At a community centre in west London an unlikely new front in the battle
against global warming is forming over milky tea and homemade cakes. A group
of 50 middle-aged housewives and retired professional women have assembled
in a wooden hall in Hounslow decorated with bunches of flowers and
photographs of local events.
Biscuit tins are passed around and chocolate cake is shared, but the talk is
subversive. Bold plans are being hatched.
Maggie Thorburn, Jean Bland and more than 50 friends and neighbours are
discussing how to storm the offices of BAA, Britain’s airports operator. In
between tea breaks they also rehearse breaking through Heathrow airport’s
perimeter fence and chaining themselves to one another in the middle of
imaginary runways.
The mission of these unlikely revolutionaries is to force the government to
reverse its policy on airport expansion. “I’m not the type to do this sort
of thing,” said Bland. “But the government’s consultation on Heathrow’s
third runway made me furious because it was so obviously corrupt. What are
we meant to do when our democracy is not working?”
Dividing into groups, the women spread out across the wooden floor of the
hall, taking it in turns to play the role of angry policemen and polite
protester. They are told by the organisers to make their bodies limp to
guard against violence.
Every 40 seconds, proceedings pause as a jet coming into Heathrow roars
overhead, making the window panes tremble.
The women are fresh evidence that Britain’s antiaviation movement is growing
at a speed that has put politicians and business on the back foot.
Last Monday protesters grounded traffic at Stansted airport in Essex for two
hours after they cut their way through perimeter fencing at 3am. Police made
more than 50 arrests.
Reports made much of the well-to-do nature of the airport invaders – they were
tagged the “middle-class militants” and “designer demonstrators”. Indeed,
among the revolutionaries gathered in Hounslow was the director of an IT
firm and an interior designer. But the obsession with class obscures the
fact that the changing demographic of protests has brought with it
unprecedented organisation, funding and strategic thinking.
At the vanguard of the more militant protest groups is Plane Stupid, which led
the Stansted invasion. Many of its activists do come from a middle-class
background and have university educations. Among them are Tamsin Omond, 23,
granddaughter of a baronet, who shares an east London flat with another
activist, Beth Stratford, 26, a Cambridge graduate. There is Olivia
Chessell, a 20-year-old whose grandfather was a cabinet minister in the
Wilson government, and Leo Murray, a grandson of Anthony Greenwood, the
Labour peer.
A number admit to being spurred on by what they see as the failings of their
parents. “Our parents’ generation haven’t done what’s necessary,” said Lily
Kember, an anthropology student at Edinburgh University who juggles her
activism with essay deadlines. “Now it’s up to us to act. It’s our future
and we’re not going to fail our children in the same way.”
Others are rebelling more obviously against the lifestyles of their forebears.
Joss Garman, 23, one of the founders of the group in 2005, is the grandson
of a pilot and Will Rose, 29, is a son of the coal industry.
“My grandparents and father were miners,” said Rose, who is from
Northumberland. “Ashington used to be the pride of the industry. It was a
booming example of the economics of coal so it was very hard to get used to
the idea that coal is bad. My dad was on the picket lines under Thatcher,
trying to keep the pits open. Now I’m trying to shut coal power plants down.”
If, on the evidence of this range of protesters, one cannot define the
movement as generational or too narrowly class-based, what is its key
feature? The truth is probably more prosaic: it is organisation –
specifically the type of structure that would impress a group of management
consultants.
“We wanted to mix the professionalism of Greenpeace with the spikiness of the
antiroads movement,” said Garman.
The group has no defined membership, leaders or constitution, but works in
geographical “cells”. Members say it is modelled on the “rhizome concept”, a
nonhierarchical model designed to share information and ideas developed by
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the philosophers, in the 1970s. The name
Plane Stupid acts as a “virtual” umbrella network which can be used by any
climate change activist wanting to take direct action against the growth of
air transport and expansion of airports. It is a far cry from Swampy and Co
and their ad hoc antiroads protests of the 1990s.
“We are not a membership organisation; we have no membership fee and no
membership list,” said Mel Evans, a campaigner. “We are organised through
affinity groups. There are nodes which are all connected but there is no
central hub. You could compare us with how potatoes grow underground.”
They are also focused on the lessons of past campaigns. The perception that
direct action is yielding tangible results has been key to the broadening
appeal of the movement. “Direct action is the only thing which seems to have
any traction over the political process,” said Garman.
Veteran antiroad campaigners have brought the lessons of their protests to the
new cause. “A lot of the seasoned activists from Newbury, Twyford Down and
Manchester have been coming to us and giving advice on how to stop the
works,” said Graham Thompson, 35, a Durham University graduate who set up
Plane Stupid with Garman and now works part-time for Greenpeace.
Plane Stupid also assesses every protest in terms of media reaction. There
were fears last week that they had gone too far at Stansted. Many reports,
as well as focusing on the background of the protesters, also picked out the
understandable anger of travellers whose flights were delayed.
“I was pretty nervous about what the public’s response would be but on the
whole people seem to be supportive,” said Garman. “They seem to understand
where we’re coming from. They are asking themselves why a fairly normal
bunch of kids feel they have to go to these lengths.”
The group also has its corporate backers to consider. It is funded mainly by
Mark Constantine, the multi-millionaire head of Lush, the global cosmetics
chain, as well as individuals sympathetic to the green movement. Customers
buying Lush’s £9.74 Charity Pot – a tub of sweet-scented cocoa butter
hand-and-body lotion – may be taken aback to discover that proceeds from
their purchase are being used to support actions such as the invasion of
Stansted. Rather embarrassingly, Lush was last week revealed to have
branches at airports in Japan and America; until a few years ago it had one
at Heathrow, too.
Andrew Butler, campaigns manager at Lush, argued that the protesters’ cause is
noble. “This is a fight in the tradition of civil disobedience,” he said.
“Last weekend around 10,000 people marched through London to highlight
climate change, to little media coverage. But what just 50 people did on the
runway at Stansted brought international attention. It’s no surprise that
people are choosing to stand up and act.”
Greenpeace, the environmental charity, provides support by employing Plane
Stupid activists and giving them office space.
The speed with which the antiaviation – and particularly the antiairport
expansion – cause has gained support has taken the industry aback.
Just a year ago it would have seemed inconceivable that the Conservatives,
traditionally the party of business, could oppose the expansion of Britain’s
leading hub airport, proposing instead what they heralded as a “seriously
green” alternative: a high-speed rail network replacing the need for
short-haul flights by linking Heathrow to European and UK destinations.
Yet while public support for Plane Stupid’s cause is substantial, their
tactics have yet to win over the nation. A poll conducted for The Sunday
Times this weekend found that just 8% of the public support the methods used
by Plane Stupid protesters, although 40% said they did support their
motives. Attitudes towards airport expansion are more divided: 50% support
expansion while 30% are opposed and 20% have not made up their minds.
The tension is likely to build. Plane Stupid is making plans for a campaign of
direct action against all 12 of Britain’s airports that are earmarked for
expansion. Part of its strategy is to drive up costs for airport operators
in the same way that the antiroads movement ramped up the cost of security
operations for road-builders.
The most immediate flashpoint will be Heathrow. If the government gives the
nod to expansion next month, protesters have vowed to bring chaos, blocking
transport links, invading the runway and storming BAA’s offices. If work on
a third runway were to start, then the activists would be licking their
lips. As Rose said: “A construction site is a playground for direct action.”
Such is the growing public antipathy to the expansion of Heathrow that the
Plane Stupid activists might find many more people willing to watch over
them with an indulgent eye while they play in it.
