State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Although self-sufficiency was never more than a minority interest, composting, recycling and tending allotments did enjoy growing and sustained popularity. Even the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition eagerly jumped aboard the bandwagon, with displays showing the homeowners of 1975 how they could make wall lights from empty tin cans, rugs from old cardigans, a lamp from cigarette packets, a chair from drainpipes and a table from corrugated iron sheeting, which was surely carrying recycling to post-apocalyptic extremes. For some people, however, growing one’s own vegetables and saving on electricity were not enough: as Gordon Rattray Taylor had shown in The Doomsday Book, the situation was so desperate that only collective action could stave off disaster. One such group were the members of the Conservation Society, which had been founded in 1966 (by James Lees-Milne, among others) after a series of letters to the Observer about the dangers of massive population growth. During the next few years, the society devoted itself not only to population policy, family planning and abortion reform, but to water conservation, national parks projects, the problems of disappearing hedgerows, the urgent need for recycling and the campaigns against Concorde and the Maplin scheme. With fewer than 5,000 members in 1970, it was hardly a mass movement, but two years later it scored a notable triumph by exposing cyanide dumping in Warwickshire, a coup that paved the way for the Deposit of Poisonous Waste Act. By the beginning of 1973 its membership reached more than 8,700, but then it began to decline – not because of any defects on the society’s part, but because another group had captured the limelight.46

  In February 1971, the environment reporter of The Times alerted his readers to a new publication, The Environmental Handbook, which had been produced by a small group of young activists in a little office space in Covent Garden. It was ‘a good 40p’s worth for all do-it-yourself environmentalists’, he thought, quoting its message to readers: ‘Be as subversive, clever, radical, yet constructive as you possibly can.’ Its authors certainly lived up to their own injunction. On 10 May, sixty young members of Friends of the Earth (inspired by a similarly named association across the Atlantic) marched from Pall Mall to Schweppes House in Connaught Place, demanding that the company change its policy of having non-returnable bottles. When they arrived at the firm’s headquarters they listened to a poetry reading, as was then obligatory at protest marches. But it was what they did next that caught the attention of the press, as they ceremonially dumped some 1,500 glass bottles on the doorstep, with the warning that more would follow unless Schweppes gave in. It was a brilliant public relations coup (aided by the fact that, amazingly, not one of the bottles broke): the next day, The Times reported, ‘supporters of FOE’s campaign kept the telephone ringing in the group’s tiny office’.47

  From a small band of radical students (the British branch’s founder, Graham Searle, had been vice president of the NUS just a year beforehand), Friends of the Earth mushroomed into one of the largest and most influential green groups in the country. Within barely a year, The Times was calling it ‘the most effective pressure group probably since the days of Shelter under Mr Des Wilson’. In 1971, Friends of the Earth had eight local branches; by 1976 there were 140, and by 1980 there were 250, with 17,000 people having registered as supporters. It succeeded because it was daring, irreverent, clever and often funny; crucially, it was also highly decentralized, allowing local activists to set their own tone. It was a new kind of organization, assertive and dynamic rather than nostalgically conservationist, aiming not just to preserve what was left of nature, but to roll back the tide of industry and pollution. It produced pamphlets on everything from roads and pollution to uranium mining and the whaling industry; it stopped Rio Tinto-Zinc mining for copper in Snowdonia, and lobbied the government for a ban on imported products made from endangered species. Funnily enough, though, the one thing it did not do was to persuade Schweppes to change its policy on returnable bottles.48

  A common criticism of groups like Friends of the Earth was that they were merely opportunities for spoiled middle-class do-gooders to get together and indulge their bleeding hearts, and that they offered nothing to working-class households who supposedly had neither the time nor the money to worry about footling issues like the future of the planet. Trade union leaders, for instance, tended to be highly suspicious. ‘My members have achieved decent living standards and they want further improvements,’ boasted the electricians’ leader Frank Chapple. ‘They can identify with the advance of new technology and its benefits, not with the muesli-eaters, ecology freaks, loony leftists and other nutters who make up the anti-nuclear brigade.’ But perhaps the fiercest critic was Labour’s shadow environment spokesman, Anthony Crosland, whose obsession with economic growth meant that he was virtually blind to the campaigners’ argument. In a sense, Crosland was still dining out on his reputation as the rising star of the 1950s; as he grew older and wearier with the disappointments of office, his thinking became coarser, more rigid, closed to new ideas. Conservationism, he told his wife, was ‘morally wrong when we still have so many pressing needs that can only be met if we have economic growth’. The environmentalists suffered, he thought, from a ‘middle-class and upper-class bias’ (which was a bit rich coming from the Highgate public school boy who had set out to smash the grammar schools), and they were ‘kindly and dedicated people, but were usually affluent and wanted to kick the ladder down behind them’ (ditto). Invited on television to debate the point with representatives of environmental groups, Crosland ostentatiously dropped off to sleep during a short film about the dangers of development; afterwards, he claimed that he had merely been ‘resting his weary eyes’. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as one of his fellow MPs told him, he was ‘more hated by environmentalists than any man I know’.49

  In some respects, though, Crosland’s analysis was not far short of the mark. Environmentalism appealed above all to the well-meaning, well-educated middle-class professionals who throughout Britain’s modern history had written letters to the press, signed petitions and attended public meetings. A survey of people who read the new magazine The Ecologist in 1971, for example, revealed that 59 per cent belonged to the professional middle classes, with a very high proportion of teachers and scientists, and a further 33 per cent were students and sixth-formers. Indeed, in many respects the ecology movement was the natural successor to CND, which had fallen from fashion after the nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963 and the rise of détente. Not only was there a strong social and cultural affinity between CND and environmentalism – what might be called the Guardian–folk music–chunky knitwear tendency – but there is some evidence that many people moved instinctively from one movement to the other, following the tides of political fashion. They were the heirs to the dissenters and Nonconformists of old, the kind of people who had once inveighed against bishops, slavery, armaments and empire – which automatically invited the suspicion of well-heeled politicians like Crosland who fancied themselves as tribunes of the working classes. When one of Crosland’s old Oxford pupils went to a Friends of the Earth meeting in December 1977, for example, he was impressed by their enthusiasm but disturbed by their bourgeois leanings. ‘They were an overwhelmingly middle-class group,’ recorded the former Viscount Stansgate, now plain ‘Tony’ Benn. ‘They appeal to some radicals and dissenters, but I felt they could be drawn into the mainstream of establishment opinion without actually making any difference to the way in which society was run.’ He advised them to ‘turn your mind to the power structure’ – which, given that Benn was then Secretary of State for Energy, was precisely what they had been trying to do all evening.50

  One of the remarkable things about environmentalism – confusing to some, refreshing to others – was the way in which it blurred the traditional ideological division between left and right. While both the Tories and Labour made growth and modernization their central objectives, environmental groups’ challenge to modernity made it hard to locate them within the conventional spectrum.* A good example was the magazine The Ecol
ogist, which was launched in July 1970 by Edward Goldsmith, known as Teddy. Born into a wealthy banking family and the elder brother of the ruthless financier James Goldsmith, Teddy was a rich man, free to travel the world indulging his passion for anthropology and his fascination with what he called ‘tribal peoples’. He became convinced not only that tribal societies were being wiped out by economic progress, but that the human race itself was at risk, with man’s basic nature as a hunter-gatherer having been eroded by centuries of decadence. By the end of the 1960s, Goldsmith had decided that it was time to fight back, and so he invested £20,000 of his own money, as well as £4,500 of his brother’s, in the new magazine. More funds came from rich friends like the eccentric casino owner John Aspinall, who ran Mayfair’s Clermont Club, kept a tigress and two brown bears in his private zoo, and spent his spare time fantasizing about a right-wing military coup. And the first issue of The Ecologist was apocalyptic to say the least, with a cover story warning of world famine, urgent appeals for population control and a public sterilization drive, and a suitably melodramatic editorial by Goldsmith himself. It was ‘only a question of time’, he wrote, before the planet’s resources were exhausted, and then ‘that already tottering technological superstructure – the “technosphere” – that is relentlessly swallowing up our biosphere, will collapse like a house of cards, and the swarming human masses, brought into being to sustain it, will in turn find themselves deprived of even this imperfect means of sustenance’.51

  The Ecologist was a big fish in the pond of the early green movement: as the historian Meredith Veldman remarks, it was a ‘slick, well-produced and expensive publication’, and ‘brought an air of professionalism to a movement often beset by amateurism’. Many of its themes – the dangers of nuclear power, the threat of motorway expansion, the folly of supersonic aircraft, the blind brutality of industrial farming – reflected what other green groups were saying in the 1970s, and the magazine was rarely less than provocative. On the other hand, Goldsmith’s obsession with the ‘hunter-gatherer’ ideal and his insistence that tribal societies were ‘the normal units of social organization’, which in almost every issue were obediently echoed by his assistant Robert Allen, struck more than a few readers as downright odd. In its respect for nature, its fascination with community, its rejection of materialism and its obsession with a lost pre-industrial golden age, The Ecologist was not so different from other green groups, or indeed from The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down. But when Goldsmith demanded an immediate end to immigration, or ferociously condemned welfare programmes that interfered with the ‘natural controls’ of infant mortality, or denounced women’s liberation, he seemed less like a nostalgic idealist and more like a cranky arch-reactionary.

  In some ways, indeed, his magazine blurred the lines between two very different kinds of groups in the early 1970s: the middle-class conservationists and environmentalists fretting about the state of the world, and the discontented Mayfair playboys muttering about toppling the government and turning the clock back. And on occasion, its obsession with hunter-gatherer medievalism produced positively bizarre results, such as when, in July 1975, Robert Allen produced a wild encomium to the Khmer Rouge, who had just had forced Cambodia’s entire population to march into the countryside in a bloody attempt to build peasant Communism from the ground up. ‘They seem to be doing their best to ensure that urban parasitism cannot reoccur,’ Allen wrote, commending them on their decision to close the factories, smash up the banks and destroy the towns’ water supplies. ‘They deserve our best wishes, our sympathy and our attention. We might learn something.’52

  For a brief period, however, The Ecologist genuinely set the tone of environmental debate in Britain. Its undoubted high point came in January 1972, when the magazine published a special issue billed as a ‘Blueprint for Survival’, which sold out immediately, was then published as a book by the small imprint of Tom Stacey, and was finally picked up by Penguin. As usual, its guiding lights were Goldsmith and Allen, and the message, laid out in detailed bullet-point form, was as doom-laden and melodramatic as ever. Much of the world would run out of food ‘within the next 30 years,’ it warned; the reserves of all but a few metals would be gone ‘within 50 years’, and ‘the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet’ would come ‘within the lifetimes of our children’. Not unpredictably, Goldsmith advised his readers that only a ‘stable society’, abandoning pretensions to material progress, but embracing man’s hunter-gatherer instincts, could save the world. Industrial development must cease; population must be tightly controlled; and people must live in self-sufficient units of no more than 500 people each, with the political system conducted on a largely local basis. And in some ways the Blueprint’s vision sounded distinctly authoritarian. ‘There is no doubt that the long transitional stage that we and our children must go through will impose a heavy burden on our moral courage and will require great restraint,’ it warned, adding that ‘legislation and the operations of police forces and the courts will be necessary to reinforce this restraint’.53

  If nothing else, the Blueprint was a brilliant public relations coup. Before it was published, Robert Allen asked thirty-six eminent scientists and conservationists for their approval, including Peter Scott, Sir Julian Huxley, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor W. A. Robson and Sir Frank Fraser Darling, a member of the Royal Committee on Environmental Pollution whose Reith Lectures had done much to arouse public anxiety about environmental damage. Allen then printed their names on the inside front cover, giving careless readers the impression that they had written the Blueprint themselves. He also managed to get Sir Frank Fraser Darling to chair a press conference on the day the magazine came out, ensuring yet more publicity: indeed, the next day saw reports in almost every national newspaper, including on the front pages of both The Times and the New York Times. Even in his wildest dreams, Goldsmith could hardly have hoped for better coverage. In the Guardian, Anthony Tucker compared the Blueprint’s impact to that of the Communist Manifesto; in The Times, a long leader concluded that its thesis was ‘too plausible to be dismissed’; in the Sunday Times, Lewis Chester wrote that it was ‘nightmarishly convincing’; and even the Daily Mail thought that its ‘prophecy of a world blindly careening towards self-destruction remains profoundly disturbing’, and that ‘the prophets of doom deserve to be heard with as much respect as those who continue to worship the Gross National Product’. If that were not enough, a week or so later 187 scientists, including nine Fellows of the Royal Society and twenty university professors, signed a letter to The Times explaining that though they were unable to sign the Blueprint because of its errors of fact or emphasis, they welcomed it as a ‘major contribution to current debate’ and a reminder that only population control, conservation and recycling could save the planet. ‘Now letters are written daily to The Times,’ recorded James Lees-Milne, a great admirer of the Blueprint, ‘and everyone who thinks at all realises that the future of the earth is literally at stake.’54

  Although the Blueprint was, perhaps fortunately, never put into effect, there is no doubt that it caused a considerable stir. In the Commons, the junior environment minister Eldon Griffiths called it a ‘quite remarkable document’, and Goldsmith even got to present his ideas to the Environment Secretary, Peter Walker, at an informal meeting in February 1972, although nothing really came of it. All the same, environmentalism seemed to be on the march. In January both the Lancet and the British Medical Journal published letters signed by dozens of doctors demanding immediate action to halt global over-population, while on the very same day that The Ecologist published the Blueprint for Survival, the American ecological doom-monger Paul Ehrlich addressed a capacity crowd at Westminster’s Central Hall, telling them that Britain held ‘the key to the entire problem’, and that ‘educated people look a great deal to England to lead the way’. In radical environmentalist circles, it was hard to miss the feeling of millenarian excitement, of
‘high euphoria’, as one of Goldsmith’s colleagues later remembered. In the very near future, it seemed, all politics would be green.55

  It was in Coventry, of all places, that this new mood bore concrete results. Towards the end of 1972, a group of friends started meeting in a local pub to discuss their shared interest in environmental issues, and in the New Year four of them – Tony and Lesley Whittaker, who were both solicitors, an estate agent called Michael Benfield and his assistant Freda Saunders – decided that it was time to do their bit. (Revealingly, Tony Whittaker was a former Conservative activist, and had already tried to interest the mainstream parties in environmental issues, but with no joy.) On 31 January, the Coventry Evening Telegraph carried an advertisement inviting support for a new political party, PEOPLE, with the goal of winning power by 1990. By later standards, their message was both uncompromising and thoroughly bleak, calling for an end to economic growth, strict measures to limit population and the radical levelling of social distinctions through a National Incomes scheme. It also bore the heavy imprint of Teddy Goldsmith, who merged his own abortive Movement for Survival with the new group, and whose austere views influenced their first manifesto. Their goal was to field 600 parliamentary candidates at the next general election; in the event, partly because it came more quickly than they were expecting, they actually fielded just five and won a mere 4,576 votes. It did not help that their first colour scheme, coral and turquoise, came out as red and blue on their cheaply printed flyers; or that the press, assuming that they were yet another left-wing sect, consistently called them the People’s Party. When a second election was called for October 1974 they did even worse than before, winning a feeble 1,996 votes. At this stage they might easily have collapsed. The Whittakers decamped to the West Country to start a new life of self-sufficiency, but in their absence the party changed its name to the Ecology Party and in 1979 managed to field 55 candidates. To almost universal surprise it picked up almost 18,000 votes, not bad going for a party with just 500 members. The Green Party – as it was eventually called – was on its way.56