Climate Camp Is Back

Tim Holmes — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:12:30 +0000

It provoked an absolute storm. CNN’s ticker screamed that Britain was ‘under siege’ from environmental activists. Sky News dubbed it ‘the world’s most organised protest’ and the New Statesman ‘the most important protest of our time’

A band of pioneering environmental activists landed outside Heathrow airport last summer and injected energy and urgency into the climate change debate. The Climate Camp showed there are people sufficiently fed up with waiting for the Government to act that they are willing to put themselves where they can no longer be ignored – and they weren’t.

BAA went to the High Court to stop the camp – they stopped me, unfortunately – and The Evening Standard ran a smear campaign. The attempted crackdown shows Climate Camp was the green movement at its most effective. If grassroots movements are the engines of social change, this is it: something special to counter the fear and sense of powerlessness that has gripped the debate on climate change.

The first Climate Camp was outside Britain’s single biggest emitter, Drax coal plant, in 2006. Among its successes came the formation of Plane Stupid. The second, at Heathrow, emboldened and empowered the local resident’s third runway campaign, whose profile has since rocketed. It also inspired a number of similar camps around the world. Next month, Climate Camp will be back – but will it be bigger?

From 3 to 11 August we’ll be pitching tents near Kingsnorth in Kent, where plans are afoot for Britain’s first new coal plant in three decades. The climate change imperative says we need a green army to derail E.ON’s plans before they gather steam, yet Climate Camp has involved less than 2,000 people. I work for Greenpeace, an organisation with some 175,000 members in the UK. At least 174,000 of them didn’t show up. As an Ecologist reader, by definition you’re one of tens of thousands environmentally aware people who didn’t either. In London, 70,000 people voted for the Green Party mayoral candidate and live within an hour of Heathrow, yet at least 69,000 of them didn’t come. Why not?

With toilets, showers, wind-powered computers and a cinema, it’s hardly trench warfare, and is timed to allow families to make it along in the summer. I’ve been trying to think why so few got involved. Perhaps you think our elected representatives will sort things out for us. Are you prepared to wait much longer? Maybe you think we’re all scary, smelly eccentrics. This is a stereotype perpetuated by the media, which will ignore the group of normal-looking folk and slap a picture of the dreadlocked girl with fairy wings on the front page. Perhaps you’re scared a wall of riot police will bash you and you’ll end up in prison. Those yellow jackets are only there to intimidate you, so don’t let them. Finally, maybe you just don’t think direct action works – in which case you’ve perversely been proved wrong by a bunch of disgruntled hauliers who recently blocked roads and overturned government policy so they could pollute even more.

Britain supposedly has the most sophisticated debate on climate change in the developed world. Let’s make Climate Camp 2008 show it.

See http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/ for information.

Tabloid Fabricated Heathrow Plot

The Staff — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:04:05 +0000

From climatecamp.org.uk:

Evening Standard condemned by press watchdog for coverage of the Camp for Climate Action’s Heathrow protest. Claim of fabrication upheld.

In a much awaited ruling the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) issued a stinging rebuke against the Evening Standard today. The usually mild- mannered PCC slammed the Standard’s coverage of last summer’s Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow as ‘materially misleading’ and ‘alarmist’. The Evening Standard will be forced to carry the ruling with due-prominence today.

On 13 August last year, the Standard ran a front page story headlined ‘Militants will hit Heathrow’ the day before a climate change protest camp near Heathrow airport opened. Chief reporter Robert Mendick said he had uncovered a plot to paralyse the airport via invading runways and placing suspect packages. The story was subsequently echoed in several media outlets, all of which ran the false claims believing them to be true. The Camp for Climate Action immediately wrote to the PCC declaring that the article was “fabricated”. The PCC adjudicated the complaint as “upheld”.

The PCC gave the strongest possible reprimand in its powers, finding that the article was a ‘serious breach’ of the PCC code of journalistic standards. They found that “adequate care had not been taken” by the Standard, despite the Standard’s claim that their reporting was the result of an ‘extensive operation organised by an extremely experienced team of executives and senior reporters’ [Doug Wills, Letter to PCC, February 12, 2007].

The rare PCC ruling comes after seven months’ worth of submissions, in which the story’s authorship, sources and credibility are all called into question. Alexandra Harvey, one of the team responsible for pulling apart the Standard’s story, said today:

“This was a political hit job of the worst kind. There was no plot, and the Standard’s ever changing claims throughout this process show that this was a fiction created for political ends – to stop the growth of a mass movement taking action on climate change”.

Chief reporter Robert Mendick has previously denied writing the very article he authored and the PCC condemned. The Standard subsequently claimed the story was the work of a different junior journalist, Rashid Razaq, working undercover.

Mr Razaq has a history of being accused of fabrications which the Standard has ignored. Last year Mr Razaq wrote a story falsely alleging the showing of films sympathetic to terrorists at the Freud Museum. The alleged interviewee said the interview Mr Razaq reported in the article never took place. A complaint by the museum’s director and curator was never answered. An undercover story by Mr Razaq about his work at Barnet Hospital as a cleaner was called into question when the Hospital stated that he was in fact employed as a porter, and had misreported significant facts. “This is a disturbing pattern, and the Standard ought to examine why Mr Razaq was allowed to continue writing these stories for so long,” said Ms Harvey.

Natasha Edlemann said, “This summer will see increased direct action aimed at stopping climate change. This growing movement expects and deserves scrutiny from the media, but we need to draw a line under dangerous propaganda by those who claim to care about climate change while seeking to destroy the reputations of the people who are actually doing something about it.”

This year’s Camp for Climate Action will take place 4 to 11 August at Kingsnorth power station in Kent. Everyone is invited to join in.

For all the documents and more details, visit Anatomy of a fabrication

Camp for Climate Action | ukwatch.net

Climate Camp Is Back

Tabloid Fabricated Heathrow Plot