I was unable to attend the National Planning Meeting, but if I have interpreted the feedback correctly I do have some concerns about Stop Climate Chaos (SCC).
I understand that SCC is just two people. They have their work cut out if an MPH size campaign is to be achieved. They will have to work very hard to get the required action and commitment from their members, given that most of the organisations in the group do not seem to be taking climate change (CC) seriously. It does not have a high enough profile in most of the organisations. The SCC coalition is made up of 25 organisations (29 with all of Airport Watch members).
Based on their websites three of them don’t even mention Climate Change (CC). These are Wildlife Trust, CAFOD & WDM. This is completely inexcusable from the latter two. Why are they in the coalition?
Ten do not have a Climate Change campaign – however, one of these is not a campaigning organisation. Again, not acceptable. With CAFOD, Christian Aid and WDM, MPH dominates their campaigns, with trade, debt and aid for 2006. CAT has loads of events in 2006 including an ‘apple day’, but sadly nothing on CC! CC data on the CAT website is hidden away, and under a “what we can do†section the answer seems to be buy some of their information sheets. Not good enough. They should have large posters up for the march and send out flyers with each product they sell. The WI say: “CC will be part of upcoming work.“
Only four have the SCC March 1st Lobby on their website. With three of them, this is their only CC campaign for 2006. The other group – Tearfund, has some ‘green tips’ as their additional campaigning duties. This is not good enough. Every coalition member should be advertising the event. SCC must ensure that all 25 groups highlight the Nov 4th march on the front page of their websites as soon as details are available. They must build up some momentum within their membership.
Operation Noah is a one page website and they have three suggestions: a pledge card, buy green electricity and spread the word; which is the same number as the Woodland Trust and one more than People and Planet and who knows how many more than Save our World who I think intend to do this with the power of mime but this is difficult to tell from their very colourful and confusing website. They do however have a review of the Dec 3rd March!
Only COIN, FOE, Greenpeace, CCC, RSPB and WWF are taking CC seriously and have serious campaigns. That’s 6 out of 25.
Ten have a SCC link. Again not good enough.
The CCC meeting suggested contacting local branches of these organisations to discuss the march. I think it would be much more effective for contact to come from the top. If SCC are capable they need to meet with all members to ensure that these organisations come on board. This would mean that local groups would then get proper instructions from their own HQ rather than an ad hoc chat from local activists. Our local WDM head declined our offer to take him to London last December as he was having a curry on the Friday night!
All websites need a link to CCC if we are organising the march.
Pitfalls of Make Poverty History Campaign
Finally I have reservations about adopting an MPH philosophy. If SCC do they must show a great deal of political savvy and focus.
MPH even by the admission of its members has failed. WDM described the agreement in Gleneagles as ‘a disaster for the poor’. This was endorsed by Action Aid, Christian Aid, Oxfam and the African Forum. The extra money promised for aid and debt relief were one and the same. The debt relief to the ‘lucky’ 18 countries despite promises was for just 3 years. This figure for debt relief is the same as the reduction in aid. In other words they do not get anything. However they must satisfy conditionalties to receive debt relief, which means that they must increase foreign privatisation, e.g. water privatisation in Ghana.
From the G8 point of view trade is not about fairness but having access to the majority worlds’ markets. Our government has actually said "we want to open up protected markets in developing countries".
Live8 was obscene and musical apartheid, even if Geldof and the Daily Mail described the whole sorry façade as “mission accomplishedâ€. Many of the well-meaning people who went to Edinburgh - not to demand anything but to have a nice walk in the sun, as one of the organisers put it, might believe Geldof & Co that everything was achieved and they no longer have to do anything. MPH has done the cause more harm than good.
The marchers were betrayed and deceived by self promoting politicians and popstars who both gained kudos and respectability from each other whilst the people of Africa carried on dying. In so doing they managed to bury CC which got very little media attention or focus despite it’s apparent equal billing with Africa. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes.
SCC must not get co-opted by politicians, the media and popular culture. This is not about PR and marketing and rubber bands which probably come from Indonesian forests. Our campaign should not be about Brad Pitt and Claudia Schiffer snapping their fingers. SCC should not jump on that bandwagon. Thom Yorke was embarrassing, and like Bono & Co, ill - informed, when he appeared on Channel 4 News to promote the Big Ask. And yes all that is negative. You can’t put a positive spin on fighting CC, we have to be against it and against those bodies that perpetuate it.
If we want to replicate a movement, we should seek inspiration from real grassroots struggles against the powerful. People with righteous anger and real grievances and a belief that they can change a corrupt system: The trade unionists of Columbia who die for their cause, the Zapatistas of Mexico; the indigenous people of Bolivia, the landless of Brazil and Venezuela where oil revenue has been diverted for the majority. Or the velvet revolution, or other mass movements in Eastern Europe or further back Ghandi. The Stop The War Coalition managed to get 2 million people onto the streets not by being trendy or appealing to people but because the marchers were against the war.
Finally, there are 215,000 women in the WI. Just imagine how nice it would be if they could set up some of their stalls in front of the American Embassy. We could combine our day out in London and stock up on home made chutneys and jam. By combining protest with shopping that might keep our detractors happy who seem to think that as marchers, we should do just that and not travel by the internal combustion engine to protest.
movement not glitz
Agreed: we need a sustained grass-roots movement to push forward on this in the long term, and not a year of glitz and failed promises. I would say that education and awareness-raising in local communities are key: as well as changing perceptions on the seriousness of climate change, this can feed into the success of Nov 4th and future marches. Time to get out into those WI groups, I think.
Good research
This is some brilliant research Ian - can I recommend you send a copy to Ashok Sinha himself at SCC? If they're really so understaffed at present, they clearly need some help with scrutinising what their member organisations are doing!
The level of coverage clearly isn't good enough at all. One of the things that was briefly discussed at the CCC Planning Meeting was outreach to the other SCC groups - really as an extension of our existing plans for outreach. It could be a very productive move. After all, FoE are rather tied up at present with the Big Ask, and various other groups are promoting the March 1st event; whereas we in CCC could devote some time to writing to development organisations calling for greater support for SCC. We must get the word out about November 4th EARLY ON, like from NOW ON, and get full confirmed backing from the whole of SCC. That way we will get tens of thousands out in November.
I agree with many of your points over MPH, but I disagree with your suggestion that celebrity contact is inevitably corrosive to a campaign. Sure, it can seem ephemeral, trendy. But on one level it's just a channel for communication. For some people it really does turn them off, and is counterproductive. However, such is the popularity of celebrity culture in every other respect, I really think we dismiss it at our peril. Please, let's not get too elitist, and convinced that dealing with celebrities is like some sort of faustian pact!
However... the most important work WILL be done at the grassroots level. Outreaching to those WI groups, conservation societies, and development organisations, is going to be the big work of 2006. Perhaps we should start marshalling arguments in a separate post, e.g. how development charities could best 'sell' the climate issue in future. Or, for that matter, how home-made jam relates to global warming. ;)
Let us meet to discuss these concerns
Stop Climate Chaos Members
It’s worth noting that People and Planet do routinely incorporate climate change actions in the mix of their email alerts, which promoted the Carbon Dating event recently. Also, Christian Aid have a strongly worded policy document on climate change, at least. I think it will be good if the ‘leading’ board members of SCC use it to encourage the development NGOs and WI to get on board. They should not however allow SCC to be diluted by the development NGOs e.g. to say we must be nice to Gordon Brown. It would be very disturbing if Stop Climate Chaos is relying on CCC to play 'bad cop'. That used to be Greenpeace's niche and at least Greenpeace is very substantial. In the USA both Greenpeace and FoE have a 'bad cop' stance as regards the Bush administration, FoE openly opposing the latter.Pitfalls of Make Poverty History Campaign
What you say about MPH was news to me, as I had read a detailed article saying that Gleneagles had delivered several modest gains (may have been a letter in the Independent). I had however gathered that WTO Hong Kong was viewed as a sellout by development NGOs, and I found it very bad news from a green diplomacy standpoint. What makes this all even harder for the climate movement is that (i) Gordon Brown was at least on the side of conditional aid, but is flouting the spirit of emissions cuts (see below/link); (ii) Kyoto is being killed by non-compliance of MOP countries, Russian stalling and the way the US, Oz and developing countries have been included (iii) the pop-star circuit has gathered first around Future Forests (criticized on double-counting concerns) and now around Climate Change Now (perhaps stronger double-counting concerns).Stop Climate Chaos: Strengths and Opportunities
I note that SCC’s forthcoming “Carbon Dating†event, been announced as centred on calling on Gordon Brown to draw up sectoral carbon budgets. See link on how Gordon Brown has been sharply criticized by environmental NGOs e.g. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, for repeatedly calling for increased world oil production; very recently he commissioned a study looking into how Heathrow T5 can be built. Quite simply, the Stop Climate Chaos coalition has sufficient size and clout to be issuing statements like “unless Gordon Brown radically changes his ways, he will not be a good Prime Ministerâ€. Consider that in 2003, the Stop The War coalition called for Tony Blair to resign over their issue (on a majority vote of their steering committee), and were entirely respected for that. Does not Stop Climate Chaos feel just as strongly (or more) over the gravity of its own issue, even if it does not go quite this far? It strikes me that the primary opportunities for Stop Climate Chaos are in broadcasting to a wide audience the reasons for climate action and (broadly and topically) how on track politicians are. SCC’s member groups already petition and inform government and politicians extensively, and that is not the biggest hurdle. Likewise, come November and the Nairobi talks, SCC should be doing protests in the vicinity of Heathrow T5, new road schemes, inefficient housing etc, to highlight the hypocrisy that has to change (as in so many countries), and demanding true leadership and joined-up-government (unless things have changed considerably by then). SCC’s Carbon Dating briefing notes rightly highlight that world emissions need to cease growing and start falling by around 2015. What prospect will there be for that if UK policy is to remain relatively unchanged under a certain new leader and he is re-elected outright in 2010? What if, for example, he promotes energy efficiency, but is still encouraging emissions growth internationally? Come 2020, will we look back on how both Stop the War and Rupert Murdoch, variously, didn’t shy from frank opinions on some politicians, but SCC was too nice to? One further example. On Jan 31 Friends of the Earth USA said of President Bush’s speech: “For over five years, this president and the Republican Congress have failed the American peopleâ€. FoE justifiably maintains a more diplomatic approach in the UK. However that should not preclude the Stop Climate Chaos board voting to be more outspoken about politicians - before the damage they do is irreversible?SCC is a coalition not an autonomous campaign group
James. SCC can only do things the majority if not all its members support. I don't think that the things that you are suggesting like highlighting Gordon Brown's hypocrisy or organising a demo by an airport would get much support from its members, especially the development NGOs. It is not a matter or development NGOs diluting the message, it's a matter of finding messages that everybody supports.
Self-fulfilment?
There is a danger of self-fulfilment in what you say. I’ve made more than one posting about various Labour politicians but they don’t get to be a topic unlike David Cameron. I wanted to warn of the Gordon Brown danger at the national meeting but was cut off unlike others after me, for which Nick Hutton has apologized.
It’s easy to fall into hating Bush and Blair, but you need to keep to the principle of what you are about, i.e. that climate change is the biggest threat to humanity and earthlife with the possible exception of all-out war with weapons of mass destruction.
You can’t let someone off the hook because you may like them over other issues. We need to look ahead and educate people as to what dangers lie ahead. The world is sleepwalking toward disaster and environmentalists, first and foremost, need to warn each other not to do the same.
OK, Oxfam supporters may want to protest in other ways than at runways. However, the government's hypocrisy on aviation/climate change has been attacked by a Lords select committee, the Commons Environmental Audit Committee, the chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Sustainable Development Commission and the CPRE (patron: HM The Queen). So it can't be too big a leap for StopCC to do the same?