The direct action movement is giving rise to a new and thrilling politics of empowerment

The direct action movement is giving rise to a new and thrilling politics of empowerment

By George Monbiot. Published in the Times Literary Supplement 21st February 1997.

Bournemouth was the first town in Britain in which closed circuit television was installed in public places. In 1985, Bournemouth people welcomed it, but in the last few years some have begun to suspect that it is being used less for deterrence than for surveillance. One young man found that the cameras would swivel to follow him all the way to the shops and back, then rise to watch him in his flat. He investigated and discovered that, after 11 years, the government had still not issued any guidelines on the use of CCTV.

He might, like his neighbours, have simply drawn the curtains, made grumbling comparisons to 1984 and hoped the problem would go away, but he decided instead to get even. He set off down the Christchurch Road one night dressed as an eight-foot alien, equipped with latex tentacles and metal jaws. His friends secretly filmed him – and the cameras – from a balcony.

The cameras locked on as soon as he appeared. Within five minutes, two police cars skidded to a halt in front of him. The police got out, then realized there was nothing they could do but gawp. No crime had been committed, and no danger to the public was apparent. When the film the activists made appeared on Undercurrents – a direct action video newsreel – the authorities in Bournemouth became a national laughing stock. The cameras have stayed up, but they are a lot less frightening than before.

The alien invasion of Bournemouth appears at first glance to have little to do with the environment, still less to do with the massive environmental protests which have attracted so much publicity over the last four years. But, creative, grotesque, highlighting the expropriation of public space and the encroachment on freedom of movement, using video as a tool of protest, it owes everything to the environmental direct action movement. It is one of thousands of tiny local exploits promoted or inspired by the most explosive new political movement of the 1990s.

In one respect at least the movement is more like a religion than a political campaign: its origins are discrete. In March 1992, two New Age Travellers called Sam and Steff pitched camp on a chalk down near Winchester. They explored its remarkable archaeology and wildlife, and were pleased to discover that the hill was conserved by all the available landscape protection designations. So they were thunderstruck when a local rambler told them that the down was to be parted to make way for an extension of the M3.

For 20 years, local people had been politely campaigning to save Twyford Down. They had tried letter writing, petitions, submissions to the public inquiry, parliamentary lobbying and legal challenges. Now, they believed, the down was doomed. Sam and Steff refused to accept it. If petitioning had failed, they argued, then the real battle was surely about to begin: they must put themselves in the way of the work. Within days they were joined by others: travellers, environmentalists, students, pagans, even businessmen and Tory councillors, from all over the country. At first they were wildly successful. They rearranged the survey stakes, dug defensive trenches, chained themselves to the earthmovers and formed human barriers across the threatened landscape. As news spread, and the protesters distinguished themselves with feats of bravery – leaping onto moving machinery, throwing themselves down in the path of aggregate trucks – they won support from the most unlikely quarters, from local landowners to the European Environment Commissioner. When the Department of Transport hired hundreds of security guards to clear the way for the contractors, the protest finally reached the national newspapers.

Road protest camps soon sprung up at Pollok Park in Glasgow, in the Stanworth Valley near Preston, at Solsbury Hill near Bath, and along the route of the proposed M11 extension in east London. As they spread, non-violent direct action tactics seeped into other environmental campaigns. Protesters occupied timber yards and docks importing Brazilian mahogany. Bicycle and pedestrian blockades began in cities all over the country. Campaigners picketed McDonalds and delivered sacks of litter dropped by its customers back to the store. The movement was reviled by the government and the tabloids, and became a magnet for the young, the disaffected and the dispossessed.

At the 1993 Conservative Party Conference, Michael Howard announced a Criminal Justice Bill, which would create a series of new offences criminalising both peaceful protest and certain forms of homelessness. Crude, ill-drafted and repressive, it succeeded in uniting all the disparate factions whose interests or activities it threatened. Hunt saboteurs, peace protesters, football supporters, squatters, radical lawyers, gypsies, pensioners, ravers, disabled rights activists, even an assistant chief constable and a Tory ex-minister, joined the broadest, and oddest, counter-cultural coalition Britain has ever known.

By 1994, direct action was drawing huge crowds. An occupation at Twyford Down attracted 5000 people, the London rally called to protest against the Criminal Justice Act in October pulled in 100,000. Even hardcore Reclaim the Streets actions, blockading traffic and digging up roads, drew up to 10,000 protesters. The environmental campaign began to look more like an enfranchisement movement.

Twyford Down, protesters pointed out, was destroyed because there were no legitimate means of defending it. Public enquiries for trunk road schemes take place after the decision to build the road has been made: all the inquiry can discuss is where the road should go. Both the Department of Transport