Paul Kingsnorth | ukwatch.net

Kingsnorth on Kingsnorth

Alex Doherty — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:32:39 +0000

It’s been an unsettling year to be a Kingsnorth. Blessed with a surname which for most of my life people have found it impossible to spell, I’m suddenly all over the news. But not in a good way.

I keep hearing that Kingsnorth is filthy and destructive and should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to expand. Everywhere I turn, people are talking about fighting Kingsnorth, stopping Kingsnorth or shutting down Kingsnorth (shutting up Kingsnorth I’m more familiar with). Thousands of angry hippies have been converging on wet fields threatening to chain themselves to bits of Kingsnorth. There are even “stop Kingsnorth” T-shirts. Maybe this is how it feels to be Ian Huntley.

Still, even I was impressed when six Greenpeace activists managed to climb up the inside of the main chimney of the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last October. Once at the top, they abseiled down the side and began daubing a giant and unequivocal message to the government on it. The message was intended to be “Gordon, bin it!” Unfortunately the police managed to serve an injunction on them by helicopter halfway through the process, so the message ended up as the rather less impressive “Gordon”.

A chimney named Gordon might seem more like a Turner prize contender than one of the obvious turning points in the long, uphill battle to prevent climate change. But a turning point it may turn out to be, for after an expensive and extremely detailed trial at Maidstone crown court, the six climbers were yesterday found not guilty of causing criminal damage, despite the fact that they had openly admitted to doing so.

The reason, unlike the case for the defence, was simple. The jury had decided to accept the climbers’ case that the damage they did was justifiable if it helped prevent the undeniably greater damage that would be done by climate change. This is not the first time that a jury has accepted a “lawful excuse” defence in a criminal damage case – but it is the first time it has happened in relation to climate change. It will doubtless make Gordon (the prime minister, not the chimney) nervous as he contemplates whether or not to go-ahead with a new coal plant at Kingsnorth; a decision which will ultimately decide whether or not the UK has any chance of meeting its targets to reduce its climate-changing emissions, and on which the cabinet apparently remains split.

Whether or not the court decision leads to a rash of similar protests elsewhere remains to be seen. Whether it ultimately helps to stop climate change – if that is even possible given the point we’ve reached and the demands of our resource-greedy global economy – remains to be seen too. But what it maybe could do – and certainly should do – is bring home to the UK, where we still all have our heads stuck firmly in the sand, the connection between action and consequence.

The court in Maidstone heard from James Hansen of Nasa, one of the world’s leading climate experts, that the carbon dioxide emitted daily by Kingsnorth could be responsible for the extinction of up to 400 species. They heard that properties just down the road from Gordon the chimney, on the Kent coast, were already suffering from sea level rises. They heard from Inuit leader Aqqaluk Lynge about how Inuit houses were already sliding into the sea. They decided that such things justified the criminal damage that the climbers had done. In other words, they accepted the connection between powering British homes and the rapidly-altering global climate.

The difficulty with the climate change narrative has always been how big it is. The idea that turning on your kettle helps to drown polar bears has never really sunk in with many people at any level beyond the theoretical. Maybe – just maybe – the Kingsnorth verdict, with the full weight of the law backing it up, will make that link clearer in our minds. If it does, perhaps all that persecution will have been worth it.

Here's the Thing

Tim Holmes — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:22:42 +0000

No one ever asked me to sign the social contract. I don’t remember being presented with a dotted line and a pen. Yet here I am, subject to the will of a state whose checks and balances are increasingly unchecked and unbalanced, and whose “democratic” machinery is so clogged with patronage and power that my chances of influencing it are close to zero.

The existence of the “social contract“ is the great liberal myth under which we still labour. The theory is that we, as individuals, allow the state to curtail some of our liberties and in return, the state protects us from harm and uses its collective strength to advance society as a whole.

It’s a nice theory, but it has a rather obvious flaw. A genuine contract is an agreement signed willingly by two consenting parties. The social contract, by contrast, is something we are coerced into simply by dint of being born. Try opting out of it in today’s Britain and see how far it gets you; ask a gypsy or a traveller how long you’ll last if you try living a life that doesn’t fit with society’s demands.

The reality of modern Britain is that the freedom of individuals is increasingly constrained by the state. In turn, the freedom of the state is constrained by an all-pervasive global capitalism. The result is that the state controls the lives of its citizens in order to serve the interests of corporations. We now live in a country in which hospitals are owned by supermarkets, schools are run by businessmen and corporations own and police entire city centres. The purpose of our education system is to turn our children into cogs in the corporate machine, and there can be no nobler national aspiration for UK PLC than Remaining Competitive In The Global Economy.

In times like this, the social contract becomes little more than a flimsy veil, failing to hide the naked power behind it. In theory, we live in a liberal democracy. In practice we are under the thumb of what William Cobbett memorably called “the Thing” – a great, lurking, self-serving power. Today’s Thing is a hydra with two heads – corporation and state – and both have the same message for us: behave yourself, take out a loan, go shopping, keep the economy afloat. Your duty is not to be alert, active citizens but passive, obedient consumers. Oh, and if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.

We are becoming a nation of enforced conformity. In this context, liberty means the freedom simply to be yourself. The freedom to go about your business without being watched by cameras; the freedom to make merry or make trouble on your own streets; the freedom to pursue alternatives to the consumer economy. It also means freedom from coercion: freedom from databases, identity cards, iris scans, fingerprints, random searches, imprisonment without trial or justification. It means, above all, having the freedom, and the power, to say no to the Thing.

England, Britain and multiculturalism

tim — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:46:23 +0000

* Paul Kingsnorth: A clouded vision (a review of Ware’s Who Cares about Britishness)

* Vron Ware: A contested reality (a reply that assesses Kingsnorth’s Real England)

* Paul Kingsnorth: The heart of the problem

* Vron Ware: The climate and the choice

Paul Kingsnorth: A clouded vision

Ware lays her cards on the table in the first few pages. Britain, she writes, “may be a country, but it is not really a place”. When you come through the Channel tunnel, you are informed that you have arrived in England, and the signs at Heathrow welcome you to London. Britain is not a nation at all, but a composite of four nations. It has, she observes, “a standing army but not a football team. It has an anthem, a flag and a queen”, but no patron saint and no constitution. These are all good points, but Ware goes further. Britain, she reckons, is essentially rubbish. The most noticeable things about the Brits are their “flaws”: ‘they drink too much, swear too much, blame the government for everything and laugh at themselves when things get rough.” Pretty much the only good thing about this poor bloody country, in fact, is “its record of functioning multiculturalism.” In other words, the best thing about Britain is the bits that aren’t British.

What is it, then, apart from the political determination of its governing classes, which holds this messy historical accident of a nation together? What makes it what it is? This is the question that Ware is supposed to be answering, and to be fair to her it is a hard, perhaps an impossible, one. Just look at Gordon Brown’s floundering attempts to make “Britishness” sing in our hearts. Or, come to that, the words of his fellow-Celtic British nationalist Neil Kinnock (and chair of the British Council) who, in the book’s foreword, makes the usual liberal case for the historical illegitimacy of Britain (we’re a “mongrel nation”, the empire was bad, etc) but then flinches from the obvious conclusion and decides that, after all, Britishness is a good and necessary thing which just needs to be “re-invented” – perhaps, the reader may mischievously think, to get his beloved Labour Party out of a tricky political fix.

Ware has chosen to try and make her project work by using the device of asking foreigners – many of them from countries formerly colonised by Britain – what “Britishness” means. This is an intriguing idea and, in the right hands, could have yielded some fascinating results. And there are some intriguing nuggets in this book, gleaned from many conversations with immigrants now living in Britain and from people in other countries whose perspective on this hoary old debate can be refreshing.

Some of them are intriguingly counterintuitive. Ware interviews Tariq, a student from Lahore, Pakistan, who is studying for a PhD at Leeds University. He is astonished to see people wearing veils on the streets of Britain. Expecting to arrive in Brontë country he was surprised to see the city of Bradford’s council estates, and even more surprised to see Bradford itself. Tariq would prefer the Britain of the past – a Victorian nation of hard work and self-discipline, not the “benefit culture” he thinks it has become. He is astonished that British mosques are employing “crazy” imams from rural Pakistan who “would never get a job over there.” His British-Pakistani barber tells him to pray for his wife who is having trouble conceiving because he doesn’t trust doctors. “They are living in the Stone Age”, he says, shocked. He wants to go back to Pakistan because “it seems so primitive” in Britain. “This country”, he declares, “has a problem on its hands”.

The book could do with more of this kind of insight, from all sides of the debate. There are other examples – a man from Britain’s Chinese community, for example, complains to a Muslim friend that Muslims are getting all the media attention and the Chinese are being ignored. His friend tells him to be thankful. Roxana from Colombia observes that “London is a place for lonely people.” Ware asks Bano, a young Muslim woman from Blackburn, whether “a strongly defined national identity is a useful device for protecting and supporting minorities”. “Not if you keep calling us minorities”, Bano shoots back. Such ghettoisation, she insists, makes it much harder for anyone who isn’t white to ever feel British.

Bano’s objection to Ware’s question gets to the heart of the problem with this book: it is suffocatingly politically-correct (PC). So much so that it sometimes seems to have fallen through a wormhole in space in 1986 and emerged in the present day. Ware’s background is in writing anti-racist and feminist literature, and her reference-points – as she points out ad nauseam throughout the book – are in battles against the National Front circa 1979 and the strenuous defence of a very 1980s version of “multiculturalism”. Every few pages, it seems, we are treated to an anecdote in which she bravely stands up to fascists as a teenager in Buckinghamshire, or soapboxes about white western imperialism and the prejudice of the pasty-faced natives. Ware is not just agnostic about Britain and Britishness; she openly dislikes it. To her, Britain’s only saving grace is its population of foreigners. Not only that, but she seems to know very little about Britain as a place, as distinct from an idea (neither do most of her interviewees but they, unlike the author, have a pretty good excuse), save for a few London boroughs and a couple of northern industrial cities. Most of Britain, and most of its people, don’t even make an appearance.

The problem with this is twofold. First, Ware utterly fails to answer – or even, in most cases, ask – the question which the book’s title poses. Second, she is forced to skate over the many cracks which are currently appearing in Britain’s multicultural ideology – cracks which, ironically, are highlighted again and again throughout the book not by foaming, white-skinned Daily Mail columnists but by the very “minorities” who she is so convinced have been its beneficiaries.

Bano, in Blackburn, explains the problem well. Growing up in Sheffield, Bano – though aware of her Muslim and Asian heritage – always felt British. She went to an ethnically mixed school where people rubbed along. Then she moved to Blackburn aged fourteen and started at a school whose intake was 95% Asian. Suddenly, she says, she didn’t feel British anymore.

Bano’s point is clear to the reader, and painful to read: attending an “Asian” school, in which the teachers focused on her “Asian” identity, she felt immediately different to the rest of the country. She had been ghettoised. She was now a “minority” rather than just another British citizen. At this point, her friend Amar joins the conversation. “People live in an Asian ghetto, they go to the state school which is mostly Asian, they have their mosques … The system is designed like that”, he says. “In my day there were no ‘minority’ teachers, but I had a better experience … If you have to give up your identity as British, you will never belong.”

Bano and Amar have highlighted the painful paradox at the heart of the multicultural experiment: the act of defining people as “minorities” in order to better defend their rights also ghettoises them; sets them apart from the mainstream. A generation of this has led to areas of Britain in which ethnic and racial segregation are now a reality. Multiculturalism has led to less, not more, integration and more, not less, communal tension.

Yet Ware cannot see it. She is “surprised” by Bano’s story, and she doesn’t really take it anywhere. Instead, she falls back into her comfort-zone: “multiculturalism” (which she never, incidentally, defines) is a good thing because – well, because it just is. The unacknowledged contradictions are highlighted again when Peray, a Turkish Muslim woman, tells her of a “safer schools” conference she had attended. A member of the audience suggested that some young men needed to be told it was wrong to sexually harass women. Peray takes this as an “Islamophobic” slight and retorts that such things simply never happen in Muslim culture. Ware reports this approvingly: but who does she think she is helping by doing so? Some Muslim women in Britain suffer terribly at the hands of men whose actions are, whether Peray wants to admit it or not, tacitly or openly sanctioned by their communities in the name of culture or religion or both. Women’s refuges are full of them. For Peray, and Ware, to suggest that this is not the case does no-one any favours – least of all the most vulnerable people in society.

There were a number of books that could have been written here: a genuine inquiry into the nature of “Britishness”, perhaps; a spirited defence (starting with a definition) of multiculturalism; or an honest exploration of the pros and cons of life in multi-ethnic Britain. Ware seems to have tried to combine all three, and has ended up succeeding in none of them. By the end, all we are a left with is a frustrating series of questions.

If this is what Britain has come to, Gordon Brown is in even more trouble than we thought.

Vron Ware: A contested reality

I bought Paul Kingsnorth’s book Real England: the Battle Against the Bland (Portobello, 2008) a few weeks ago after reading a positive review of it. I was enthusiastic about his project of bringing an anti-globalisation perspective to the destruction of England’s distinctive environments as I also feel passionately about this. I have been writing about a particular English locality for ten years now, tracking the impact of global forces on every area of life. I’ve also been working on and against racism and nationalism, attentive to the past and future relationships between Britain and England. When I read him I realised that there are differences between us.

Now, Kingsnorth’s mean-spirited and inaccurate review of my book commissioned by the British Council, Who Cares About Britishness? A Global View of the National Identity (Arcadia, 2007) suggests that there is little common ground between us. Rather than just respond to his attack I’d like to assess his whole approach.

Kingsnorth employs the well-worn method of identifying the “real England” by travelling around the country to document a tale of damage, decline and neglect. The portrait of Englishness that he paints conveys a lament for better times, coupled with a reluctance to protest effectively at the destruction of “ways of life” and institutions that once developed out of local, English culture. I thought the book would also bring an added dimension, especially since George Monbiot’s recommendation on the front cover announces that the book “helps to shape our view of who we are and who we want to be”.

In particular, given his knowledge of the movement inspired by the World Social Forum I hoped he would combine an environmentalist rage with a critique of the racially coded nationalism which is often implicit in this genre of writing about England. Instead, he does not really address the question of who counts as English, and who the “we” are, talking vaguely of people “of all backgrounds”. The fact that he is prepared to define himself as a nationalist indicates that he is not interested in connecting his position to a discussion about the future of England as a post-colonial country at ease with itself and alive to the value of a cosmopolitan future.

The project of my book was entirely different, not least because Britishness is not an ethnic or cultural category that functions in the same manner as Englishness. Britishness is a construct with deep historical roots in the country’s imperial past, one that has left profound legacies in many parts of the world in the form of institutions, language, land ownership, and hierarchies of power. It made sense to travel outside Britain as well as within it, to see what could be learned about Britishness as a residual global concept.

I had two objectives in this project. First, I wanted to talk to young people in Britain whose opinions are rarely sought – those who had been migrants themselves or whose parents had migrated to Britain before they were born – to learn about and report on their experience and perspective. It was never my mission to go round to identify and learn about Britain itself “as a country”. I made this clear in the introduction, that Kingsnorth chooses to cite selectively to suit his own prejudices.

Second, I felt that it was important to learn from debates in other societies that had been marked by British rule – particularly debates about national identity. I was especially interested in how young people in those countries negotiated identities, whether political, cultural, sexual, religious or ethnic, often in situations far more difficult and dangerous than faced by their equivalents in Britain. A large part of the book entails listening to young women and men – in Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Ireland – struggling to define themselves within and beyond their nation-states. The signs are that there is a converging generation of young people in different parts of the world who are wary of nationalism in all its forms, having witnessed the catastrophic damage that it does to social and political life.

Kingsnorth wilfully misunderstands the scope of the book, and does not even attempt to discuss the second half. Very surprisingly for an anti-globalisation activist, for his own part he seems to have little interest in the idea of a global conversation. He is offended by my ironic summary of Britain’s shortcomings in my introduction, and misquotes me as saying that “Britain’s only saving grace is its population of foreigners”.

I find it significant that in his review he refers to people born and raised in the United Kingdom as “immigrants”. This suggests that he does not understand the stakes involved in interrogating terms like British or English. For example, he is so phobic about being seen to be anti-racist that he makes it clear he agrees with the “immigrant” view of what’s gone wrong with “multiculturalism”. For my part, I am not interested in defining this term because it means so many different things to different constituencies. The word is routinely used to denounce a range of past mistakes made precisely because there was no coherent governmental strategy to address racism and cultural diversity in the UK. By recounting a series of conversations with young British people I hoped to offer a glimpse of what it felt like to grow up in a society shaped by this confusion, representing a range of experiences that were unremarkable, positive, frustrating or difficult.

Kingsnorth is particularly irritated by one one of my interviewees, Peray, who dismisses a social worker who implied casually that Muslim culture endorsed the harassment of women by men. He is even more scornful of my failure to correct Peray by reminding her that “women’s refuges are full of Muslim women who suffer terribly at the hands of men”. Happily, in Britain violence against women is a crime whoever commits it. More important in this context, there is no evidence that Muslim women are disproportionately affected. Using culture as a stick to beat Muslims with is a familiar tactic among those who question their right to belong, whether in England or the whole of the UK – or in Europe for that matter.

Finally, for someone who claims to be an expert on England, Kingsnorth should know that Andover is in Hampshire, not Buckinghamshire (he should have heard of the campaign to block the siting of the Tesco mega-shed on the A303). And in damning my account of my run-in with the National Front on my home ground he betrays his impatience with a writing style not unlike his own: a mixture of polemic, dialogue, observation and reflection. The reason I traced the contours of anti-racist politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s is that I wanted to anchor the current discussions of Britishness within a historical context that is often forgotten and increasingly misrepresented.

Kingsnorth’s review clarifies what is so different about our respective efforts to engage in a political debate about Britain’s future. He finds my avowedly feminist and anti-racist perspective “suffocatingly politically correct”, which says more about his perspective than mine. He attempts to articulate a purified form of English nationalism, paying scant attention to the untidy, complex and contested history of racism. In my view this makes his enthusiasm to identify “the real England” appear opportunistic and shallow.

Paul Kingsnorth: The heart of the problem

My review of Vron Ware’s book Who Cares About Britishness? has evidently upset the author. I can’t deny a twinge of guilt: as a fellow-writer, I know the frustration of a bad review, and the things it can make you say. So I’m not surprised to read Vron’s retaliation about me, my review and indeed my own book, Real England, on OurKingdom.

I don’t respond from pique, but because this is, at heart, a crucial debate about the future of England and Britain, and about two competing understandings of what constitutes “belonging”. More than anything else, perhaps, it is about how that dread term “multiculturalism” has, in my view, undermined a shared sense of community in both England and Britain, and continues to do so.

Let’s start at the beginning. Vron Ware has managed the remarkable feat, as I pointed out in my review, of writing an entire book about multiculturalism without once defining it. Her response, when this is pointed out, is to say “I am not interested in defining this term because it means so many different things to different constituencies.” Er … well, yes it does. Which is precisely why a writer’s job is to define it for us, the readers; pin it down. Particularly if you are then going to spend 300 pages eulogising it.

But if Vron won’t do it, let me try. In my view, there are two distinct things we might mean when we talk about living in a “multicultural” society. First, there’s the on-the-ground reality of a nation in which a substantial minority of people – 8% in the 2001 census, and doubtless more now – define themselves as from “ethnic minorities”. Many are descended from – or indeed are – Commonwealth immigrants who arrived in Britain from the second world war onwards, and many more have arrived from east-central Europe more recently. For the most part we all rub along with each other pretty well, in that very British way that requires no fancy intellectualising about our “identity”. This is the reality of contemporary Britain: it contains many cultures and ethnicities, and I personally have very good reasons (which I’ll come to in a while) for believing that this is a good thing.

Then there’s the second definition: the “ism”. “Multiculturalism”, in this context, is an ideology; a theory; a political agenda which has existed in various forms since the 1960s and is now the dominant narrative about Britain in official circles, from education authorities to government ministers. It decrees that Britain – and especially England – is a post-colonial tabula rasa, onto which many distinct cultures have been dropped. There is no longer such a thing as a unifying or indigenous British or English culture – indeed, the very terms are “problematic”.

Britain now is a “cosmopolitan” society in which no one cultural identity has pre-eminence, and in which Englishness, Polishness and Bangladeshiness must compete on equal terms. The nation’s many “minorities” are not to be integrated into mainstream society (“integrated” is such a problematic word; and anyway, what is the mainstream?) but fenced off, theoretically if not physically: defined as “BMEs” [Black and Minority Ethnic], afforded “protection”, treated as victims, spoken for. Descended from Pakistani immigrants but born in England? Sorry, you’re still “Pakistani”, or “Asian” or “minority ethnic”. You can be British, if you like, because Britishness has been stripped of meaning and is therefore “inclusive” – but you can never be English (or, presumably, Scottish or Welsh, though this gets less attention) because Englishness is “racially coded”. Attempts to define it are thus potentially racist; it’s best if the English just shut up about it and get on with “celebrating diversity” instead.

This is the reality of the “multiculturalism” which Vron Ware hymns. It is a divisive ideology, divorced from place and history and largely meaningless to most people in today’s Britain, whatever their ethnic group. But it is also all-pervasive, and this is what I picked up on in Vron’s book. Throughout, she comes across people from ethnic-minority groups in Britain who reject this vision: who don’t want to be seen as “minorities” or patronised by pressure- groups; who want to be British or, hell, even English.

Yet when I mentioned this in my review, I was accused of being “phobic about being seen to be anti-racist”. This is pretty breathtaking – not least because it seems to be, quite literally, a meaningless sentence. I think Vron is trying to say that I’m not anti-racist. By which she presumably means that I am a racist of some kind. It’s a curious way to react to a reviewer who highlights quotations from your own book.

But perhaps this is also what she means when she accuses me of beating British Muslims with metaphorical sticks. In my review, I highlighted a section of Vron’s book in which the author attempts to deny that there is any problem within south Asian communities in Britain as regards the position of women. This is a good example of where the whole multicultural house of cards comes tumbling down. Desperate (or should I say “phobic”?) not to appear racist, Vron needs to pretend that there are no real negatives to living in “BME” communities in Britain. So there is, for example, no problem with violence towards women in south Asian communities; after all, white men hit their wives as well, right?

Right, of course – but there are few honour killings within the Polish community as far as I know. It’s well known, especially by British women of Asian origin, that male domination within the more traditional elements of this community is a real problem. A true feminist, surely, would want to acknowledge this? But not Vron: anyone who brings its up is apparently questioning Muslims’ “right to belong, whether in England or the whole of the UK – or in Europe for that matter”’ Got that? Mention the culturally-specific incidences of male violence within some Muslim communities and you’re with Enoch Powell, the Conservative politician whose “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 was a racist landmark. And who suffers from this stance? The victims of that violence – powerless Muslim women. How do we square this circle? We don’t: we pretend it doesn’t exist, and call anyone who mentions it a racist.

And it gets to the heart of the problem: utter confusion. Vron seems to assume that all critics of multiculturalism come from the political right. Well, here’s the shocker: I’m an anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist environmentalist – all “isms” that should surely meet with Vron’s approval. And I think that multiculturalism – the official “ism”, as distinct from the on-the-ground reality – is bad for absolutely everyone.

Perhaps I should come clean about my personal investment in this argument. Not only was my grandmother an immigrant – meaning that my own “racial coding” would probably not meet British National Party (BNP) requirements for true Englishness – but my parents-in-law were immigrants from India in the 1970s. This makes my wife, in the charming PC terms of which Vron is so fond, a “BME”, and my daughter of “mixed ethnicity”. It also means, according to both the BNP and Vron Ware, that neither of them can be truly English for, apparently, Englishness is “racially coded” – only for white people.

This would be news to my wife, who considers herself as English as me. But it is not news to me, for I have heard it many times before, and it angers me. I’ll confess that Vron’s book made me angry too. Angry because I want to live in an England – and a Britain – whose people, of all ethnicities, are united by place and a common purpose, not divided by race and mutual suspicion. Vron says that I “(do) not really address the question of who counts as English”, and that “this makes [my] enthusiasm to identify ‘the real England’ appear opportunistic and shallow”. I’m not sure what opportunity I’m supposed to be seizing (certainly not the opportunity for a decent book advance) but the “real England” I attempt to identify in my book is anything but shallow. It is, in fact, deep-rooted: in place, landscape and the cultures which spring from it.

And that’s the real point: culture springs from place, and “Britishness” or “Englishness”, as concepts divorced from the physical reality of Britain or England, are meaningless. My book explores the deep connection that many in England feel to their places; how this forges their identity and why they fight for it. Some of those people are from ethnic minorities. They are also English, because they were born and live and work and fight in England; because it is their home and they are changing it and it is changing them. They are not ghettoised, reduced to statistics, treated like foreigners in their own land. They are English because they choose to belong here.

Vron wraps up her response to me by asserting that I “attempt to articulate a purified form of English nationalism, paying scant attention to the untidy, complex and contested history of racism”. I have no idea what a “purified form of English nationalism” is (what would an impure form look like? Cloudier?) but I can tell Vron this for free: I am more than aware of the history of racism, and I think that the multiculturalist project perpetuates it. The England I would like to see, is one in which we all have a part in forging English cultural and institutional identity; an identity which unites us around our locations and our aspirations for the future, whilst being aware of our pasts – and paying scant attention to our ethnicity.

This, at the end of it all, seems to be the key difference between Vron and I. I am aware that an identity, a culture, needs to spring from and be nourished by a place. England is such a place, and so is Britain – they are not academic concepts, they are landscapes, urban and rural: the present woven from the past, the cultural from the literal and material. The English people are the people of England, whatever their colour or religion. My “nationalism” is intended to be a forward-looking, unifying project which brings them together; Vron’s multiculturalism, by contrast, is backward-looking, guilt-ridden, race-obsessed and divisive. And I’d rather look to the future than stay marooned in the politics of the past.

Vron Ware: The climate and the choice

For those who may be reading this, who perhaps haven’t come across my work before, I will say the following, simply and clearly, without any accusations of who is racist, race-obsessed, stuck in the past and guilt-ridden.

My book on Britishness begins with an exploration of what makes people feel at home in this country. It starts with a scene of ordinary life, in a café in Leytonstone, drinking tea with two young-ish British community workers with family origins in Somalia and India. We talk about shops, bars, housing, school and other mundane topics, including their experiences of growing up in the neighbourhood. Although it is debatable whether London fits into this discussion, since it is a world city with about one in three born outside the country, I wanted the conversation to illustrate the complex mixture of ingredients that allow individuals to feel a sense of belonging and connection to any particular place. I was intrigued by what Leytonstone had to offer as it was a part of London with which I was unfamiliar. When someone says they take being British for granted, but are proud to be from Leytonstone, it makes you curious.

Later in the same chapter I describe how I asked a young woman whose parents were from Pakistan whether she preferred Oxford, where she had been born, to Banbury, where she moved as a child. I listened to her talking about her experiences of growing up in Banbury, a very English place to which she was very attached partly because her parents still lived there. The fact that we had this conversation in Pakistan, where she was visiting relatives (including a cousin who had grown up in the UK and gone back to live in Rawalpindi) was largely incidental. I included it in my book as I thought it reflected a confident, transnational identification with two countries, strongly rooted in a particular place, but strengthened by an awareness of the family history outside it that had taken her there.

I could go on, but I hope I have made it clear that Paul and I agree that identity and culture have a dynamic relationship with place, landscape and locality. In this section I included an episode from my own experience in order to show that I too, English born and bred, had come from somewhere local but had not always felt at home there. I also wanted to include an insight I learned from writers such as VS Naipaul and Zygmunt Bauman: we can gain a better perspective on what is familiar if we deliberately allow ourselves to become estranged from it. For some this happens with exile and displacement. For others it needs conscious work and a readiness to listen to strangers.

Identity is often both simple and complicated at the same time. It is also about choice not just fate and here too Paul and I agree. For him, people from ethnic minorities are free to choose to belong here, and that’s enough to make them English. Of course it’s right to affirm that they can make a deliberate choice to identify themselves as English. This does not alter the fact that many people, whose Englishness is not in question, are not prepared to recognise that ethnic minorities are eligible to make that claim. It is not me who is saying, as Kingsnorth alleges, that Englishness is “only for white people” and I simply can’t understand why he doesn’t get this point. Fortunately there are signs that this rigid alignment of colour, culture and national identity is beginning to shift. As Mark Perryman and others have argued elsewhere, spectator sport is one area where England is revealed as a remarkably affable and open-minded community. Note that this is because of concerted efforts to eradicate racism from football. It did not happen organically.

But Paul blames multiculturalism for making minorities feel as though they don’t belong. He liked that part of my book where I quote young people from Lancashire saying how they hated their monocultural, segregated schools. But rather than caricature his views as crudely as he has done mine, I will carefully reiterate my own position. I have to say that when he says that my book is “a hymn to multiculturalism”, I wonder if he has read the same one that I wrote.

Who Cares About Britishness? is an exploration of the global relevance of national identity, rooted in the history and geography of Britishness. After the first chapter on home and belonging, the book I wrote takes the form of a travel narrative in which I interweave some of these local voices with episodes and conversations from my journey to cities in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kenya and Ireland. The final chapter is called “organise, don’t agonise” and it explores some of the ways that young people in these different countries, including England and Northern Ireland, are actively trying to intervene to work for social justice. The word “cares” is deliberately intended to have a double meaning, clearly lost on Paul.

I will set aside the fact that the book was partly an attempt to draw attention to Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world. I realise from reading subsequent comments on this forum that this aspect is not – at least yet – of great interest to OurKingdom participants. But it should be.

My position is this: to be anti-racist means identifying and opposing the corrosive forms of racism that continue to diminish all our lives in this country. It is no more about treating people differently according to colour, ethnicity and faith than it is an excuse to denounce all white people as racist. It means being alert to expressions of race-hatred, xenophobia and supremacism (not just of race and ethnicity but also culture and civilisation) wherever they are found, and making an effort to demonstrate why and how they poison our public and communal lives. To me, anti-racism is a form of political practice, with its own genealogy and ideological influences, that is entirely separate from the doctrine that Paul characterises as multiculturalism. I think this has become a straw figure which is why I said above that I was not in a hurry to define it. But first Paul insists that my “entire book” is a eulogy to something he loathes, and then he obsesses about the fact that I did not “pin it down”.

After 2001 it became fashionable to blame “multiculturalism” for the way that life in some northern mill-towns had become virtually segregated. All the problems caused by neglect, default, ineptitude, bad planning, well-meaning initiatives, and the impact of de-industrialisation were attributed to what seemed in retrospect a faulty but coherent national ideology developed in the 1960s and foisted on the British public with no consultation. I believe it is essential to understand the local histories of post-1945 immigration if we are to deal with the consequences now.

In my book I recounted a episode from the 1960s campaign by Sikhs to wear turbans on the buses in order to remind younger people of the complex struggles of earlier eras. I tried to show that what happened in Wolverhampton was very different from events in Manchester, Bradford, London and other cities where it became an issue. I wanted to argue that each centre of settlement has its own history of negotiating immigration, and this has had lasting impact on patterns of housing, education, political representation and so on.

In recent years government policy has developed a focus on social cohesion in an attempt to distance itself from what has happened before, and even the adjective “multicultural” has become derided. It has become tainted with the charge of advocating separation, “special treatment” for minorities and advocating cultural relativism (particularly with regard to gender relations). The term “multiculturalism” has also become confused with the language of anti-racism which was apparently devalued by its fixation on diversity and minority rights.

This, by the way, is what I meant when I said that Paul was phobic about not being seen to be anti-racist. It would seem that it is no longer acceptable to speak about racism since it is “divisive” and smacks of “political correctness”. If I thought he was being racist I would say so, but it is a serious charge and I don’t for a minute think he is, and I have read his work carefully. I didn’t need to know those details about his family. His decision to personalise the argument in that way is symptomatic of his inability to understand anti-racism as politics.

In this climate it is more important than ever not to delude ourselves that we have moved beyond the need to talk about racism openly. The vociferous commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in the mainstream media this past year is evidence of a real ambivalence on the question of what it means to be English and who can rightfully belong.

A comment on OurKingdom is an indication of how this current not only survives but is being amplified in the present: “It simply hasn’t been possible to integrate the number of newcomers that have arrived, and their arrival (combined with a native population that didn’t want, or ask, to be multicultural) has displaced or destroyed urban, white, mostly working class, communities (see Billy Bragg [who now lives in Dorset] or Michael Collins).” This statement, which ventriloquises the resentment of the white working class rather than expressing openly the views of the author, gives voice to an old lament. Countless writers have shown how English nationalism has long been entwined with a strong sense of grievance that it is foreigners who are damaging this country, and that it is “real” English natives (and now landscapes) who are being injured as a result. Breaking that causal connection requires sustained, sensitive and imaginative labour.

It is not enough to wish away the connections between racism, xenophobia and nationalism and to pretend that the politics of belonging involves nothing more than an immigrant’s decision to make a commitment to her or his adopted country. Let there be no misunderstanding. It is naïve beyond belief to advocate a renewed English nationalism in 2008 without addressing the way that immigration has resurfaced on the national political agenda once more. Let’s not kid ourselves that the BNP is the only organisation either to take advantage of the growing inequality, poverty and powerlessness that tend to push people towards racism, or to speak on behalf of whole sections of society (like the “white working class”) in order to make a populist appeal.

Those of us who glimpse a more inclusive, non-racist and non-racial vision of life in England have to make our own choices to reject any form of nationalism that is complicit with racism.

Living with Apocalypse

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:04:59 +0000

According to the Ecologist’s web editor, something happens every time he publishes a blog by me. He receives a number of emails from readers asking one of two things, or sometimes both. One: if this guy is so depressed about the future of the world, how does he get out of bed in the morning? Two: if this guy is so depressed about the state of the world, what is he doing about it? How can he keep on living his reasonably normal life, in the face of what’s around the corner?

So I’ve been told to come up with an answer. Here’s my attempt.

Firstly – and this is the easy bit – I am not depressed. Curious, I know, this, but true. I am always writing about the inevitability of serious climate change, for example, and of my belief that human civilisation as we currently know it is headed for the ecological rocks sometime soon. Some find this stupendously depressing. Not me. Why? Because I think that human civilisation as we currently know it is not very nice in many, many ways, and that it needs to change. I also think we are incapable of changing it, caught up as we are in a socio-economic system which depends on ecocide to perpetuate itself. Change, I’m afraid, will come out of a crash. Just as 1929 led to the civilising of capitalism for half a century, maybe what climate change is about to do to us will lead to the civilising of, well, civilisation. If not – well, we should have worried about that 100 years ago. The climate horse bolted so long ago that the stable door has fallen off its hinges.

A wider point is perhaps a psychological one. What we really don’t like about the idea of inevitable climate change is the idea that we, humans, are not in control. Even those of us who call ourselves ‘green’ fall for this hubris, talking of the need to ‘manage the environment’ as if it were ours. Well, it ain’t, and having that demonstrated to us cheers me up too. Falling off our perch: it’s all good.

Which brings us to the second question: if I think this is on the horizon, what am I doing living in a pretty ordinary house, married with a new daughter, using a computer, looking pretty ordinary? This one’s tougher. And actually I have an answer. Within a couple of years my family and I plan to leave the city, set ourselves up on a smallholding, possibly build our own house and certainly make our lives a bit more sane and a bit closer to the soil. This is not becasue I think it will save us from eco-doom (though it might make it more bearable). It’s because I want to practice what I preach and – well, because I just want to.

And you know what? the thought of that makes me happy to. Looming apocalypse: it really can be fun.

Fending off the English

tim — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:41:49 +0000

Here we go again. Every few weeks, Gordon Brown’s crusade to re-establish “Britishness” rears its tired head. A fortnight ago we were treated to Lord Goldsmith’s proposals for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the Queen, and a new Britain Day to help “create a greater sense of shared belonging”. This week, justice minister Michael Wills was wheeled out to fire the latest salvo with a speech on “the politics of national identity”.

Britishness, says Wills, in a precise echo of Brown, is the glue that binds us together. English or Scottish, Jewish or Muslim, black or white, bourgeois or proletarian – everyone loves being British. Which is why the government is going to draw up a “British statement of values”. It doesn’t know what these values are yet, but when it’s worked them out (with a little help from all of us), it’s sure that we’ll be keen to celebrate them – perhaps on Britain Day.

Clumsy but dogged – rather like the prime minister himself – Brown’s ongoing campaign for “Britishness” is an exercise in top-down futility. The reality is that Britain is dying, and the government knows it. An institution which was clumsily welded together from four distinct nations in order to service a global empire has today, that empire gone, lost its point and purpose. Westminster politicians of all stripes regularly talk in hushed tones about “the breakup of the union” as if it were the worst thing in the world. Yet the breakup of the union is probably inevitable – and if the government doesn’t like it, it only has itself to blame.

Britain is under assault from many quarters – but the biggest threat, perhaps counter-intuitively, comes from the English. When Labour created a Scottish parliament, and assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, it claimed they would strengthen, not weaken, the British state. But the devolution process was incomplete because the largest British nation – England – was not included. Today’s constitutional settlement brings almost daily reminders of why this is an injustice – and the English are waking up to it. As they do, they threaten not only the future of the union but the future of Gordon Brown, Michael Wills and the government of which they are a part.

The Scottish today have a powerful and effective parliament; the Welsh have a less powerful but still impressive devolved assembly, as does Northern Ireland. All of these nations also have representatives in the British parliament at Westminster. The English, meanwhile, have the worst of both worlds. Instead of our own elected parliament or assembly, we have unaccountable “regional assemblies” – eight of them, which make major decisions on housing, spatial planning and transport, among other things, with no recourse to the people they claim to represent. Meanwhile, at Westminster, Scottish and Welsh MPs can make decisions about the future of England for which they will never have to answer to their constituents.

This – the thorny old West Lothian question – is the timebomb ticking quietly under Brown’s “Britishness” agenda, and it is what will eventually doom it. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs sitting at Westminster can vote, and have done, to impose policies on the English which their constituents at home will not have to suffer, and for which they will not be answerable at the ballot box.

Most notoriously, this has happened in two of New Labour’s most controversial policy areas. In 2003, government proposals to create Foundation Hospitals were rejected by the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly. Only England remained, and Labour MPs were split. A parliamentary amendment removing Foundation Hospitals for England from the proposed Health and Social Care Bill was supported by most English MPs – but Welsh and Scottish MPs, drilled into the lobbies by the government, defeated them. The next year the same thing happened when university “top-up fees” were rejected in Scotland and Wales but imposed on the English by just five votes – the votes of Scottish MPs.

England today is the only British nation without any form of democratic devolution. It is the only nation in Europe without its own parliament or government. It has fewer MPs per head of population than the other British nations, and receives considerably less money per head from the treasury. Opinion polls show that the English are increasingly aware of this injustice – and increasingly unhappy (Alex Salmond enjoys reminding the English of the unfairness of the situation, for obvious reasons). This unhappiness, which is coalescing into resentment and anger, threatens not only the union, but the government’s power base. New Labour is a Scottish creation, and any devolution to England could destroy not only the (Scottish) prime minister but the legitimacy of his government – a government which, if you removed its Scottish and Welsh MPs from the equation, would be a minority administration in England.

In this context, it becomes clear why the government is so keen on “Britishness”: it is trying to hold the English at bay; trying to avoid having to finish the devolution project by ensuring that England, too, controls its own affairs. As a result, we are seeing a mirror-image of the UK’s pre-1997 constitutional injustices. Back then, the Scottish were resentful at being ruled from Westminster by a political party – the Tories – which did not represent their interests and which used their country as a testing ground for unpopular policies, most notoriously the poll tax. The Tories responded either by ignoring them and hoping they would go away or by issuing hysterical warnings about the breakup of the union.

Sounds familiar? Today England has the illegitimate government, and the English are the guinea pigs for its unpopular ideas. It responds by simply denying the legitimacy of their claims (“separatist nationalism must be taken on”, squeaks Michael Wills) or by feebly grasping at a fading British mythology. Some Scottish or Welsh nationalists may be enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing the English get a taste of their own medicine – but they shouldn’t. This is not about setting the English up against the Scots or the Welsh. It is, at root, about democracy and about justice. It is about all of us – Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English – getting Britain off our backs.

Climate Change Denial

Alex Doherty — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:22:16 +0000

Recently, I was having a conversation with one of the country’s most prominent campaigners on climate change. He’d been talking about what could realistically be done to prevent further emissions. He’d made a convincing case that, technologically at least, it would be possible to make the necessary transfers from carbon heavy technologies to renewables within the timeframe needed to prevent disastrous global warming. What was frustrating, he said, was the unwillingness of governments, and perhaps people in general, to make the necessary changes.

We were both a bit tipsy, so I asked him to be honest with me. What chance did we really have preventing disastrous climate change, I asked. Being realistic – being honest, how likely was it? After making me promise not to take his answer outside of the room, he told me: about 5%, he said. If we’re lucky.

Technically, I suppose I have now broken that promise, but since I’m not naming him, I don’t expect he’ll mind. The point is not this one person’s opinion in any case, because it’s an opinion I’ve actually heard enunciated by other climate change campaigners I know – and as an environmentalist of 15 years standing myself, I know quite a few. Pretty much all of them, if you get them alone in a room and perhaps give them a glass or two of wine, would admit to pretty much the same thing. The technology exists, perhaps, but the political will and the economic reality doesn’t. That reality dictates that stopping climate change is nigh on impossible.

This is my impression too, so I’d like to make a controversial suggestion: that climate change campaigners themselves are in denial. Denial of how much good they can do. Denial of how much difference their actions will make. Denial of how much doodoo we are really in.

Here, then, is the case for the prosecution. I’m no climate change expert myself, so please feel free to tear me apart. But as well as I understand it, the situation is this. Scientific consensus tells us that we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases by somewhere between 60 and 80% below current levels in order to stabilise climate impacts. This, of course, will not act to prevent climate change, which appears to be affecting us already, but it might prevent it from getting worse. Furthermore, we need to do this quickly – within three or maybe four decades at most. Climate writer Mark Lynas, in fact, goes further. He reckons that we have at best a decade to stabilise emissions at current levels in order to prevent us tipping into a situation where positive feedback to make disastrous climate change irreversible. And James Lovelock, of course, believes it’s already too late.

Meanwhile, we have a global industrial economy growing at the fastest rate in human history. It is globalised – linked together intimately – to an extent also entirely unprecedented. We have a human population, and a rate of human population growth, that is unprecedented too. Furthermore, the vast majority of the world’s nations have joined hands in a happy capitalist alliance, which puts industrial expansion and economic growth at the heart of their policymaking. That economic growth is based upon fossil fuels. Perhaps ‘based’ is to weedy a word, actually – it is entirely dependent upon them. They make it possible. Nothing else will provide anything like the rate of growth needed to keep that global economy from imploding.

Now, perhaps if we had a hundred years to make that 60 to 80% reduction we could do it, though it would still require a degree of international consensus and co-operation so far unseen in human history. But we don’t have that long. We have, it seems, a few decades at most. Meanwhile the world’s biggest polluter, the United States, barely recognizes the existence of climate change. The other major industrial economies, including those of Europe, may make the right noises, but the chances of them making such deep cuts in such a short time – and impacting on their own ‘global competitiveness’ in the process – are pretty much zero. And all of this is without taking into account the newly industrialising countries – Brazil, China, India etc – who have no intention whatsoever of slowing down the rate of fossil-fuelled growth which is bringing people out of poverty and finally making them players on the global stage.

Imagine you are a visiting alien from another planet. Appraise the situation for yourself, and give me an unbiased and honest account of how likely you think it is that this species, at this time, in this situation, can do what is necessary to prevent potential climate disaster. What is the answer you get? Not good, is it?

In this context, the demands of climate change campaigners for people to fly less, use bikes a bit more, insulate their lofts and go on an annual march look pretty paltry. In fact, they could even look counter-productive, winding people up into a frenzy of personal activity, only to have them crash to the ground when they realise how tiny that activity is in the context of the problem. If we really have perhaps a 5% chance of stopping climate change, don’t those who campaign on it have a duty to be honest with the public? And is their lack of honesty merely a mirror image of the lack of honesty of our politicians when confronting the same issue?

Tough questions, and not ones any eco-activist likes to hear. And I should make it clear that I’m not pointing the finger. I try to limit my own personal emissions, and I can rant about climate change with the best of them. Neither am I making a case for nihilism – for giving up, shrugging our shoulders and letting Shell and BP do what they want.

But I suppose I am making a case for honesty. I think climate change campaigners know more than they’re letting on, but they’re not telling the public. I think that my anonymous friend’s view – that we have maybe a 5% chance at best of fending off disaster – is pretty widely held. If it is, would we not be better off accepting the impossibility of necessary change in the available timeframe, and reworking our responses accordingly?

I suspect that we would. So why are climate change campaigners so reluctant to acknowledge what most people can see with their own eyes – that turning this oil tanker around in such a short time is an impossibility?

Firstly, and most cynically, no one would buy their books or go to their talks if they did. But this is just being mischievous. I suspect that they – we, actually – are in denial as well. Denial of the scale of the problem, but also about the value of using traditional methods of environmental campaigning to solve it. And that’s the point. We are, after all, all professional campaigners aren’t we? It’s what we do. We are ‘activists’ – so we need to be active. Not being active is almost a crime within this world, even if the activity itself doesn’t actually do any noticeable good. Even if it’s displacement activity.

When I discuss this with the climate change campaigners that I know, their argument always boils down to one final point. Maybe you’re right, they say, but even if you are, it’s better to be doing something than to be doing nothing. We must be active. We must campaign. Not to do so would be an abdication of responsibility; it would be to cede ground to Bush and Exxon. This is unthinkable, and so we must be active, even if being active might be less useful than stopping to think about where activism for activism’s sake is actually taking us.

It’s perfectly understandable reaction. But what would you have done, if you were heading up the Light Brigade? Headed straight at the guns of the sake of being active, or stop to think about what you wanted to achieve, what was possible to achieve and how you might actually achieve it. Maybe charging mindlessly up the valley of death shouting, ‘reduce global emissions radically now! we have 10 years!’ is not the best thing to be doing. Because if the means to do it simply do not exist, it stops being campaigning and starts being wishful thinking. And what is the difference between wishful thinking and denial? Answers on a postcard please.

Paul Kingsnorth is a journalist and author or One No, Many Yeses, a travelogue of the anti-globalisation movement. He runs his own lively blog at www.paulkingsnorth.net

The Tesco Chainstore Massacre

Alex Doherty — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:00:12 +0000

This is the second time that Ronald Wright has shown me his selection of nails. He’s evidently proud of them. We’re in the back room of Ron’s ironmonger’s shop, which takes pride of place, by virtue of its longevity, in the thriving high street of Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast. Seventy-five year old Ron has worked here for sixty years, as his father and grandfather did before him, and as his two sons do now. Blythe and Wright, founded in 1897, is truly a family firm.

Out front it’s a busy Saturday afternoon. The sun is shining, and the shop is full of men buying paintbrushes, wheelbarrows, drill bits and dowelling. Staff bustle past, talking about laminate and MDF. Ron tells me to pour myself a cuppa from the huge brown teapot that sits on top of a filing cabinet. Small, white-haired and immaculately dressed in shirt and tie, brown shoes and a blue Blythe and Wright overcoat, Ron is proud of what he has built up, and in his rolling Norfolk accent, he is telling me why.

‘We’re one of the last ironmongers in England ,’ he says. ‘It’s all B&Q now, isn’t it? But look at this. Look at this range.’ He indicates the back wall, which is lined with dozens of trays of nails, in every size, shape and quantity imaginable. He sweeps his hand along it proudly, and looks at me intently through his gold-rimmed glasses.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘you won’t find this in B&Q. You won’t find this range, and you won’t find them sold individually either. In there it’s all little plastic packets, and you get what you’re given. Here, we give the customer what they want – one nail or one hundred. We’ve got them all, and we know what we’re talking about. You don’t see this anymore, do you? Well, you still see it here.’

‘Ironmongers’ is actually a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Blythe and Wright. The word conjures up images, for me anyway, of dusty Dickensian boltholes hung with coal scuttles and cobwebs; something from another century. Blythe and Wright is anything but; this is a big, well-stocked modern shop, selling everything and anything that the hardware enthusiast, DIY-er or gardener could possibly want. It’s popular, well-run and customer friendly; personal service, says Ron, is their speciality.

‘It’s old family firms like this that built England ,’ he declares, proudly. ‘Sheringham may be a small town, but it’s a special one. Did you know that we’re the only town of six or seven thousand people in England that doesn’t straddle a main road? Sheringham wasn’t developed, you see, it evolved. We’re a bit unique, and being unique, we don’t want it spoilt by Tesco.’

Tesco. The name that sends a shudder down the spines of small shopkeepers and independent businesspeople from Truro to Inverness has for the past few years been haunting the dreams of the people of Sheringham. For this small town, huddled on the flat, East Anglian coast, is indeed, in Ron’s words, ‘a bit unique’: it is one of the last towns in Britain without a supermarket. As a result, it has a thriving mass of individual, independent local shops. A walk down its high street is a rare treat, and the character it reveals is a rare thing also. For Sheringham is a town which retains what so many of our towns have lost: independence of character, individuality of outlook – a spirit of its own.

Naturally, then, it seems the ideal place for a vast new Tesco superstore.

That, at least, is the supermarket’s view. Britain ’s fastest-growing and most successful superstore has already captured over 30% of the grocery market in Britain . This year it plans to open over 100 new branches, taking it above 2000 for the first time. One in every eight pounds spent on Britain ’s high streets is spent in Tesco, and the company is expanding rapidly abroad: it now has branches in China , Korea , Poland , Hungary , Thailand , Slovakia , Turkey and Taiwan , and is rumoured to be planning entry into the US market.

But this, apparently, is not enough for Tesco. No corner of the market must be allowed to go untapped. Almost a decade ago, the company identified Sheringham, with its rich local economy and lack of other large competitors, as prime territory. For seven years it engaged in secret negotiations with town, district and county councils, to ensure that it got exactly what it wanted. In cahoots with local councillors, the company redrew the map of Sheringham to accommodate its plans. Only after it had got what it wanted from the council did the company apply for planning permission. And only after that did the people of Sheringham find out what was about to hit them.

When they did find out, there was consternation. To the horror of local shopkeepers, many local residents and even a number of the tourists who flock to this little seaside town every summer, it was revealed that part of the historic town centre was to be demolished to make way for the new store and car park. Sheringham’s fire station and community centre, an old peoples’ home and a row of historic Norfolk flint cottages were to make way for a town-centre superstore serving 38,000 people, in a town whose population numbers less than 8,000. The intention seemed clear: Tesco planned to hoover up the grocery trade not just in Sheringham itself, but in the whole of North Norfolk .

What this would have meant for the rich diversity of Sheringham’s high street was clear enough to those whose living depended on it. One of them is Mike Crowe, whose shop, Crowe’s of Sheringham, is just a few doors away from Blythe and Wright. Crowe’s is a curiosity shop crammed with random nick-nacks: brass pokers and bedpans, baskets of signs that say things like ‘Hands off the barmaid’; plaster ducks; old kettles; lamps; boxes of second-hand cassette players; a bucket of golfballs. Everything is individually priced with a little handwritten stickers.

Mike Crowe has with piercing blue eyes and a face reddened by the sea wind. He’s been in Sheringham for 63 years, and has run this shop for thirty of them. He is also chairman of Sheringham Regeneration, a local group dedicated to improving quality of life in the town. The ironic thing, he says, is that the people of Sheringham would actually like a new food shop. They can see a need for one – but not this one.

‘I think the problem with these big stores is that they’re not really interested in the individual, or in anything different’, he says thoughtfully, leaning on his scuffed wooden shop counter. ‘If Tesco came to Sheringham and said to us “what do you want?” I think the town would be almost unanimous. Ask anyone, and we’ll all say that the town does need a medium-sized food store. We’ve got tiny food shops here and nothing more. But Tesco won’t supply a medium-sized food store because it doesn’t fit in with what they do. There’s no profits there. They want a big food store, with all the extras.

We’re interrupted by a woman who has been browsing around in the buckets and cabinets for the last five minutes.

‘Do you sell fire grates?’ she says to Mike.

‘No’, he says, slowly. ‘Sorry. Try next door.’

‘I already have.’ Mike shrugs apologetically and resumes our conversation.

‘Tesco’s,’ he says, ‘are big business, and big business is not interested in meeting our needs. I don’t think there’s any argument against the concept of a new food shop. It’s the size. It’s the little man feeling they’re getting trodden underfoot. That’s where the destruction comes. You walk down Sheringham’s streets and you can still see individual shops. They’re independent and they’re run by the people who own them. A lot of people say to me, “this is why we come to Sheringham, because of these individual shops”, you know. That’s what makes Sheringham what it is.’

I decide that it’s time to find out what exactly Sheringham is, so I take a slow, studied walk around the town’s three main shopping streets. Sheringham is a picturesque little place. Its buildings are mostly brick and Norfolk flint, its roads are narrow and the town is bound at one end by the arm of the sea wall, sweeping low between the sea and the shore. And it does have a certain feel about it. For a while I’m not quite sure why. It could be the east wind coming in from the sea, or the slight smell of salt in the air, or the wide skies. It takes me a while to pin down what this feeling is, and why, but in the end I do. It is a feeling of individuality, of character, of uniqueness that is lacking in so many of our communities today. Sheringham has a sense of place.

And much of this has to do with the fact that the town is thronging with healthy local businesses. Not the cobwebby, inefficient, backward little dives that supermarkets always like to say towns rely on before they arrive. These are thriving, colourful local shops; everything from traditional chippies to Indian restaurants, ironmongers to pubs, greengrocers to fish shops, tailors to butchers. It’s quite a sight, and it makes me realise how rare it is to see a place like this today. The locals aren’t exaggerating when they say their high street is something special.

I decide to conduct a personal, unscientific survey of Sheringham, to find out just how local its economy is. I get out my notebook and pen and walk the main shopping streets, counting the numbers of shops and businesses that are independent and the number that are chains. As I do so, two things become apparent. Firstly, the sheer variety of shops. This small town has over 42 types of shop, ranging from jewellers to cobblers via pet shops, hairdressers, bookshops and chemists. Secondly, the local far outweighs the national or global. By my reckoning, Sheringham is home to 95 independent local shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants. Chains, either national or global, have just 18 outlets, and six of these are banks.

It’s quite a result, and one that would be hard to replicate in most other towns. If you want to know the reason for it, just ask Reg Grimes. Reg will tell you in no uncertain terms that the lack of a superstore and this thriving local economy go hand-in-hand – and that he intends to keep it that way.

Reg is, if you listen to some local opinion, a one-man crusade against the destruction of Sheringham by Tesco, or any other monster retailer that dares to try and get its grubby hands on his town. Reg is the chairman of the Sheringham Preservation Society, but he is also the founder of SCAMROD – the Sheringham Campaign Against Major Retail Over-Development – which has spearheaded the town’s resistance to Tesco. I find him in the town’s old boatshed, which is in the midst of being converted into a gallery to display local shell art. Reg sits on a paint-stained wooden chair surrounded by empty glass display cases and spirit levels. He has big, grey bushy eyebrows, tinted glasses, a grainy Norfolk accent and a look of determination.

‘Ten years ago, the local plan was amended to include a supermarket’, he explains, ‘About two years later, Tesco came along and put in a planning application for a completely inappropriate site. At around the same time – and quite by coincidence, I’m sure – the district council decided quite arbitrarily to extend the town’s boundaries, to include the community centre as an area that could be redeveloped. Shortly thereafter, Tesco withdrew their initial application and applied for a store on the site it wants now, where the community station and the fire station are.’ He looks at me, steadily.

‘That’s when we decided to really get stuck into them’, he says. ‘We did our research. We got together a local group to look at this. We were quite clear that we were not against a decent foodstore. People want one. What we don’t want is a great big company like Tesco or the other big three – they’re all the same – coming in to wipe out competition and spoil the town. Their policy is to take as much trade from the rest of the town as they possibly can. Wherever they’ve set up store, they’ve come out with the same old rubbish every time. It’s identical: “this will encourage more people into the town.” Utter rubbish. People go there with their cars, there’s a two hour restriction on their carparks, people go in, buy their food, get in their car and go home. Their sole purpose in coming here is to capture a large new audience. The actual population here is tiny – maybe 4000 households. They want 38,000 customers. What they’re looking at is bringing in people from surrounding areas, in their cars. It increases traffic as well as everything else…’

As Reg and SCAMROD began looking at the Tesco plan, they began to uncover more and more things that made them deeply uncomfortable. They discovered that the council, which had just spent £2.5 million of public money refurbishing a block of council flats, now proposed to allow Tesco to demolish them to make way for its new store. They discovered that towns of similar size all over Norfolk and elsewhere had seen a rapid collapse in their local business base after Tesco arrived. They discovered that the flint cottages to be demolished were to be replaced by new flats on the town’s allotments, with an access road across common land.

They discovered, too, that the district council, charged with representing the interests of its people, believed that it had no chance of doing so. ‘They are too big and powerful for us’, said the leader of the council, John Sweeney, at the time. ‘If we try and deny them they will appeal and we cannot afford to fight a planning appeal and lose. If they got costs it would bankrupt us.’

And so, apparently believing that they had no choice, the council’s planning committee voted to approve Tesco’s application in 2004. But they hadn’t banked on SCAMROD and the strength of local attachment to that sense of place. Reg and his group swung into action, organising a 900-signature petition, filing objections at every possible point, and working to convince councillors, the local media and the town as a whole that Tesco would be a disaster for Sheringham. Their battle made the national press. Tim e passed, and as it did, Tesco’s luck began to run out.

While Tesco jumped through hoops and battled increasingly vociferous local opinion, government planning guidance on superstores changed, and doubts grew amongst local authorities about the wisdom of their decision to give Tesco the go-ahead. Eventually the district council caved in and commissioned an independent report on the Tesco proposal. When it was published last year, the report’s conclusion was unequivocal: the Tesco plan was bad for Sheringham – the least justified of the four major supermarket applications currently under consideration in the surrounding district. It recommended that such big stores should stick to bigger towns.

The report buoyed up SCAMROD and forced a rethink in the district council. Despite frantic lobbying, the tide had turned against Tesco. Last September, the council’s planning committee, which had approved the superstore application two years before, rejected it by twenty votes to nil. All their power and influence had apparently availed them nothing. Tesco had lost.

You might expect Reg and the townsfolk to be triumphalist, but they remain, instead, cautiously optimistic. Tesco could still appeal against the decision, warns Reg. Anything could still happen. Tesco, after all, are not known for giving up. But for now, at least, Sheringham remains alive.

‘When Tesco first came, they said their store would be up and running here by 2003’, says Reg. ‘That was their aim. So we’ve done quite a good job so far, I think.’ And he smiles, quietly.

Also smiling, back in his shop on the bustling high street, is Mike Crowe. Like the other local shopkeepers, businesspeople and residents who objected to, or took up arms against, the Tesco invasion, Mike is happy with the result. He is happy because he knows what was at stake, and what questions were posed by this local battle with national implications.
‘It’s about what we are, and what we want to be’, he says, simply. ‘An individual town, or just like everywhere else? An individual life, or a life controlled by someone else? That’s what it was all about. And for now, we got the right answers.’

Alternative Pre-Budget Report

Tim Holmes — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 03:12:15 +0000

Mr Speaker This is my tenth pre-budget report, and under this government the tenth consecutive year of growth. I can report not only the longest period of sustained growth in our history, but of all the major economies America, France, Germany, Japan Britain has enjoyed the longest post war period of continuous growth.

Ten years ago Britain was 7th in the G7, bottom of the league for national income per head. In the last two years Britain has been second only to the USA. In no other decade has Britain’s personal wealth – up 60 per cent – grown so fast.

I therefore conclude that we are, as a nation, one of the best-placed on Earth to respond to the serious environmental challenges that face our world.

Mr Speaker, it is not unusual for Pre-Budget Reports to receive media attention before they are announced in this house. I was amused to read reports of what I intend to say today in this mornings press.

It was suggested that I intend to announce £1 billion-worth of green taxes. It was suggested that I intend to raise petrol duty by 1.25% and double air passenger duty finally bringing it back to the level it was at when this government took office in 1997. There has been talk of tax relief for biofuels and exempting carbon-neutral homes from stamp duty.

Mr Speaker it is clear that such paltry measures would make little or no difference to the environmental challenges we face. We are going to have to do a lot better than that. Starting today, I intend to unleash the great radical, reforming spirit of this party, the spirit embodied by of Bevan, Attlee and Beveridge, to save not just this nation, but the planet.

So I am announcing today the following measures.

Firstly, it has become clear that our methods of calculating wealth, and consequently growth, are skewed and inaccurate. Companies are able to claim financial success and consequent profit by externalising their environmental costs onto society. This is damaging for the environment and for the economy.

So, Mr Speaker, I am announcing the creation today of a commission which will investigate this issue as a matter of urgency, and report back to me in six months with proposals to force all companies in the United Kingdom to internalise all their environmental costs. This may involve, for example, airlines meeting the costs of combatting global warming, supermarkets being taxed according to the distance their products have traveled, and Top Gear presenters being forced to finance the clean-up of road accidents.

We anticipate, Mr Speaker, that the result of such a change will be the relocalisation of economic activity, and the dying-out of destructive industries.

To augment this, I am announcing today a major package of incentives and financial support for companies conducting research into sustainable and renewable technologies.

I am also announcing a progressive removal of the red tape which prevents small and local businesses from competing fairly with multinational companies.

This will be combined with a windfall tax on all multinational retail outlets operating on Britains high streets, with the money raised going to fund the promotion of local food production.

Recognising that a modern economy cannot operate without a modern transport system, I am also announcing today a package of £10 billion of initial spending on the construction of new railway lines, a modern, national coach network, the restructuring of major city centres around pedestrians and cycle transport, and research and development into hydrogen fuel cells. Funding will be raised by diverting the £600m which someone wanted me to spend on the disastrous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, introducing congestion charging on all major roads and
progressively raising fuel taxes.

Mr Speaker, I am also announcing today the free insulation of all houses in Britain and the introduction, in consultation with relevant departments, of regulations requiring all newbuilt houses in the country to be fully carbon-neutral, from 2008.

On the subject of housebuilding, Mr Speaker, it is clear that current plans to construct 200,000 new homes a year over the next two decades are unsustainable. It is also clear that the recent report by Kate Barker, proposing a relaxation of planning laws in favour of big business and developers is frankly, crazy. I am therefore announcing the sacking of Kate Barker with immediate effect. She will be replaced by Simon Fairlie, a longtime campaigner on sustainable planning, who will be a given a remit to reform planning laws to encourage low-impact development and ecological construction.

Mr Speaker, I am confident that this package of measures will give our country a headstart in creating a green economy for the 21st century. And I commend this statement to the House.

Still Waters Run Deep

Tim Holmes — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:36:15 +0000

As we stand looking out over Thrupp Lake, it begins to rain. The rain shakes the leaves of the oaks and the willows, and frays the surface of the water. Canada geese and swans look unconcerned as the five of us put up the hoods on our raincoats and huddle under the trees.

Its a strangely tranquil place. A 30-acre lake, bristling with wildlife, surrounded by mature trees and studded with islands on which waterfowl nest and gather you could imagine, standing here, that there was not another human being for miles. Yet we are standing in one of the most populated parts of south-east England, only minutes away from housing estates, motorways and ominously one of the countrys biggest coal-fired power stations.

With me are four local residents, who know and love this quiet, unassuming, unspectacular but beautiful place. They walk their dogs here, come here to think, to watch wildlife or just catch a breath of air. They live nearby and, as new housing estates, business parks, road widening schemes and the vagaries of breakneck development hem them in further every year, Thrupp Lake has become a refuge.
There are a lot of people living round here, says Jo Cartmell, a wildlife expert who has just finished scanning the mud of the banks for otter footprints. This is a place you can come for a bit of beauty and tranquillity, which is so precious these days. For me, its a much-treasured area. Ive been here for 20 years now. I couldnt believe when I first moved here that a lake of this size, with all this wildlife, was literally so close to home. Jo, Basil, Marjorie and Lynda walk me around Thrupp Lake as the rain continues, creating a mist of spray in the trees. Their knowledge and love of this landscape is clear as they point out long-tailed tits in the branches and coots scooting across the mudflats. They tell me of sedge warblers, Cettis (pronounced chettys) warblers, whitethroats, otters, water voles, firecrests, herons, bats, dragonflies, terns, cormorants, carp and orchids, all of which they have seen in or around the lakes, just minutes from their homes.

They tell me about the swans that nested on one of the islands, and the fox that swam across and ate their eggs. They tell me about the old ladies who come in wheelchairs to look at the view and watch the birds; about the anglers, the joggers and the schoolchildren who enjoy it.Then they take me around the corner and show me the future.

Fifty yards away from Thrupp Lakes tranquil beauty, across an old railway line, is a wide expanse of dark grey slime, studded with weeds and scrub. The slime is dangerous and unstable the industrial equivalent of quicksand. It is also laced with arsenic, chromium, boron, cadmium, antimony, vanadium, barium and copper. It is surrounded by a high, barbed-wire topped fence with KEEP OUT signs along it.

Four years ago this, too, was a wildlife-rich lake. Now it is a waste pit, fi lled with hundreds of thousands of tons of ash. The ancient, dirty, coal-burning Didcot power station, just visible above the tree line, killed the lake by piping its waste coal ash straight into it. Nine other lakes in the area have met the same fate. Only two remain, of which Thrupp is by far the biggest. Now, Didcot wants to fill it, too, with poison ash.

But it is meeting fierce resistance.

The lake is a County Wildlife Site, and sits in the middle of the Oxfordshire Green Belt. Yet the county council has recommended that the dumping go ahead. The RSPB, English Nature and the local wildlife trust have not objected. Neither has the Environment Agency.

All that stands between the wildlife of Thrupp Lake and 500,000 of tons of waste ash, in fact, are Jo, Basil, Marjorie and Lynda: four determined, respectable, middle-aged middle Englanders who have set up a spirited and widely-supported campaign group called Save Radley Lakes. And what their determined local campaign has exposed goes far beyond their village of Radley, and its nearby power station. This is about more than just the future of an Oxfordshire lake. It is about electricity, waste disposal, climate change, government policy and corporate power. It is quite a story.

It starts in 1947, when the owner of the land that is now the Radley Lakes complex began mining it for gravel.

Over the next few decades, gravel extraction created 12 deep pits, which filled with water and, over time, became a collection of lakes. As wildlife began to colonise them they became popular with local people. Walkers, anglers, birdwatchers, joggers, families, cyclists and parties of schoolchildren began to frequent them and they became a popular local landmark. By the early 1980s, the 12 Radley Lakes had become so popular and well-used that proposals were discussed to turn the complex into a public water park and nature reserve, with separate lakes for boating, angling, windsurfing and wildlife. The idea was widely supported locally. But in the intervening period, something else had happened to seal the fate of the lakes.

Didcots coalburning power station began operating in 1970, on a 300-acre site a few miles from Radley. Quite apart from its contribution to global warming, coal burning creates a huge amount of localised waste. At full capacity, Didcot can consume five million tonnes of coal a year. The coal is pulverised into dust and fed into giant furnaces, which create the heat that generates electricity. But this process also creates waste ash, known in the industry as Pulverised Fuel Ash, or PFA. Didcot can produce 3,000 tonnes of PFA in a single day up to a million tonnes a year. And it has to be disposed of somewhere.

Until 1984, Didcots PFA was dumped in a nearby landfill site. But this soon filled up, and other potential landfills nearby had already been booked for the disposal of waste from London. One condition of the construction of Didcots coal plant in 1964 was that PFA could not be disposed of by road, because of the vast number of lorries that would be required to take it away. So the power station needed another nearby site to dump its waste, and its gaze alighted on the Radley Lakes.

In 1982, before many local people knew what was happening, Didcot had been granted planning permission to pipe its PFA into the Radley Lakes, just five miles away. So nearly a wildlife and water park, they were now to be a landfill site for industrial waste. But there were conditions attached. Any lake filled with PFA would have to be restored by the power station to a natural state afterwards. And they would need specific approval for every stage of the operation.

Over the next 20 years, 10 of the Radley Lakes were filled with PFA and fenced off from the public. Only two remained: Thrupp Lake and its smaller neighbour, Bullfield Lake. Local people hoped that these, at least, would be preserved. Then, last year, Didcots new owner, the German-owned electricity firm NPower, applied for planning permission to fill the last two lakes with PFA as well.

Standing on the thin spit of land that separates Bullfield from Thrupp Lake, Jo Cartmell shakes her head. There is a kind of astonishment in her voice, as if she cant quite believe what is happening. Jo has lived here for 20 years. She has seen the other 10 lakes disappear. She is determined to save at least this one.
What amazes me is that the people from NPower didnt even come to see the lake! she says. They embarked on all these negotiations and they didnt even see the place. If they had done, and if they had even an ounce of nous between them, they would never have embarked on the plan to fill it.

NPower, of course, sees things rather differently. Its press officer, Kelly Brown, who says she has been to Thrupp Lake, is keen to explain to me what a good job her company does for the environment. Shes also keen to stress that, in her words, there is absolutely no alternative to disposing of PFA in Thrupp Lake. NPower doesnt call it Thrupp Lake, though. It refers to it merely as Lake E; the latest in a long line of waste disposal pits, labelled A to P, which it says were a scar on the landscape when first mined for gravel, and are now being restored by the company.

Technically, says Kelly Brown, sternly, Lake E is not a public amenity. All these lakes that people walk around, theyre actually private land. Eighteen months ago, we applied for permission to fill Lakes E and F (otherwise known as Thrupp and Bullfield Lakes) with PFA. There was a public consultation, which we studied carefully. Then we submitted a new proposal, to fill only Lake E. We have now guaranteed not to fill Lake F. And much of the land which is now Lake E private land, remember will be restored ecologically, and become a public park.

The way she puts it, it sounds quite nice. Soothing, even. And she hasnt even got to the economics yet.
Didcots coal burning power station meets the electricity needs of up to two million people, she explains.
And of course, it generates a lot of waste. If we cant secure a 24-hour, seven days a week means of disposing of that waste, then theres the possibility that power supplies will be disrupted. We have explored all the options very carefully, and I can assure you that there is no alternative at all. We have to use Lake E for PFA.

So far, so simple. Yet other issues lurk in the background, making the story much more intriguing and complex.

Firstly, theres the issue of PFA itself. Far from being a useless waste material, it is eminently reuseable. In great demand in the construction industry, it is used in concrete, road building, mine grouting, coastal defences and underwater construction. Didcot power station has recently built a plant to convert its PFA for industrial use as it is keen to trumpet. But there is no legal obligation on it to do so, and less than half of its PFA is currently reused. The rest goes into the lakes.

Secondly, as NPower is keen to point out, the law is against it in at least one respect. For years, PFA was not buried but reused. But in 1974 the European Commission introduced the European Waste Framework. In what was presented as an attempt to protect the environment, it classified PFA as a waste material rather than a by-product. The result, however, was that it was simpler and cheaper for companies simply to dump it than look for alternatives.

At the same time, no law exists in Britain as it does in many other European countries demanding that a large percentage of PFA is reused or recycled. From NPowers point of view, all this adds up to one conclusion – the cheapest and easiest thing to do with its Didcot waste is to tip it into a series of local lakes.

Then, in 1982, when the first lake at Radley began to be filled, locals were assured that PFA was entirely inert not toxic, not polluting, not dangerous. However, this was followed by another European Directive, which enforced a new way of PFA disposal before the waste was tipped into a drained lake, the lake needed to be lined with thick clay, to prevent any leaching of toxins into the groundwater. In other words, they PFA was potentially toxic after all. Suddenly, too, the filling of the lakes became a much bigger scar on the landscape. Whereas before, the lakes would just be filled up to ground level, they must now be surrounded by giant clay bunds up to four metres high, blocking off any view of what remains.

Basil Crowley, the chairman of Save Radley Lakes, has worked very hard to get his head around all the information and arguments, and he is dismissive of NPowers insistence that destroying Thrupp Lake is the only option available.

Ill tell you what this is really about, he says. The reason NPower are going after the lake so determinedly, and resisting alternatives, is that they want to get their moneys worth. They paid £3.2 million for Thrupp Lake, before theyd even been given full permission to dispose of PFA in it. Plus, he says, the power station is coming to the end of its life. In 2015, yet another European Directive comes into play, which will require Didcots coal plant either to clean up its act, or to close. NPower has decided to close it.
Since its got no long-term future, its not worth their while doing anything else, snorts Basil.

Finally, Save Radley Lakes simply do not believe NPowers insistence that Thrupp Lake will be enough to suit their needs. According to their calculations, Thrupp is not big enough to take all of Didcots PFA waste for the next nine years. They say it will only take around 20 per cent of it before it is full and NPower will need to look somewhere else. They also point out, correctly, that on the site of Didcot power station itself sits another gravel pit. Much newer than Thrupp, and with virtually no wildlife value, it would be a perfect place to dump the PFA. It even has planning permission for dumping. But it has been bought by a company that plans to use it for landfill from London while the waste PFA from 100 yards away is pumped, instead, into Thrupp Lake.

It makes no sense at all, when you put it all together, says Basil. The reality is that for NPower this is the cheap and easy option, and no-one will stop them.

And it seems, no-one will. English Nature couldnt designate the site a Site of Special Scientific Interest because they couldnt find anything rare enough living on it. The local wildlife trust has remained mute. The Environment Agency is happy that no laws are being broken. And NPower is keen to play down the wildlife value of the site.

Save Radley Lakes produced a report recently which was full of inaccuracies about the lakes wildlife, insists Kelly Brown. They say there are water voles there. They say there are otters. Well, we employed a team of specialist ecologists, who produced a very detailed report. There are no otters or water voles. Its not the right environment for them. And when we have restored the site, its ecology will be richer than it is now. Our restoration work is second to none.

Tell that to Jo Cartmell, who has seen otter tracks, or to the other local people who have seen and photographed otters there. Tell it to the Environment Agency, come to that, who verified one of the sightings. Tell it to Basil Crowley, who employed a qualified environmental surveyor of his own, who came back with evidence of water voles; or to Jo, who has studied them for years. Tell it to the kingfishers and bats who will have nowhere to nest once the filling begins.

There is also the question of what restoration actually means. Before the gravel pits were dug here in the 1950s, it was farmland. Originally, Didcot promised to restore it to agriculture. But these days, agricultural land is much less in demand. Plus, the intervening five decades have seen the scrubby gravel pits develop into mature lakes.

Kelly Brown sends me a picture of what NPowers restoration will look like. Its full of detail about the lagoon it will dig for the water birds, the native trees it will plant around the edges, the burrowing sites it will create for kingfishers to nest in, the small pond to be created especially for amphibians. In short, NPower is not restoring the original farmland its creating a smaller, cheaper, less wild version of the existing lake; one dug out of toxic ash, rather than soil. Its not terribly reassuring.

Ultimately, though, Thrupp Lake has a problem a problem that may doom it. It is not special enough. Take the otters, for instance. Otters have been seen here, explains Jo, but we cant prove that theyve bred here. If we could, we could stop the destruction, because otter breeding habitats are protected. But otters just being here doesnt count, were told. Its a ridiculous bureaucratic way to look at it. We know the place is suitable for otters. We know otters have been seen here. We know otters have been seen on the Thames, five

miles away, well within their range, which is 20 miles for a male otter and 10 miles for a female. Even if theyre not breeding here now, its a perfect breeding site for them. But that apparently doesnt count.

A similar rule applies to the kingfishers. Yes, there are kingfishers at Thrupp Lake, and kingfishers are protected but their habitat isnt. Yes, it is rich in wildlife but not rich enough, and not in the right sort of wildlife to become a protected nature reserve. To the local people, Thrupp Lake is a special place. To the conservation bureaucracy, it is apparently not special enough. And to NPower, its not even Thrupp Lake it is Lake E; a location, not a place. A utility, not a landscape. An ideal site for the disposal of poisonous waste that nobody wants, and nobody is supposed to see.

NPowers application to fill Thrupp Lake is currently with Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for local government, who can either reject it, accept it or deliberate on it for longer. NPower is confident she will accept it. If she does, Save Radley Lakes say they will take it to the High Court. In an ideal world, they say, they would like both remaining lakes to be locally-owned, locally-run resources. NPower could have a great big PR coup if they said Weve decided to give it to the community instead of dumping in it, says Marjorie. It would repay so handsomely for such a small amount of money.

Meanwhile, though, the fight goes on. And, as it does so, questions hang in the air. Who is to blame for this situation? The EU, for making it harder for the company to do anything else? Oxfordshire County Council, for rolling over before a big, powerful company that provides local employment? The government, for failing to insist that PFA is recycled rather than dumped? Or NPower, for lazily dumping waste it could reuse or recycle, or for turning an immediate short-term profit by selling a potential dump on their land to accommodate Londons
waste?

Back on the shore of Thrupp Lake, what seems clear to me is that to fill this place with waste ash would be a crime. What amazes me, says Jo, is that on the one hand, were all being behoven by the government to reuse and recycle more, and rightly so. On the other hand, a giant corporation is allowed to do this, which is fly dumping on a huge scale. Theres no joined-up thinking at all. When you think about it, none of it actually makes sense.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

At the time of going to press, the fate of Radley Lakes lay in the hands of Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for local government. By the time you read this she will have decided either to allow NPower to go ahead or to hold a public inquiry. Whatever the decision, though, Save Radley Lakes says there are three things you can do:

1 Dont buy electricity from NPower. If you already do, switch to Ecotricity (page 88). Write to the company that its destruction of Thrupp Lake has made you take your money elsewhere. Its website is www.npower.com

2 Get involved. Save Radley Lakes is looking, in particular, for legal experts to help with their case. They
would also welcome donations to their fighting fund, which can be made through their website (see right).

3 Check the Save Radley Lakes website. Whatever Ruth Kellys decision, the fight will continue, and the campaign will tell you how you can help. Log on to www.saveradleylakes.org.uk

HOW TO FIGHT A PLANNING APPLICATION

The Save Radley Lakes campaign is an example of an effective, wellorganised, determined campaign in the face of local environmental destruction. If you are trying to fight the destruction of local green spaces, consider the following points:

■ Be quick and organised. Some challenges need to be registered within six weeks of planning permission approval (see www. planningsanity.co.uk).

■ Does the development threaten any protected species, or affect any Special Areas of Conservation? This can make your case stronger (see www.jncc.gov.uk).

■ The Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 grant members of the public access to environmental information held by public bodies (see www.cfoi.org.uk).

■ The standard of Wednesbury Unreasonableness can sometimes be invoked if an award of planning permission can be said to be so unreasonable that no reasonable person acting reasonably could have made it.

■ If planning has already been granted, the decision can be challenged through a judicial review in the High Court (see www.earthrights.co.uk)

■ The costs of a full judicial review can amount to £20,000. Consider applying to the Legal Services Commission for legal aid (see www.legalservices.gov.uk).

■ Registering your protest group as a limited liability company can provide some financial protection for individual members should the case fail.