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(Modified from various talks to local campaigners in the run-up to direct action.)
I'm going to talk tonight about direct action -- what it is, why it's important, how we use it -- and give some specific lessons from the Newbury campaign.
I have a friend who was very active in the Twyford Down campaign, and when he retired, his colleagues gave him two presents: a cake in the shape of Twyford Down (quite a smart thing to give someone, because it saves a fortune in ingredients) and a wig made of dreadlocks and beads. These stereotypes are amusing, but unhelpful.
As far as I'm concerned, direct action is something we do, not something we are. We can all take direct action when we get angry, when people refuse to listen to us. But there's no fixed group of people taking direct action. There's no crack squad of eco-mercenaries coming to save your little bit of countryside; only you can do that. At Newbury, we went to great lengths to broaden the group of people taking direct action (with training sessions around the country, posters suggesting what people could do to help, and so on); and attempted to involve as many local people as we could.
Direct action is something we can all do. To me, just being here now is direct action, when you could be sitting at home watching Coronation Street. You, everyone one of you, have a unique contribution to make to a direct action campaign: you can express exactly what you feel about this road; you can show how angry you are; you can communicate that anger in a way no-one else can. It's your job to show that the local people don't want this road.
Direct action has a proud history. Without it, women would probably still not have the vote; black people would be treated with much more inequality. It has to be used carefully, though; both Martin Luther King and Ghandi spoke about understanding your responsibilities to society when you take direct action and appreciating what the consequences might be, particularly when you break the law. Bob Dylan summed it up when he said "To live outside the law, you must be honest". Direct action is important because it reaches the parts other campaigning techniques don't reach. But it's not something apart from them; it can help us use those techniques more effectively. I like to think of direct action as one more tool in the campaigner's toolbox, to be brought out whenever it's needed; it compliments, but doesn't take the place of, all the other tools.
What's the point of direct action? Many people give up fighting when it comes to the late stages of a campaign, partly through exhaustion, partly as a psychological defence mechanism. What is the point of going on? There can be several reasons for doing that: to stop or obstruct work and to cost developers money are the two things we think of first. But there are other reasons for taking direct action too. There's the idea of "getting it out of your system" -- channelling and expressing your anger, achieving something positive in the process, and feeling better for it. This is known as "empowerment". But for me, one of the most important reasons for taking direct action is communication: direct action is about communicating your anger and your concern to a much bigger audience than you would otherwise reach; it's about waking people up, shocking them into action, if necessary. Direct action is a communication technique as much as anything else.
Let me give you an example of how direct action can work, hand-in-hand with conventional techniques. Last year, we were down in the South West working to stop the expansion of a massive quarry. The planning permission had practically gone through on the nod, despite years of campaigning by the local parish council. Two direct activists saw a report about this in the paper and decided to occupy the site. That happened very soon afterwards and within days, the campaign was headline news throughout the south west. That added attention gave us the opportunity to restart the conventional campaign, rapidly collecting 3000 signatures against the scheme that went to John Prescott. A whole suite of traditional campaigning techniques -- legal, media, and political -- were then applied in tandem with direct action and the scheme was rapidly booted out to a public inquiry (which would never have happened if the local people had used traditional techniques alone). This is the best way to use direct action. It's all about teamwork... using all the tools together.
Many people think direct action is something that happens when a scheme is about to get the go ahead -- when it's virtually certain anyway. There's no reason why that has to be the case. The golden rule of environmental campaigning, for me, is to do whatever is most likely to stop what you're fighting at any particular time, and keep revising that "whatever" throughout your campaign. There are plenty of recent campaigns in which direct action has been used to kick the ball back into play when we thought everything was hopelessly lost.
And sometimes you have to run a direct action campaign in parallel with a "traditional" campaign, dividing your resources between the two. That happened at Newbury from the end of 1994 to the start of work in 1996, when the Third Battle of Newbury group was running political, legal, media, and direct action strands in parallel.
At some point, you have to accept that the road, quarry, housing estate, or whatever is probably going to be built. But you must never for one moment think that you can't stop it. You must try everything. And even when they start building, you must continue to undermine what they're doing. Even when they're finished, you must still be there pointing out what they've done. You've got to keep fighting to your last breath; if you're not prepared to do that, you might as well give up now -- because you're already beaten.
And direct action doesn't necessarily have to mean getting arrested. This is a decision that, hopefully, you yourself make. You set your own limit. You work out what you're happy doing. You put your toe in the water and see what you feel comfortable with. And then maybe you go further next time.
But there are lots of things you can do that have little or no risk of getting arrested. For example, you can do direct action on the media. At Newbury, I found out that the police were holding a press conference on site one day. I wanted to gatecrash it with a bunch of local residents, but I couldn't find enough people at the time. So I waited for the police top brass to arrive and kept my eye on the camera crew. When the police made to leave the site, I grabbed the camera crew and went after the police top brass, Roger Cook style: "I'm a taxpayer and I don't see why I should put up with this. How much am I paying you to be here.... blah blah". The news that night showed, not the police press conference, but the "angry local resident" unhappy with the police. That's direct action, and it's very effective.
Everyone has something to offer to a direct action campaign. Local people shouldn't fall into the easy habit of just taking protesters food "fuel" and stoking the engines of protest. Think what you like doing best, or whether you have a particular skill, and then do that for the campaign. Maybe you're a welder? There's lots of welding to be done on protest sites. Maybe you know about radios? Maybe you're a joiner? Maybe you have a load of firewood? Maybe you just have the odd free Saturday when you can do to the site and cheer people up, or help them carry wood, or whatever.
But if work starts, when it starts, I'd ask everyone to do one thing: at least go and see for yourselves what's going on. It'll be upsetting. It'll make you angry. But do it all the same. Go and get upset. Go and get angry. Go and shout at the workers, or tell the television cameras how you feel. Because the atrocities these profiteering developers commit can't be allowed to go on in private. This is the old quaker idea of "bearing witness". Go and see them. Shame them. If you want to get in the way and try to stop them, that's up to you. But you'll be doing a lot of good just by being there.
In the end, remember this: try to make a difference by doing what you feel comfortable with. And remember: No-one else is going to do it. "If not you, who? If not now, when?" There was one really great poster at Newbury that summed the whole thing up for a lot of people. It said, simply, "Do something memorable before you die."
It's obviously a question of teamwork: making sure everyone's doing what they do best, and what they enjoy; making sure everyone's skills are used to the maximum effect for the campaign; and making sure everyone respects what everyone else brings to the campaign. The direct activists need to be fully integrated in the group effort, not something apart.
Good communications is obviously the key to this. Problems start when the talking stops, so make sure everyone is invited (or at least represented) at campaign meetings. Your meetings should be as inclusive as possible. There will be friction between direct activists and some of the more conventional campaigners simply because the styles of campaigning and the lifestyles of the respective individuals are so different. Consider teambuilding exercises, joint social events, or other ways of simply getting people together and talking.
Conventional campaigners need to realize the extraordinary commitment of the direct activists and the great risks they take -- with their liberty, their health, their prosperity, and their sanity. I can remember seeing at least one person coming down from a tree at Newbury with a bright blue face after spending two days standing in that tree in the snow. At least twenty people were sent to mental hospitals during the campaign. Many of us felt we were on the way there.
Equally, direct activists need to realize the importance of using all the different campaign techniques at all stages of a campaign. There's no point at which every tactic except direct action ceases to be valid. Media, legal, and political techniques work best when they're fully integrated with direct action.
Now I'd like to spend a little bit of time thinking about the Newbury campaign -- first of all, why we lost it after things initially looked so promising; second, some of the problems that occurred when direct action and conventional campaigns tried to run in parallel. These are a few of the factors that contributed to our downfall (in no particular order):
a) Middle-ground: We lost the middle-ground of public opinion. We allowed ourselves to be marginalised as protesters, "greens", outsiders, and so on. The other side marginalised themselves to a degree too, leaving a large body of ordinary townspeople somewhat bored and confused in the middle. By the start of the direct action, we were winning these people back, with the help of influential local people, famous names, and the group of local business people, CAMBUS, who had got together to oppose the road. But it was too late by then.
b) In the Autumn of 1994, we put a lot of effort into door-to-door canvassing and rapidly collected 2000 postcards against the road. But when Brian Mawhinney put the Newbury bypass on hold in December 1994, we softpedalled. We stopped our postcards and petitions at the time when we should have intensified. We were overtaken by complacency at a time when the other side was really gearing up for a fight.
c) Our report on alternatives to the road was prepared much too late, was overcomplex, and was not well launched or presented. We always knew this was a key to stopping the road, but somehow failed to deliver it in time.
d) We were politically naive. Barbara Bryant's book "Twyford Down: Roads, Campaigning, and Environmental Law" is the story of a bunch of influential Tories trying to stop a road by pulling political strings. We barely even tried to do this, but if Bryant's experience is anything to go by, it would have made no difference.
e) We were too insular and very poor about networking until the road was already back on the books. When the road had becme an inevitability, we were suddenly very good at database marketing, mailing out, contacting supportive groups, and building alliances; why couldn't we have made this work six months sooner?
f) We spent 18 months preparing for direct action at Newbury, but it still took us by surprise. We allowed the media to do its usual "tree people" versus asthmatic children rubbish. Only when the tree clearance was well underway were we proactively launching stories, anticipating troublespots, and managing the media effectively.
g) We allowed ourselves to be distracted by "designated sites" and "protected land"; if Newbury teaches us anything, it is that there is no such thing as protected land. Worse, the designated sites distract from others that are undesignated and that may be of equal (or more) value. At Newbury, the rivers played second fiddle to Snelsmore Common SSSI, though the damage there will be of much higher ecological importance. At Twyford, everyone focused on the cutting and forgot about the massive, high-level river embankment. Archaeologically important sites and landscapes tend to suffer for the same reason.
h) We put too much faith in the conventional process and, particularly, in the statutory bodies. We expected people like English Nature, English Heritage, and the Environment Agency to come riding in like white knights; experience would show us, eventually, that these people are useless government stooges who happily legitimize state-sponsored vandalism.
i) We failed to simply our arguments. We were talking about SACTRA reports, Royal Commissions, PM10s, induced traffic etc; the pro-bypass people had a simple message "Bypass now". They pandered to pig-ignorance, repeating a simple and appealing idea: the town could be liberated from traffic with a new road. We should have spent time thinking of a simple rebuttal.
j) We were too bothered about being environmentalists, or "green transport" people, and didn't spend enough time appearing to be good community citizens. We should have positioned ourself as a community group, not an environment group. That way, the argument could never have become "environment versus transport" or "local residents versus outsider protesters".
k) We failed to keep the long-term focus. We shouldn't have relaxed when the Mawhinney review was announced, or allowed the pro-road backlash to build momentum. We should have kept our campaign at maximum strength all the way through.
l) We failed to "sing from same songsheet", particularly where alternatives to the road were concerned. The CPRE faction were pro-tunnel and anti-demand management. The EF! faction were anti-tunnel. The Enlightened Transport faction were anti any kind of expansion of the existing road, which would have generated more traffic in the town. And so on. There were other bloopers. One prominent local campaigner gave an interview to the Newbury Weekly News along the lines of "you won't like the tree people when they arrive".
m) We put too much faith in legal challenges, "Europe", and so on. Campaigns can never be won purely on legal grounds, but only if there's strong public opposition as well. The idea of Europe stopping things is also politically naive; who funds Europe, after all? The European Commission bends over backwards not to upset member states, is totally open to political "fixing", and is entirely unaccountable to European citizens. Even if you win a legal challenge, if there's strong local support for a road, it will come back in some form or another. Or you'll look like "eco-fascists" depriving the town of its much-needed road. The only way to win a local campaign is to systematically build strong local support and demonstrate, convincingly, that the town does not want it.
n) We concentrated too much on winning arguments and too little on winning the campaign.
Having made all those mistakes and more, we suddenly found ourselves fighting a road again by the middle of 1995. Between July 1995 (when Mawhinney announced the Newbury bypass would be going ahead) and January 1996 (when the trees started falling), we switched over from conventional to direct action campaigning. But we never for one moment thought that we couldn't stop the road. We never gave up. There were problems running two kinds of campaigns in parallel, of course:
Newbury was a good example of how direct action and conventional campaigning can work effectively together. But not everyone would agree with that. Here are some of the problems we encountered and how we tried to solve them:
a) Finance: There were bound to be fights over money. What was the priority: mailouts or rope for the trees? The answer to this is always "whatever's most likely to stop the road at any given point in the campaign". We eventually set up a finance sub-committee and appointed people to deal with the allocation of money and resources; one treasurer tends to feel the strain too much in a big campaign like Newbury. We tried to make sure the decision-making mechanisms had equal participation from local people and direct activists.
b) Communication: This was usually pretty good between the local campaigners and the camps, thanks to an inclusive attitude and open campaign meetings. Once clearance had started, we got better at holding events on camps. We also experimented with holding campaign meetings on camps rather than in towns, though from a practical point of view, this proved a bit tricky.
c) Polarization: Back to the old chestnut of protesters being "outsiders". We tried to attack this in three ways. First, we wheeled out people on the camps who were genuinely local people. (There are always plenty of these, whatever the media says.) Second, we used influential locals and business people to support what the direct activists were doing. Third, we coined the idea of "local protesters" -- local people who were going along to camps and working, or climbing trees, or whatever. In other words, we blurred the distinction between "local person" and "protester".
d) Separation: We tried to run direct action and conventional campaigning parallel, involving everyone in all aspects (or at least making them aware of all strands). It can be difficult to demonstrate to direct activists that money spent on a legal challenge is money well spent when the bulldozers are looming (and perhaps it isn't); it can be equally difficult to justify spending hundreds of pounds on rope to local people who are pinning their hopes on a successful legal challenge. The important thing is for everyone to try to understand the different campaigning techniques other people are using and to realize that there is real strength in a diversity of different approaches. In other words, you have to know the difference between "divided we fall" and a double-barreled shotgun.
e) Scale: If there was one area we really succeeded with at Newbury, it was in putting up a hell of a fight. That was just what we wanted, but it was also a problem: how to manage a campaign along nine miles of countryside, with 30-odd different camps, around 1000 activists on the ground, and so on? We used various "organic" mechanisms, like phone trees. We used sub-groups to work out finances. We devolved allocation of reosources to a couple of "quartermasters". But things were still difficult.
f) Control: If you're one of a small local campaign group that's about to become the focus of a big direct action campaigner, you must accept that you will lose a certain amount of control. Relax and just accept it -- there's nothing you can do about it. Try to see it as a positive thing (many more people have come to help you; you're no longer fighting in the wilderness; your early campaign was obviously successful in at least getting the message out).
Road Raging - Top Tips for Wrecking Roadbuilding
My First Little Book of Peaceful Direct Action
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