged the Put People First coalition. It draws together a dazzling array of organisations. Usual suspects like War on Want, Greenpeace and the Jubilee Debt Campaign work alongside smaller groups ranging from Sudanese Women for Peace to Performers Without Borders. There are even several Christian groups – whoever expected to see the Salvation Army marching unto class war? This is all knitted together with the combined might of the Trade Union Congress’s six million members.

The coalition’s 28 March demonstration created much excitement. Organisers speculated that the turnout would be the highest of any demonstration since the peak of the anti-war movement in 2003.

Titled ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’, the march aimed for the broadest possible appeal. Coach-loads of protesters from across the country converged on the capital. But in the end, it felt somewhat muted. With an estimated 35,000 out on the streets, it wasn’t even the biggest demonstration this year – the Gaza protests in January were far larger.

Solidarity – but not quite unity

There was certainly a diversity of attendees, but it seemed most had simply brought their own particular issue along. Anti-war activists had come about the war, environmentalists about climate change, trade unionists about jobs. There was a clear sense of solidarity, but not quite unity. What for instance, of the dispute between environmentalists and the Unite union over the third runway at Heathrow?

Possible tensions were smoothed over by the ambiguity of the demonstration’s purpose. Although an accompanying policy document compensated somewhat, policy documents don’t get feet on the street – the core message matters. Instead of bold, concrete demands such as for the public ownership of major banks, a bailout for the unemployed or a proper green stimulus package, Put People First offered only vague principles. Perhaps many stayed away confused or uninspired?

The TUC’s head of international relations, Owen Tudor, is more optimistic in his assessment. ‘Dealing with such broad issues can be difficult,’ he says, citing disagreements over priorities between climate activists and trade unionists as a key sticking point. The key question in retrospect, he asserts, is: ‘Were these three areas, “Jobs, Justice and Climate”, tacked together, or are they integrally bound up? The more radical outcomes of this alliance will depend on how far we see these things as integrated. People are now coming to a conclusion that they are.’

If it manages to stick together – Copenhagen will likely be make or break time – Put People First could create the grounds for a more forceful expression of progressive forces in society. It’s certainly unfair to judge an organisation too harshly on its first outing.

Nik Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, says: ‘We were actually pleased with numbers on the day, but even more pleased with some of the meetings that had gone on beforehand. We got trade unionists sitting down with development activists, and climate activists, discussing not just a Make Poverty History type agenda, but something central to all our interests. The structure of the world economy is affecting poverty in Zambia, but also people losing their jobs in this country. We need to bring that whole agenda together to tackle it.’

Those at the top of the participating organisations seem enthused, but is this shared throughout the ranks?

Derek Clarke of Tameside NUT feels Put People First’s ability to mobilise more people depends on orientating itself towards the grassroots. ‘It needs to start focusing on local campaigns and how to link them up, as opposed to just national campaigns and national demonstrations. We need to get people talking about it in the pubs and clubs and the only way you’ll do that is to energise local groups.’ Gary Hassell, of Brighton RMT, shares the sentiment. ‘One demo like this won’t be enough – we’ve got to take it back to the regions, back to the workplaces, and we’ve got to start making political demands. Hopefully this protest today will act as a catalyst.’

Similar hopes were attached to the more confrontational Financial Fools Day protests on 1 April. Two loosely anarchist-orientated groups, the Camp for Climate Action and the hastily assembled G20 Meltdown, planned to bring the financial district to a standstill for the day and spark off the feted ‘summer of rage’. A hungry media latched on. The Climate Camp and its slick PR machine took an unfamiliar place in the shadows for the week as ‘good protesters’, and attention focused on the more colourful characters of G20 Meltdown and their talk of insurrection.

As with Put People First, the hype didn’t quite match reality. But the difference was the electric atmosphere on the streets – a heady mixture of carnival and passionate dissent in the blazing sunshine at the Bank of England and Bishopsgate. It reflected the heritage of the protests (often physically embodied in the organising groups) in the 1990s Reclaim the Streets, anti-road and alter-globalisation movements. A friend who had seen the best of those years drew a good comparison: ‘The sound systems are smaller, the music’s not as good and people are taking less drugs. But people have a better idea of what they’re here for, there’s more politics. Maybe it’s better overall!’

What about the politics?

Like Put People First, G20 Meltdown tried to include everyone. Four marches, led by the red horse of war, the black horse of borders, the silver horse of financial crisis, and the green horse of climate chaos, converged on the Bank of England.

The crowd was wonderfully eclectic, but like Put People First there was a sense of confusion over what was being demanded. Climate Camp attempted to use the occasion to draw attention to the issue of carbon trading, drawing analogies between the reckless management of the economy and the handling of climate change. It seemed self-consciously aimed toward a distinct kind of protester – as style mag Grazia (don’t ask) put it, ‘smartly dressed … young professionals, many of whom have never demonstrated before.’ The organic food stalls set up in the middle of Bishopsgate under the slogan ‘farmers market, not carbon market’ seemed particularly apt.

The common thread uniting the week’s protests was the scapegoating of finance capital. Laying into greedy ‘bwankers’ is hard to resist given recent events, and even harder so when said creatures lean from their offices and wave banknotes at you (it really happened).

But it was a shame to see so much replication of mainstream views of the crisis being caused by recent financial mismanagement, rather than deeper, structural problems in the world economy. If things continue like this, it will be all too easy for mainstream parties to co-opt the anger into petty banking reforms.

In the short term, the broad public discussion on policing is the most tangible political result of the protests. Police behaviour at the protests was nothing new, but the subsequent media interest in it is. Much energy from campaigners has gone into making the most out of the furore – a more timid, better behaved police force will be welcome if protests are to grow.

The G20 demonstrations were always going to be, at best, a starting point. But even when big street mobilisations lack coherence, they can inspire participants and distant spectators alike.

As the dust settled in the financial district, workers quietly went into occupation in Enfield. Many protesters went straight to join them. Parents outraged by privatisation took over their school in Glasgow. This is where real pressure will come from. Maybe this really was just the beginning?