Suffragettes vs the fighter pilot tendency
11 March 2009
As I briefly emerge blinking from a frantic few weeks chasing deadlines in a dim flat, I feel the need to note some interesting developments in the world of activism.
Firstly, it's excellent to see that the vanguard is being populated largely by gloriously brilliant young women. My slightly younger self caused a minor media fillip a few years ago when I started putting fake parking tickets on 4x4s with my friends in the local green movement. I think this was because, at the time, the idea of a woman in her twenties having an idea then taking the lead on an issue was quite the novelty. The highlight was being called onto the Richard and Judy show to be called a ‘clever chicken' by Richard and asked by Judy why I didn't like ‘404s' - bless them both.
Nowadays though, if there's even the slightest hint of cleverness or media-savvy about a campaign, you can bet your life that one of a growing band of courageous, intelligent young woman is behind it. If it's not Tamsin Omond getting 2,000 suffragettes to mob parliament, then it's Ariane Sherine raising a saturation-level media budget for the Atheist Bus campaign with nothing more than a great idea and the guts to put it out there. And this week Leila Deen succeeded where George Osborne failed and out-spinned Mandelson with an inspired act of flan flinging.
The best quotes I saw about this were from Leila herself and her mother. I love the simple lack of bombast of this from Leila: "He's been actively pushing a high-carbon future through the third runway. I didn't want to let him stand up and talk about that, so last night I decided to make some custard, colour it green, and show how slimy I think he is."
While this non-sequiteur sums up the childish-but-important perfectness of the whole incident: "I'm proud she's got the courage of her convictions and she's prepared to take direct action for injustice. It's not easy, to know you run the risk of being arrested. When Leila usually makes custard it's quite lumpy, but this looked pretty smooth."
Meanwhile, though, the alpha males of the green movement are letting the side down badly and handing the nuclear industry great lumps of PR gold by ‘embracing' nuclear power with varying degrees of headline-grabbing enthusiasm.
Like the young women mentioned above, these chaps have a few physical and biographical characteristics in common, largely a tendency to be over 45 with the haircut of a WW2 fighter pilot and the experience to know better than play so crudely into the hands of an industry on the make.
George Monbiot made his name telling stories of romantics in market towns standing up to big out-of-town supermarket planning applications that were getting past local councils by claiming all kinds of benefits (jobs, prosperity, traffic diverted from the town centre) while patently being a sideshow to the real question of how to build sustainable communities. Mark Lynas, on the other hand, gained his reputation scrutinising every piece of climate science he could get his hands on to outline the effects of climate change to those of us without that amount of time on our hands. Stephen Tindale was in charge of Greenpeace when they launched their push for decentralised energy - a simple but important rethink of power supply that holds the key to doing without super-sized power producers altogether and making the most of waste heat from electricity production in regions and localities.
So it's gutting each time to hear them effectively giving up their respective fights and playing straight into the hands of those who would bamboozle the UK into signing off on a huge mistake.
Tindale, after spending some time at RWE, now says he reluctantly backs whichever big installations are least carbon heavy, Lynas is going on about the intensely unproven and unreliable fast-breeder reactor as the solution to the problems we have with uranium supply and nuclear waste. (In theory it can use reprocessed fuel from the current crop of reactors. However, almost all fast-breeder reactors built since the idea emerged nearly 60 years ago have spent more time switched off than on, thanks to coolant leaks and other problems with the technology, as well as political opposition, and there are also recurrent problems manufacturing and transporting the fuel).
Even though he only conditionally said he would support nuclear, and has set four in-practice-impossible conditions, Monbiot was quite mendacious in his ‘I don't care about nuclear' piece last year and subsequent TV appearances, trying to paint greens who didn't take such a complicatedly nuanced view as in some way superstitious and adhering to ‘rigid principles' as an act of faith rather than a reasoned policy position. Similarly, Tindale told the Sun last month: "Some people still argue against evolution, 150 years after Darwin's discovery", and Lynas is pushing the same buttons with this comment: "The Green lobby doesn't like the idea that the world can be saved by building nuclear power stations. It wants us to chop wood, go back to nature."
This kind of thing boils my blood for two main reasons. One is that I was a metallurgy student and, as such, have been inside several nuclear power stations, here and abroad, without needing either smelling salts or an exorcism. My opposition to nuclear is based on the fact that - like letting a big supermarket drive your town's regeneration programme - it is such a distraction when there are so many other, less technically challenging, more job-heavy, cheaper, easier, quicker, etc etc projects out that would balance energy needs with production and cut carbon at the same time. It is emphatically not because I think it is inherently dangerous or filled with dark cunning and evil.
The second is that, combined with their deep voices and 1940s haircuts, this rhetoric from the alpha males frames the issue in a ‘practical expert versus excitable hysteric' narrative that is very hard to counteract if you are following one of them in a debate and are young and female. No matter how much science you can quote, you're never going to get people to think you are making sense in that context if you look like an MMR-shy mum.
But the most frustrating of all these examples is probably Chris Goodall, whose opinion piece in the Independent prompted the front page splash that put all the recent converts together to make it a news (they excluded Monbiot, who works for the Guardian).
Chris is Green Party candidate for Oxford West at the next general election and, as I understand it, his reason for backing nuclear goes something along the lines of ‘well, it's clear the government are only going to seriously support either big coal or big nuclear for their main energy push, so as my only concern is climate change, I'm prepared to choose the least worst of these two'.
Now, if you were a lobbyist, working on the government to influence their views in your direction, this would be an interesting position to take, and I would gladly have a debate with you about its merits. But in politics you're not just lobbying your MP, you're trying to get them sacked and offering yourself as a better alternative to replace them. Instead of accepting these ‘facts on the ground' and actively promoting your acceptance - and the choice you have made from a stacked deck - you should be putting a hell of a lot more effort into challenging such a blinkered view of energy policy.
With the election due in a year or less, any Green candidate who so meekly allows the rules of the game to be set by their opponent is clearly not up to the job - and I bet there are a lot of talented, intelligent young women in Oxford who could do it much better.
Me
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