|
Roadblock
is dedicated to all the campaigners in the ‘anti-roads
movement’
|
ROADBLOCK
HOW PEOPLE POWER IS WRECKING THE
ROADS PROGRAMME
Roadblock
was first published by
Alarm UK in 1995.
Although some of the text is now out-of-date, much of
it is still relevant and inspiring for campaigners today.
Roadblock has been republished on the Web in September 2004 by kind
permission of the authors.
An easy-to-print, text-only version of
Roadblock (in PDF format) is also available.
You can click on some of the small, thumbnail images to see bigger
pictures
For details of current UK
anti-road campaigns, see the Road
Alert! and Road Block websites.
|
"Roadblock is the story of protest; of how a nationwide movement
has brought about a real change in Government policy."
"Protesting
about new roads has become that rarest of British phenomena, a truly
populist movement drawing supporters from all walks of life."
The
Economist, 19th February 1994.
The past
decade has seen a revolution in transport thinking in Britain -
brought about by protests against road-building on a scale unmatched
anywhere else in Europe. In 1985, the Department of Transport felt
confident that it could build a road wherever it wanted, whenever it
wanted. In 1995, its road- building programme is in disarray. The
once-mighty Department has been humbled by groups of local people
around the country who have risen up in revolt against its
destructive road schemes.
A new
Secretary of State for Transport has come into office promising a
move away from roads as the basis of its transport policy. This is
the biggest Government rethink on transport issues since the dawn of
mass car ownership four decades earlier. A transport revolution
has begun.
Roadblock
tells the story of what has happened. It looks at how the localised
protests against road schemes have come together to form a vibrant,
popular movement, transcending class, cultural and political barriers
- a movement which has changed the course of Government policy. It
highlights some of the individuals and organisations involved. And it
attempts to unravel the sometimes complex reasons why this protest
movement has been so successful.
Roadblock
has been put together by people involved in ALARM UK, one of the main
organisations to have taken part in this transport revolution. It is
not an attempt to write the history of ALARM UK, or a definitive
history of the anti-roads movement, but rather a description of what
has happened over the past ten years from our perspective.
It's the
story of protest; of how a nationwide movement has brought about a
real change in Government policy. A large number of environmental
organisations have played different roles in the changes that have
taken place:
Well-established
environmental organisations like the World Wide Fund For Nature,
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust, The
Royal Society for Nature Conservation, and, notably, Friends of the
Earth, CPRE and Greenpeace Transport 2000 - the national lobby group
on transport and environment issues Groups whose main focus is direct
action, such as Earth First!, Reclaim the Streets, and Road Alert!
Countless small local "grassroots" groups.
Within
this wide-ranging network, ALARM UK has had a dual role: to act as a
national single-issue lobby group opposing a roads-based transport
policy; and to provide an umbrella for the local groups all over the
country that have provided the real strength of the movement.
OUTSIDE ESTABLISHED STRUCTURES
Three main
aspects of the movement have contributed to its success:
It has
operated largely outside established structures and it has not been
aligned to any particular political party. This is perhaps because,
in the mid-1980s, none of the three principal British parties - the
Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats - were comfortable
with the central demand of the protest movement: to switch resources
from road-building to more sustainable modes of transport. Only the
Green Party has wholeheartedly embraced this policy of sustainable
transport, but whilst many of its members have played important roles
in the ‘anti-roads movement', it has not become strong enough
to be the movement's political voice.
Secondly,
the movement started out as, and largely remained, a single-issue
protest: against the destructive nature of road- building and in
favour of a more sustainable approach to transport policy. By
definition, then, this meant operating largely outside the
established green pressure groups, whose concerns are broader than
just transport - the notable exception being Transport 2000 with its
environmental transport focus. Some mainstream environmental
organisations, the well-established and wealthy ones like the World
Wide Fund for Nature, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
and the National Trust, have gradually got more involved in transport
matters over the decade. But this has been in response to the
emerging protest movement, rather than through having played any
significant role in its creation. Other multi-issue mass-membership
environmental organisations who have had a history of campaigning on
transport issues - such as FOE and CPRE - have provided invaluable
background reports and information and a good number of their
individual members and local groups have played an important and
informed role in the developing protest movement. However, both FOE
and CPRE were initially very wary of the type of direct action which
became part of the movement in the early 1990s. Greenpeace, with its
historical ethos of direct action, has now fully embraced the
potential of the anti-roads movement and is playing a lively role
within it.
But
perhaps 'bottom-up' has been the defining characteristic of the
movement. It started with local people's concerns - about a road that
was going to destroy their homes or communities or environment. Many
people might well have been worried about the great global issues of
our time - climate change, air pollution - but what got them
protesting was an issue which affected them directly: a road coming
their way. They were looking for assistance with that particular
problem. This assistance came from people who had fought roads in
years gone by, from local green activists, and from publications by
the likes of Transport 2000, FOE and Greenpeace which drew on a fine
body of radical academic transport thinking. The role of ALARM UK,
which came to embrace many of these local communities, was to
bringing them together and to encourage a new form of radical
campaigning.
Over the
late eighties and early nineties, hundreds of local groups came
together to form a formidable fighting force. This movement created a
climate of protest in which numerous bodies - from local authorities
to radical green organisations - were able to work to bring about a
significant change in national transport policy. In particular, it
established a mood of revolt against road-building in the country
that enabled the young direct action environmentalists, who were to
emerge so spectacularly at Twyford Down in the early 1990s, to play a
major role in bringing about change.
Case History No 1:
A40 Longford to M50 Gorsley
improvement
 David
Marcer played a key role in the campaign to stop the DoT from
building a new road through rural Gloucestershire.
I live on
the edge of north-west Gloucestershire, in Maisemore, a small village
on the opposite bank of the Severn from Gloucester. The scheme had
been announced in the White Paper "Roads for Prosperity"
published in March 1989, but of course no-one in the village was in
the habit of reading White Papers so we knew nothing until December
1989. The DoT let us into the secret by sending us a coloured map and
an invitation to an exhibition in the village hall.
As someone
who had little interest in transport matters, roads, the
environmental debate or anything like that, my reaction was of vague
indifference because although the road would run reasonably close to
the village, I thought that it might reduce the traffic on the A417
outside our door. My daughter, who was sixteen at the time, reacted
rather differently. She grabbed the map from me and said "this
will go right through the Leadon Valley, you have got to stop it!"
I told her
in an adult manner that organisations like the DoT could not be
stopped by people like me, but she insisted. I thought for a few
moments about the true implications of a four-lane dual carriageway
being driven through our peaceful little valley, and for some reason
I still do not understand I said to her "all right then, if you
insist then I will stop it' " And from that moment until March
1994 1 refused to acknowledge the possibility of any result than
outright victory over the DoT.
This was a
totally irrational attitude which could only have been assumed by
someone basking in total ignorance, but the next four years taught me
more than I had learned in the whole of my life before.
Of course,
when you first try to organise a protest campaign you believe that no
one has ever done anything like it before and everyone wallows around
in complete confusion whilst they reinvent the concept of
campaigning. I started by writing letters to our MP and to the DoT (I
still believed that democratic processes were fair, open and honest
at this point). The replies were bland and meaningless.
A few
weeks later the DoT held their exhibition in the village hall. There
were elegant pictures of embankments and cuttings with the usual
trees and small cars to add to the effect. Some villagers were going
around saying that it was mad to build a long embankment across the
flood plain, because it would make our regular winter flooding worse.
I knew better of course. These were professional engineers and would
never make such a basic mistake. Unknown to me, Sydney, who was soon
to become a fellow campaigner, had already asked one of the
professionals about the flood plain. He received the immortal
reply,"flood plain, what flood plain?"
We formed
a small protest group under the loose authority of the Parish Council
and after three meetings we were able to decide on a name: MORAG -
Maisemore Opposes the Road Action Group. If I were to say that we
discussed policy, strategy and tactics it would be dignifying our
endeavours with the benefit of hindsight. We managed to formulate a
few reasons for opposition - the flood threat; environmental
intrusion; noise, fumes and light (when you have no street lights you
treasure a dark sky at night), the cost of the scheme and the lack of
justification.
However,
we never completely agreed on policy. The realists wanted to aim for
an achievable target like moving the route as far away from the
village as possible, whereas the idealists wanted to go for broke
with total opposition. The realists told the idealists that no road
scheme had ever been stopped before and the idealists said that was
true but tried to justify their mad ideas all the same.
As an
idealist, I began by thinking that my policy of uncompromising,
outright opposition was extreme and high risk, and I was very much
aware that by refusing to compromise or discuss alternatives we
risked losing small, but beneficial modifications to the route. This
was pointed out to me frequently, but gradually I began to realise
that outright opposition was the only morally and logically
sustainable policy: morally because we had no right to campaign for
the road to be moved to someone else's back yard; logically because
if we compromised by discussing details we would have undermined our
argument that the road was not justified.
Without an
agreed policy, strategy was difficult to formulate. We managed to
agree that our only chance was to stop the road before a Public
Inquiry. We had been told by people who knew much better than us that
protest is useless at that stage and anyway we had not the remotest
chance of raising the money to fight an lnquiry. We also agreed that
delay could help as well. It is perhaps difficult to remember how
gung-ho the road- builders still were only a few years ago, but we
told ourselves that something might happen, perhaps even a change of
government at the election that was then due in one or two years
time.
One of our
campaign themes was political (with, of course, a small p). We used
every election that came up and tried to make the road a high profile
issue. At the general election we asked each of the three candidates
for statements on their position and published them. The Labour and
Liberal Democrat candidates even attended some of our demonstrations.
We also
decided to target the County Council as the highway authority. We
pestered officers in the County Surveyor's Department with questions
about the road, its purpose, how it tied with the County's strategy,
why the County's officers were working with the Department of
Transport to destroy parts of the county. I believe that we shook the
officers just a little out of their complacent attitude that more
roads are good for you. We had meetings with and made presentations
to the Labour and Liberal Democrat groups. The change in the balance
of power that resulted from the loss of Conservative members in 1993
made our task easier and by the end of that year we had persuaded
Councillors to set up a policy panel which invited contributions from
all interested parties.
By now,
lots of groups were involved in the campaign: CPRE, another group
called CARE at Newent further up the road and CURB, a protest
coordinating body, plus the various Parish Councils. We made sure
that every one of these groups was represented at the presentation.
On the other side were groups like the RHA and Freight Transport
Association and a couple of Parish Councils who would "benefit"
from the road, but we were seasoned campaigners by now and knew our
briefs backwards. We won hands down and the Council voted to oppose
the road. Councillors had never opposed a road before and as they did
so against the advice of the officers, so they thought themselves
very brave.
As the
campaign progressed we began to believe that victory was possible and
that delays would benefit us more and more, especially as the cost of
the scheme kept on rising.
Then in
March 1994 the DoT admitted defeat. We had been phoning around for
information; I had left messages with several local journalists to
ring me as soon as the press release came through, but a fellow
campaigner heard first and rang me. Curiously, a sense of anticlimax
made it the lowest high spot of my life. My wife and I then went for
a walk in the Leadon Valley. Although only a few hundred yards from
our front door, I had only been there infrequently during the
campaign because the threat of its destruction upset me so much. I
broke open one of the testbore tubes and pinched a small numbered
disc from it. This very small trophy is now on my key ring.
The value
to me of the campaign is inestimable. It is a very intense personal
feeling and probably immodest as well, but I do feel that in
contributing to saving a few square miles of countryside I have done
at least one worthwhile thing in my life. The achievement, if such it
was, is still something about which I can feel very emotional.
As for the
value of the campaign in terms of having an influence on stopping the
road, I would be a fool if I were to deny that we had the advantage
of an increasingly strong following wind, so we will never know.
On a
personal level the campaign has had an enormous effect on me. It is
not so much self-belief, but a belief that nothing is impossible if I
decide to do it and go about it the right way. A small number of
ordinary people, with dedication, hard work, study and application
can stop government, or any other force for that matter, dead in its
tracks.
The
lessons I learnt from the campaign is that they, whoever they are,
are no cleverer than you and often their complacency means that they
act in an extremely stupid way. Many of the people you think will
know more about the subject that you turn out to be rather
ill-informed; if you get involved in a campaign watch out - it will
not be long before you find yourself in a room full of experts all of
whom know less than you about the subject under discussion. This can
be quite a shock if you are not prepared for it.
You must
face up to the fact that you are in a battle, and the only hope of
victory lies in using the few weapons that you have at your disposal
to the greatest effect. The other side will use every trick that they
have learned over many years. The cards are already heavily stacked
in their favour, they own the referee and they will not hesitate to
lie, misrepresent and cheat. The road-builders are prepared to use
overweening power and even force if necessary to destroy something
that is precious to you. Although I would never advocate anything
other than non-violent physical resistance, the battle cries for the
paper-and-talk protester have to be "do unto them what they
would do unto you, but in spades" and "no prisoners".
|
BRITAIN IN THE EIGHTIES
The
movement had its beginnings in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher
ruled the nation. Britain, at that time, was full of contradictions.
Many people were making fast money in the free-market world of
Thatcherism; rates of car and home ownership were rising rapidly But
there was also increasing homelessness, severe unemployment and
environmental destruction. Furthermore, government was becoming
unresponsive to public opinion and was (deliberately) running down
public services - health, education and transport.
It is
probably too early to assess with any certainty what role the
particular conditions of Thatcher's Britain played in the formation
- and subsequent growth - of the British anti-roads movement. But
some things are clear. Britain has relatively poor public transport
provision compared with the majority of other European countries,
and particularly those of Northern Europe. And in the early 1980s
the Thatcher Government set out, literally, to alter the shape of
Britain. This was to be achieved through the positive encouragement
of out-of-town retail and recreational developments, along with
business parks and the largest road-building programme the country
had ever seen. It was all to be based on what Thatcher called "the
great car economy".
"The Thatcher Government set out, literally, to alter the shape of
Britain."
It is
perhaps not surprising, then, that ordinary people rose tip in
protest against the reshaping of their familiar surroundings. The
gleaming new piazzas, that were seen by the upwardly mobile as
progress, were regarded by the established middle- classes of the
shire counties as unwanted development which threatened England's
'green and pleasant land'. These concerned middle-classes could not
turn to either of the other two main parties for any real
assistance, for, while both Labour and the Liberal Democrats
favoured better public transport, in the mid-1980s, neither was
clearly articulating opposition to unwanted development. It was
perhaps logical, then, that Middle England became part of a protest
movement that operated outside established political structures.
Equally
excluded from establishment politics were the growing number of
people who were dismayed at what they perceived as the national -
and indeed global destruction of the natural environment. Their
'deep green' concerns were not taken on board by the major political
parties; and certainly not by the groupings on the far left that had
attracted many radicals of earlier generations. The relatively
unstructured 'anti-roads' movement that was emerging in the
mid-1980s was to become, a few years later, a natural vehicle of
protest for the green children of Thatcher.
By the
eighties, the transport policies of all the major political parties
had been dominated for over thirty years by the need to cater for the
car. The massive road schemes proposed at this time would have meant
yet further destruction of things people valued - their homes, towns,
communities and countryside. In unprecedented numbers, people began
to say "no". This attitude formed the foundation of a
nationwide campaign that within a decade has brought about a dramatic
change in transport thinking. The Government's plans to reshape the
country around the car have been irrevocably damaged.
LONDON - THE FIRST BATTLEGROUND
London was
the first eighties battleground of what was to become known as the
'anti-roads movement'. It emerged in response to the largest single
road-building programme ever proposed for the capital. The main road
plans for the remainder of the country were not to emerge until 1989.
But London is the essential starting point for the Roadblock story
because it was the protest in London that was to set the trend for
the campaigns that shook the nation in the first half of the 1990s.
It is therefore worth spending time looking at London in some detail.
The road
proposals for London were called The London Road Assessment Studies.
They were first devised by the Department of Transport (DoT) in the
early 1980s as a way of easing the serious traffic congestion on the
capital's roads. The DoT planned to speed up both orbital and radial
vehicle journeys. The radial journeys were to be dealt with by
widening narrow sections of main roads or by building ‘bypasses’
around congested areas. Orbital car travel was to be made easier by
the construction of an 'Inner M25'. It is thought that around
£12 - £20 billion had been set aside for the work.
The early
Assessment Studies reports were released in 1988. They were far from
the final proposals. They merely indicated the different options for
the proposed roads. But their release prompted a huge outcry
throughout London as residents became aware of the road-building
schemes that were planned to carve through their communities.
Thousands of residents flocked to Town Halls across the capital and
massive local campaigns developed from Barnes to Hackney and Clapham
to Haringey. At the same time, the national lobby group Transport
2000, under its new director Stephen Joseph, who was to become a key
figure in the transport revolution, called a meeting to set up a
campaign to fight the Assessment Studies. Many local groups,
realising that they could not win their campaigns alone, came to that
meeting. ALARM was born. In less than a year, ALARM had become the
umbrella body for over 150 London-based groups (including local FOE
and cycling groups).
Two
factors are responsible for the early growth of the movement in
London. Firstly, unlike many other parts of Britain London had a
history of radical protest against road-building: in the 1970s, the
'Homes not Roads' Campaign, led by the London Amenity and Transport
Association, had prevented an earlier attempt to build an inner
motorway box and the fifteen year old battle to stop the widening of
the Archway Road in North London had opened many eyes to the dubious
techniques the DoT can use as it attempts to get its way. The second
factor concerned the willingness of people to defend their homes.
Thousands of houses would have been demolished if the schemes had
gone ahead. The basic motive behind the rapid formation of most of
the local groups was the desire of people to protect their homes and
local environments from the ravages of road-building. So ALARM had
two strands: a few radicalised people who understood how the DoT
operated; plus thousands upon thousands of inexperienced campaigners
who were determined to fight for their homes and communities.
LONDON - STRATEGY AND OBJECTIVES
From the
outset, ALARM had firm objectives and a clear strategy. John
Stewart, who ultimately came to chair ALARM, explains: "ALARM
was clearly focused from the very beginning. It was a transport
organisation whose objective was to stop all the road schemes in the
Assessment Studies and to promote sustainable alternatives. It had no
other objectives, no political affiliations, no constitution and only
one rule: each group had to oppose all roads in the Assessment
Studies, not just those in their own back yard - only then would
ALARM be able to argue that road-building was not the way forward for
London and devise positive transport alternatives. Furthermore, that
way the DoT would not be able to divide and rule."
Margot
Sreberny, a leading figure in ALARM, added, "We had a clear
strategy from the start - to persuade the politicians to drop all the
road schemes as a result of the individual and collective pressure
exerted by the ALARM groups. Only when you are so sure of your
strategy can you be certain that you will not be blown off course. "
Case History No 2:
Norwich
Denise
Carlo played a leading role in fighting a series of road schemes
in East Anglia, a largely rural region where the road lobby is at its
strongest. One of the most damaging of these schemes was Norfolk
County Council's plan to complete a Inner Ring Road for Norwich - one
of England's finest, and most historic, cities.
“The
writing was on the wall for the third phase of the Norwich Inner
Relief Road (IRR3) back in 1988. Norfolk County Council, defensive
and bunker-minded, had failed to see the signs: public
disillusionment over urban road-building and government alarm over
global warming. Community groups and individuals joined forces at the
inaugural meeting of the Norwich Road Action Group (NRAG) in 1988. We
believed that the road could be defeated and we succeeded.
On paper,
the four-lane highway roller-coasted through Norwich: marching across
the historic heart; tunnelling under a school playground for one
thousand children; squeezing through a densely populated district
where many elderly people lived; slamming across the ancient
north-south route parallel to the waterfront, its two parts reunited
by a pedestrian underpass; leaping over the river and railway line on
a giant suspension bridge, the central pylons higher than the
floodlights at Norwich City football ground.
As a
former student of landscape history, I recognised the devastating
effect the scheme would have on the ancient topography and so it
became my ambition as NRAG secretary to work for its defeat. Fighting
IRR3 involved a wider agenda. Phase 3 formed the lynchpin in the
Norwich Area Transport Strategy. Norfolk County Council arrogantly
assumed that IRR3 would be built. Four major road proposals relied
on its completion. NRAG were determined to knock out IRR3 and re-
orientate the roads-biased strategy for Norwich.
What were
the pressure points? First target: Norfolk County Council. However,
officers and councillors refused to discuss their controversial
project with opponents. "We have never heard of the Road Action
Group" said the County Surveyor and Chair of Planning when our
members tried to present them with a letter.
We
switched our target. We concentrated our efforts on the next tier of
local government - Norwich City Council. If the City could be
persuaded to oppose the road they would act as a lever on the County.
For four years, we cajoled City officers and councillors, identifying
the road's supporters, our anti-road allies and the waverers.
We
mobilised public opinion with regular leafletting and a high press
profile. The public put pressure on councillors particularly at
election times. Following their planning application, Norfolk County
Council received one thousand letters of objection and one letter of
support.
Public
opposition, growing internal doubts and a change in the climate of
opinion on environmental issues, finally prompted the City Planning
Committee at the eleventh hour to oppose the published route. This
set the bureaucratic wheels in motion. The City drummed up support
from English Heritage, the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Broads
Authority and the Chamber of Commerce. Six months later when the
Inquiry opened, Norfolk County Council were virtually isolated.
Generally speaking, campaigners should avoid a Public Inquiry. In our
case, however, we were desperate for a hearing as a way of broadening
the decision making process away from the County Council. Objections
from the City, English Heritage and the public, persuaded the
Minister to call in the planning application.
If NRAG
were relying on the City to produce a radical transport alternative,
we were to be disappointed. Their consultants, Colin Buchanan and
Partners, came up with an uninspiring idea for completing Norwich's
outer ring road. NRAG scraped money together to hire green transport
consultants, Metropolitan Transport Research Unit (MTRU). It had
become clear to us that better public transport alone would not solve
local transport problems. If we were to demonstrate any credibility,
we had to produce a workable alternative based on a method of
restraining traffic. MTRU had a project: city centre rush hour car
permits as tested in Milan. With financial support from Transport
2000, MTRU's non road-building option took shape. NRAG obtained a
written assurance from the Minister that we could present our
proposal at a Public Inquiry. Mark Sullivan, NRAG's professional
advocate, skilfully steered us through the strain of a 42 day
hearing.
 Over the
years, NRAG's greatest challenges had centred less on the road and
more on resolving differences of opinion over tactics within our
group. The blackest moment came when the City Council courted
members to support an outer ring road solution. For a short time it
seemed possible that NRAG might break up, but we kept our nerve.
We were
unprepared for the tone of Inspector Whalley's report in March 1993.
In discrete civil service language, he lambasted the IRR3; the outer
ring road option he described as a "temporary and costly
answer"; NRAGs option he viewed as "pointing the way".
Summing up, the Inspector concluded that traffic restraint appears
"inevitable and desirable”. The Minister upheld the
Inspector's conclusions on IRR3 and its short-term effect on traffic
relief. Objectors were overjoyed.
As
predicted, the Norwich Transport Strategy collapsed, but NRAG members
voted to carry on campaigning for a radical transport agenda. Norfolk
County Council, under new political control, have begun to listen and
consult more widely. All parties have learnt the importance of
cooperation.”
Some
broad lessons from our campaign:
1. Success
ultimately depends upon building up a wide constituency of support
especially at the local level where votes count.
2. Use the
expertise of your members, supporters and sympathetic professionals.
Keep them informed so that they can take action.
3. Use the
media and create a fuss. Campaigning relies upon publicity.
4. Learn
how the road-planning system works and exploit the opportunities for
bringing pressure to bear.
5. Be
prepared for internal divisions within your group: keep to a
well-defined no road-building goal so that your purpose is clear to
all.
6.
Remember bureaucracies and established political forces are not
monoliths; it is possible to exploit divisions among them
and even
cultivate your own sources of information there.
7.
Recognise that as a campaigning group you can respond more quickly
and flexibly to events than officials.
8.
Campaign with passion - that line on a map threatens something that
is precious to you.
|
But it was
the campaigning techniques that set ALARM apart. ALARM adopted a new
kind of approach in its campaigning. An approval which was
ultimately to result in a historic victory in 1990 when Cecil
Parkinson, then the Secretary of State for Transport, withdrew every
road proposal in the Road Assessment Studies. Up until then, most
people opposing road schemes had done so within the accepted
structures - structures devised by the Department of Transport. The
DoT would put its route options out for public consultation and
people would be urged to tick a box to indicate which route they
favoured. Then came the Public Inquiry, where protesters were urged
to make polite, well- reasoned arguments outlining why they objected.
Most did. Almost all Public Inquiries were lost. ALARM's strategy
was to win long before Public Inquiries, even before the official
Public Consultation period. In other words, ALARM set out to create
its own framework of protest, dismissing the DoT's structures as
merely techniques designed to get its plans through with the minimum
of fuss. ALARM's approach deliberately set out to liberate people
from meek adherence to the DoT, to empower them, to enable them to
set their own agenda and to put the Department and its officials on
the defensive. It set out to create such a mass protest movement that
the Road Assessment Studies would become politically untenable.
The ALARM
campaign was rooted in local groups. ALARM did some London-wide
media work, but its main function was to provide the local groups
with the weapons that they needed to campaign effectively in their
own areas: an understanding of the wiles of the Department of
Transport so they would not be duped; transport information so that
they could make out a coherent case against road-building being the
answer to London’s transport problems; and advice on how to
make use of the media.
BUILDING UP LOCAL GROUPS
As
building tip the groups was so crucial to ALARM's way of working -
and to its ultimate success in defeating the Assessment Studies - it
is worth explaining in some detail how it was done. First and
foremost, it was not easy. This was no seamless march of super
campaigners on the way to a famous victory, but a mixed group of
people fighting to win through struggle, argument and personality
differences, learning as they went along, and working very, very
hard. ALARM was not funded. It employed nobody. The groups raised
their own money. The central activities were funded by the groups
giving a small proportion of their money and with some financial
assistance from a few London-wide bodies, particularly Friends of the
Earth, who permitted the excellent Rupert Harwood to spend nearly all
his time working on the campaign.
ALARM met
about every two weeks. These were open meetings, to which most groups
usually sent one or two people. ALARM planned central events and
agreed its alternative ideas for transport in London as contained in
'The Blueprint for Transport' (produced by Haringey Council). Two
working sub- groups were set up: one on information; the other on
stunts and publicity. The information was distributed to local groups
in the form of easy to-use, short and snappy Briefing Sheets, well-
focused on the sort of questions the groups were asking about
transport alternatives or about how the DoT operated.
Jonathan
Bray, a founder of ALARM UK, said, "A prime aim of ALARM was to
counter the argument that London’s transport problems could be
solved by building more roads. ALARM compiled and distributed
thousands of Briefing Sheets which explained that new roads would
generate traffic and outlined, in broad terms, the sort of public
transport, walking and cycling solutions that would work. ALARM
always saw itself primarily as a transport organisation. Indeed, many
of the ideas we were putting forward in the late 1980s are now being
taken up by Government.”
ALARM
advised its groups not worry too much about responding in detail to
official documents, but instead to organise their own meetings where
the general public could be warned in advance of the sort of
propaganda the DoT would use and learn of coherent alternative
transport solutions.
By the
time that the DoT held its own official consultation meetings, its
officials were often made to look quite ridiculous by defiant, but
well-informed, protesters. Right across London, the DoT's sleight of
hand was exposed. A classic case occurred at a packed meeting in
well-heeled Dulwich. The man from the Department was explaining,
using pretty pictures from France, that the people of Dulwich would
benefit from a widened South Circular Road as the residential roads
would be traffic-calmed. But the official had reckoned without a
member of the audience who knew that, while the DoT would pay for the
destructive widening of the main road, there was no money guaranteed
for the traffic- calming. One squirming bureaucrat went strangely
silent.
Part of
the DoT's sales technique was the terminology it employed. To counter
this, ALARM even produced a Briefing Sheet explaining the value of
groups creating their own language. The DoT's road 'improvements'
became ALARM's road 'alterations'. The 'Western Environmental
Improvement Route' became the 'Earls Court Bypass'.
ALARM was
deliberately structured in a decentralised way. It ensured that the
DoT had no one person with which it "could do business".
The DoT had great difficulty in pinning down an organisation that had
no visible head; instead scores of different people kept popping up
all over London.
MAKING A MEDIA SPLASH
Through
the publicity subgroup, ALARM also assisted local groups with media
work. ALARM did not campaign in local areas; nor deal with the local
press. Sensibly, that was the responsibility of the local groups.
They were, however, having some difficulty getting anything beyond
local coverage. Gina Harkell, who organised many of ALARM's
London-vide stunts, said, "By making stunts all-London events,
press coverage moved up a gear. London-wide TV and the national
newspapers covered events and the anti-roads movement got a
foot-hold in the media. "
ALARM
devoted a lot of energy to its eye-catching stunts. It worked on the
basis that a photograph in a national paper is worth a thousand
words of carefully written text sent to a junior bureaucrat at the
Department of Transport; that officialdom is trained to deal with
detailed responses - which is why it likes Public Inquiries; that
bureaucrats have great difficulty in responding to stunts where
their carefully regulated world has been disturbed and they no
longer are in control of events.
The
stunts served a number of purposes: then, highlighted the campaign
by using a technique - eye-catching pictures - that the media would
go for; they spoke to the people of London over the heads of the
bureaucrats; they brought together the ALARM groups; and, above all,
they enabled ALARM to set a lively, well- publicised, humorous
agenda that kept the DoT on the defensive.
But ALARM
was not all daring stunts and fancy language. ALARM would not have
achieved lasting success if its protest had not been rooted in
London's communities. This was no campaign of trendy metropolitan
activists or deep-green utopians. Tens of thousands of ordinary
Londoners were integral to it. One MP alone received 17,000 letters
opposing the Assessment Studies. This all provided the climate where
local councils, MPs, and business organisations could come out and
oppose the road-building proposals.
"This was no campaign of trendy
metropolitan activists or deep-green utopians"
ALARM's
achievement was to persuade these thousands of Londoners, many of
whom started out from an essentially 'Not In My Back Yard' (NIMBY)
position, that road-building was not the solution for any part of
London and to campaign pro-actively against the Department of
Transport; to convince them not to put their faith in accepted
structures, but to put pressure on the politicians to scrap the
plans.
Two months
before the London local elections in May 1990, Cecil Parkinson
withdrew all the road proposals. The London Road Assessment Studies
were dead. Killed off by a new kind of protest. London had been ready
for that sort of campaign. A year later, ALARM was to test the
temperature in the rest of the country.
Case history 3:
Twyford Down
The M3
is the motorway link between London and the major port of
Southampton. Over the lost few decades, the route was progressively
upgraded to motorway standard with the exception of one short gap,
close to Winchester in Hampshire. Although this area was extremely
ecologically sensitive, the Department of Transport ignored low-cost
options to improve the existing route in favour of at first, a scheme
through water-meadows close to Winchester, and then a route through
Twyford Down. In 1992, after a series of Public Inquiries and failed
legal cases, the bulldozers moved in, provoking a campaign of
non-violent direct action. This resulted in the imprisonment of ten
people for defying a High Court Injunction imposed by the DoT, in
addition, seventy-six people are being jointly sued by the Department
for delays and damages totalling £1.9 million.
David
Croker and Chris Gillham were leading lights in the
campaign to save Twyford Down, right from the days of Public
Inquiries through to supporting the last, heroic efforts of young
people to stop the bulldozers. David Croker, for thirteen years a
Tory Councillor, came to chair the joint Action Group against the
scheme and later the Twyford Down Association; Chris Gillham was a
member of both these organisations and with others started up the
Friends of Twyford Down in 1992 when the result of the General
Election appeared to remove any last hope that the Government would
stop work on the Down. Here they both give accounts of this momentous
campaign.
 David
Croker: "Although it is still too early to give a
dispassionate analysis of the Twyford Down campaign there is a need
to look at some significant events. The original scheme, approved
after a short Inquiry in 1971, was for a road through the
water-meadows along the line of the Itchen Valley. It was opposed by
a broad coalition of landowners, including the powerful Winchester
College and many conservation and amenity groups. Early "direct
action" in the form of Inquiry disruption, following the
intervention of anti-roads campaigner John Tyme, led to the second
Side Roads Inquiry of 1976 being turned into a full-scale
re-examination of the need for the scheme. In 1980, the Inspector
found against the scheme on environmental grounds and the DoT
promised a reassessment of alternatives. That reassessment led to the
Twyford Down scheme, made possible by the College offering to sell
the Down, which it had been given in trust to protect, in order to
move the road away from the water-meadows.
The
Twyford Down scheme had an easy ride at the 1985 Inquiry, due to
support from the County and District Councils and the absence of
organised opposition. From this low-point, a re-activated Joint
Action Group ramped up a campaign which converted the District
Council and secured the reopening of the Inquiry in 1987, at which a
fully worked-up "tunnel alternative" was put forward.
Despite
huge local support, the tunnel proposal was defeated on the grounds
of cost and delay. The decision was challenged, first in the High
Court at a cost of £100,000, and then with the European
Commission (EC) over the failure of Government to implement the
environmental assessment legislation. Preliminary construction work
on the Down started whilst the EC was reviewing the case; a programme
of rallies and marches organised by the Twyford Down Association
raised public awareness and got widespread interest in the broadsheet
press and on TV The scheme became an issue in the 1992 General
Election when the strongest advocate of the scheme, the then Roads
Minister Christopher Chope, lost his seat. However the result of the
election and John Major's Maastricht deal with the EC cleared the way
for the scheme to be built.
It is
important to note that this was a local campaign until work was
threatened - there was no simultaneous anti-road campaign at a
national level from which to draw support. Once demonstrations
started, people came from all parts and continued to come throughout
the direct action phase. The media exposure of the last three years
has galvanised the national anti-road campaign, to the extent that
the name of the place is synonymous with environmental disaster. Even
the DoT says that it does not want "another Twyford Down".
Did we
fail? Perhaps a Twyford Down was necessary to rouse public opinion.
Perhaps we needed, as a warning, an example of how far the Department
of Transport were prepared to go, and as an inspiration, an example
of what the public could do. Twyford Down - the last three-mile gap
in the motorway from Southampton to London - also stands as an
example of the dangers of ignoring the corridor effect, of the need
to examine strategic schemes in their entirety. By the mistakes they
made, it has led national environmental groups to recognise that they
need to get involved in local schemes. And perhaps the drawing of a
few brave politicians from the main opposition parties to
demonstrations on Twyford Down has helped to bring about the more
positive anti-road policies of those parties.
Today we
would be able to stop what happened to Twyford Down. As it is, we are
left with a ruined landscape, which we must continue to hold up as an
example wherever else we fight a campaign. There must be no repeat.
Let Twyford Down be the death throes of a discredited transport
system.”
Chris
Gillham: "Half of the western promontory of the South Downs
has been taken away and dumped across the wide, gentle valley of the
ltchen, with its bright chalk streams; the scar of it is shocking;
the noise of it invades places of once tranquil loveliness; gone
forever are the ancient grassed trackways of the Dongas, a dramatic
yet spiritually calming landscape of old turf, and a feeling of
forgotten people and their doings. I am still one of those being sued
by the DoT; I have spent a lot of money; my family life has been
unsettled by the threats over it. I even broke my arm, foolishly,
pointlessly on Twyford Down. I can hardly bear to look at the place
and find myself taking detours to avoid it. And I am grateful.
What is
there to be grateful about? There is certainly consolation in knowing
that Twyford Down has set in train a process that promises change.
But the reason I am grateful is that Twyford Down has changed my life
and my way of thinking, and given me a feeling of self worth that I
never had before. It has brought me a new companionship, a sense of
trust in people and a feeling of community. And all of this with a
sharp edge of excitement.
I came
from a background of concerned but respectable and restrained
involvement. I spent years in formal committees of preservation
groups, not achieving very much. Here is the justification, whenever
it is needed, for non-violent direct action. The system allowed us to
spend decades in argument, and huge sums of money, making an
intellectually unshakeable case, only for the system to brush it all
aside. When you hear the brazen words "democratic process"
and "rule of law", reply quietly with "Twyford Down".
There was
always talk in Winchester that people would stop the bulldozers if
they ever came, but I never believed in the possibility of such
things. I would probably not have been disappointed that Winchester
walked away from Twyford Down at the end, because I would have given
up too, had it not been for the faithfulness of the Dongas Tribe and
its refusal to accept the cause as lost. I went along with them
firstly from admiration and then because they taught me hope, and
finally because they made me believe that I could, after all those
years, do something to make a difference.
"Twyford
Rising" was an expression of faith - we talked of stopping the
scheme, even after the wreck of the Dongas. Perhaps we we re
literally wrong, but the faith was justified in other ways. As the
direct action went on, the idea that something was being born took
hold. The Dongas Tribe spoke of the awakening of the Dragon. I cannot
better that image or fail to believe in the truth of it.”
|
PROTEST GOES NATIONWIDE
"The question is simple, can we
reproduce the ALARM campaign across the country?"
"The
question is simple," said Rupert Harwood, one of the founders of
ALARM UK, "can we reproduce the ALARM campaign across the
country? If so, the Government's National Roads Programme would be in
severe trouble. " He was speaking in 1991 to Jonathan Bray, Gina
Harkell and John Stewart. Together, round a kitchen table, they
formed ALARM UK.
Each
person had played an important role in ALARM. Now they set out to
employ the strategy they had used in London to take on something much
bigger - the £23 billion National Roads Programme. The DoT
had unveiled it in 1989 with bravado, boasting that it was the
biggest road-building programme undertaken in Britain 'since the
Romans'.
The DoT had
not been put off by what happened in London. It put its defeat over
the Assessment Studies down to London being a special case.
Nationally, it intended to spend £13 billion over ten years
to substantially 'upgrade' the country's road system. This was later
revised upwards to £23 billion. There were two main reasons
for this massive proposed expenditure: the government was concerned
that the country’s road infrastructure would not meet the
demands of a Single European Market; and it also looked with alarm at
the way, traffic was predicted to grow - between 83% and 142% by the
year 2025. The scale of the programme was awesome. Huge swathes of
the motorway and A-road network were to be widened and rebuilt. The
country was to be transformed, with the motorwav network widened to
ten, twelve or even fourteen lanes. New motorway boxes were proposed
for regions like the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, plus new
quasi-motorways like the South Coast Expressway and the Home Counties
East-West route. According to English Nature, 161 Sites of Special
Scientific Interest were threatened (SSSIs represent the UK's best
areas for flora, fauna & geology), while English Heritage
calculated that over 800 important archeological sites could be
affected. A survey of the South East found that over 370 wildlife
sites were threatened by, national or local road schemes.
For the
powerful road lobby, the 1989 roads programme represented their
finest hour. With such a vast increase in road- building, rocketing
car use (during the 1980s, traffic doubled on the motorway network)
and declining public transport, the future looked bleak from the
point of view of campaigners. On the plus-side, the scale of the
roads programme was such that the scale of potential opposition was
equally vast, especially when the road-planning process was so skewed
against objectors that it was capable of radicalising the most
conventional of citizens.
Around
that kitchen table, ALARM UK devised its strategy Essentially, it
followed the London pattern to provide: a central, umbrella
organisation which supplied local groups with information on
transport, environmental and campaigning matters, which staged
occasional nationwide stunts (including a 'Stop That Road Week') and
which held conferences where the groups could meet. ALARM UK groups
would be autonomous. ALARM UK has never had a constitution, just a
set of guiding principles. The idea was never to build up ALARM UK
for its own sake, but simply to establish a movement to create a
climate of protest which would overcome the National Roads Programme
and so pave the way for real investment in more sustainable forms of
transport.
ALARM UK’s MODE OF OPERATION
It is
worthwhile spelling out in some more detail how ALARM UK operates. It
is not a carefully structured organisation involving committees and
subcommittees poring over official documents and issuing position
papers and policy documents on the great environmental topics of our
day like global warming and atmospheric pollution. Rather, as road
schemes affect a random cross-section of society, it aims to be a
place where ordinary people, often with nowhere else to go, can seek
practical advice on how to stop their road scheme. Fundamental to
ALARM UK's way of working is the fact that it attempts to provide
groups with assistance relevant to their situation. People's initial
concern nearly always revolves around their particular road scheme;
generally it does not involve wanting to 'green' Britain, far less
solve the environmental problems facing the world.
ALARM UK
has produced a series of Briefing Sheets aimed at the concerns of the
local groups and designed to enable them to campaign effectively in
their own areas. These Briefing Sheets cover two general areas:
campaigning- the techniques adopted in London are recommended; and
transport information - sufficient facts and figures to enable local
groups to argue the case against their road schemes in transport
terms and to begin to develop realistic "transport"
solutions. The local groups have thus become the engine room of ALARM
UK. They own it. The central Organisation exists to service, assist
and inform groups of ordinary people around the country. ALARM UK
would be nothing but an empty without its grassroots members.
ALARM
UK's advice has been to encourage groups to win before the The Public
Inquiry - for decades, putting faith in the Public Inquiry System was
the sure road to defeat. The advice still stands, but by 1995 even
the Public Inquiry Inspectors are beginning to sense the change of
mood. In the 1990s, objectors, often assisted by the able Keith
Buchan (of MTRU Consultancy) have won Public Inquiries at Hereford,
Ealing and Norwich. This is, possibly, The ultimate irony.
How To WIN
Alarm UK would offer support
("yes, you can win")
Many local
road campaigns followed a similar pattern.
A few local people would
become aware, perhaps through the local paper or via a DoT Public
Consultation document, that a major road was planned for their area.
The local establishment (the council, business and trade unions, MPs
and often the local paper itself) would all support the proposal
because of the "traffic relief and economic benefits it would
bring to the area". At first the local campaigners would be
overawed by the forces arrayed behind the road proposal. Having got
in touch with ALARM UK (often via a more well-known environmental
group), ALARM UK would offer support ("yes, you can win"),
a pack of Briefing Sheets and any other assistance needed.
Often the
first step in getting a local campaign up and running would be a
public meeting (ALARM UK may have suggested, or provided speakers).
The nervous organisers would often be surprised by the turn-out, and
the willingness of those in the audience to get involved in the
campaign.
Following ALARM UK's advice, campaigners would then begin
to fight a political (with a small “p”) campaign. A
campaign to make the road so politically embarrassing that local
politicians would be forced to oppose the road, which would
ultimately lead to the Government axing the scheme. By lobbying
councillors, MPs, and MEPS, gradually the campaign would begin to
"turn" the politicians. These politicians might not agree
with the campaigners, but they knew they had to support them or lose
their seats.
As the local campaigners grew in confidence they would
put on exciting stunts and events (like marking out the path of the
road on the landscape, or getting mock battles between bowler-hatted
civil servants and iron age warriors on the site of threatened hill
forts) until the campaign started to dominate the local press.
With
the help of reports and briefing sheets from Transport 2000, Friends
of the Earth, CPRE and ALARM UK as well as local experts, the
campaign would also fight the road proposers on their own territory.
They would question whether the new road really would bring
prosperity to their area, whether it would really relieve local
traffic problems. They would also set out their own non
road-building alternative to the scheme.
As the campaign developed,
ALARM UK would always be there with useful contacts, information and,
crucially, moral support, as campaigners faced the peaks and troughs
which are inevitable when any diverse group of people get together to
try to make common cause against a common threat.
And when the great
day of victory came, ALARM UK tried to ensure that those who wanted
to carry on campaigning could find a role helping others (be it
through writing Briefing Sheets or through speaking at meetings).
|
Case history 4:
Oxleas Wood
The
East London River Crossing was one of the most controversial sections
of a planned inner ring road for London. It would have cut through
suburban Plumstead and one of London's few remaining fragments of
ancient woodland - Oxleas Wood. Jonathan Bray convened a
strategy group which brought together national and local campaigns to
stop the road.
“Whenever
I used to visit Oxleas Wood I would visualise the proposed road
cutting through it. It's hard to believe that the woods are now safe.
But safe they almost certainly are!
My
involvement in the campaign against the East London River Crossing
began in earnest in the late eighties. By this time the road had been
scheduled for construction for many years and had already been
approved by the longest Public Inquiry ever held into a road scheme.
That inquiry had lasted 194 days; the transcripts of the proceedings
contained 9.5 million words!
 Local
people, in the form of People Against the River Crossing (PARC) and
Greenwich & Lewisham FOE, were fighting a determined and
exhausting battle against a scheme which would not only cut a swathe
through 8,000 year old Oxleas Woods but would also take out several
hundred houses in the quiet and pleasant suburb of Plumstead. But
with approval in principle granted, and with the Government,
developers and some socialist local authorities strongly supporting
the scheme, the odds against stopping it were getting bigger all the
time. To achieve victory, a concerted strategy was needed to make
Oxleas Wood a big issue locally and give it wider significance - a
strategy to make it a symbol of the environmental damage that the
road programme was causing and a rallying point for the environment
movement. If that could be done, then, given Oxleas Wood's proximity
to Westminster, it might force the Government to back down rather
than risk confrontation with a united community and environment
movement, in its own "back yard".
Like all
the best campaigns we fought on every level. There were
letter-writing stalls at the popular Greenwich market, politicians
were systematically lobbied and a well-presented public transport
alternative was drawn-up. We organised an "Adopt-a- Tree"
scheme; the aim here was to get every tree in Oxleas Wood adopted. As
well as bringing in funds and publicity, it would give supporters a
real stake in the campaign. And if the worst came to the worst we
could invite tree adopters to turn up to defend their tree.
In order
to make Oxleas a "line in the sand" for the environment
movement, we got some of the large environmental non-government
organisations (for example the Wildlife Trusts and World Wide Fund
for Nature) to take part in an Oxleas Strategy Group. This helped
lock them into a campaign that was ultimately run by local people,
but which made the best use of the resources of the national
campaigns.
A couple
of legal lines of last resort helped propel the campaign into the
national news. The Government had failed to carry out an
Environmental Impact Assessment for the scheme, as required by
European Community law. The heroic European Commissioner for the
Environment, Carlo Ripa di Meana, took up this complaint causing
Prime Minister Major to hit the roof and interrupt a Commonwealth
conference to condemn the EC's action. The complaint was never seen
through by the EC, but the publicity was invaluable, as was that
which resulted from a High Court case where the "Oxleas 9"
(nine local people) put their assets on the line to take the
Department of Transport to court over their failure to provide
adequate land in exchange for the damage to Oxleas woods. The case
was lost, but Oxleas had caught the public imagination and the
pressure on the government was intensifying.
Meanwhile,
campaigners were preparing for the worst. A "Beat the Bulldozer"
pledge was launched, with the aim of getting 10,000 people to pledge
to be there if the bulldozers went in. With the TV pictures of direct
action at Twyford Down fresh in their minds, as well as the vivid
pictures we had painted of what would happen if they violated Oxleas
Wood, the Government backed down.
For me the
Oxleas campaign had meant hours of hard work in meetings held in
draughty halls on dark, rainy nights trying to get the best campaign
that I could. For hundreds of local people it had been years of
struggle. Was it worth it? Definitely. Oxleas was a turning point.
We'd shown how people power could stop roads, a lesson that was
quickly learnt right across the country. We'd shown that the
environment movement, when it's focused and working in harmony with
local communities, could win. And of course the peace and beauty of
OxleasWood has been preserved.
Jonathan
Bray, founder and convenor of the Oxleas strategy group
|
It
requires another publication, written by people further removed from
the events of the last ten years, to assess the true contribution
ALARM UK has made to the transport revolution that is taking place in
Britain. But it appears that the loose structure of ALARM UK has
played a significant role in moulding together isolated road protests
into a nationwide revolt against road-building. Obviously protest
groups have grown up that have been outside ALARM UK, but the 300
groups that are now affiliated incorporates the bulk of the
grassroots opposition to the road-building programme. It is this
vibrant grassroots movement which has created the climate that has
made the DoT so vulnerable to attack from all quarters.
The other
important factor in all this has been the close working relationship
between Transport 2000, ALARM UK and, from 1993, the direct action
group, Road Alert! This has produced a movement that can make a
strong intellectual case for sustainable transport policies; is
radical and informed at grass- roots level; and has incorporated
direct action as integral to it.
REVOLT AGAINST ROAD-BUILDING
A year
after its formation in 1991, over one hundred groups had joined ALARM
UK. This symbolised the unease that was developing around the country
over road-building. By then, road-builders had suffered isolated,
but significant, defeats outside London - quite independently of
ALARM UK. A campaign led by Birmingham FOE, where local people had
been mobilised early and effectively, had overturned plans by
Birmingham City Council for major road schemes in the south of the
city: an important victory close to the heart of the country's motor-
manufacturing industry. And in South West England, a lively campaign
by the local group, PANEL, led to the abandonment of the Exeter
Northern Bypass.
Surveys
began to show that, while most people were as devoted as ever to
their car, growing numbers of people were opposed to further major
road-building. This was particularly the case in the prosperous South
East of Britain where a general feeling was emerging that the smart
towns and villages of the Home Counties were being ruined by unwanted
development. There were protests against superstores, and the
expansion of airports, and, above all, against the building of new
roads. Articulate campaigns were mounted against the expansion of the
M25 and the construction of a new superhighway through the
well-heeled towns of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.
Many of
these anti-roads campaigners were pillars of the local establishment.
The were also members of established and establishment environmental
organisations like the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust or the Council for
the Protection of Rural England. Their members provided an impetus
for these organisations to get involved in campaigns against
road-building schemes.
EARLY SUCCESSES
“Ordinary
groups of people - had taken on the DoT - and had won. Never before
had the mighty DoT been shaken in this way.”
The early
successes against the DoT came outside the South East - Birmingham,
Preston, Yorkshire, Woodstock, Exeter. The importance of these
campaigns cannot be overestimated. Ordinary groups of people,
fighting to save their communities from the ravages of road-
building, had taken on the Department of Transport ... and had won.
In both Preston and Yorkshire, the campaigners fought classic
campaigns along the lines of ALARM in London and had road schemes -
each worth over £100 million - abandoned. It is no
exaggeration to say that, quietly and unobtrusively, history was
being made. Never before had the mighty Department of Transport been
shaken in this way. These victories were followed by numerous others
across the length and breadth of Britain. The basic picture was the
same - people who had never campaigned before had taken on a
Government department . . . and won. For any government this would be
a serious situation: a major plank of its transport policy -
road-building - was becoming untenable.
THE SUMMER OF '93
“The
way was open for campaigners around the country to fight to win.”
With
hindsight, the Summer of 1993 was a turning point. Anti- road
campaigns were happening right across the country, but most of the
famous victories - such as Yorkshire and Preston - were still to
happen. The events of the Summer of '93 shook the DoT to its very
core and paved the way for what was to follow.
Two place
names sum up what happened that Summer: 'Twyford Down' and 'Oxleas
Wood'.
At Twyford
Down, the anger at the destruction of a precious landscape spilled
over into direct action. This ancient chalk hill was situated
directly in the line of fire of a frustrated Department of Transport,
who for many years had been attempting to construct the so-called
"missing link" of the M3 between London and Southampton.
Here, the drama of people lying in front of bulldozers high up on a
lonely hillside brought the road protest movement into every home in
the land... and hugely embarrassed a Government already concerned
about the growing revolt against road-building across the country.
Meanwhile,
in a remote corner of South East London, the 'Oxleas Wood' campaign
was coming to a dramatic conclusion. For the best part of a decade,
local people had fought to stop the East London River Crossing. This
road, so strategically important to the Department of Transport,
would have demolished over 250 homes and cut through the 8,000 year-
old Oxleas Wood. The anti-roads movement had made 'Oxleas Wood' its
"line in the sand", the one it was determined to win. And,
in that remarkable Summer of '93, it did. The final straw for the
Government was the fear that the embarrassing scenes of Twyford Down
would be repeated in the suburbs of the nation's capital. The fact
that the Department of Transport was prepared to drop one of its most
important road schemes meant that the way was open for campaigners
around the country to fight to win.
Case history 5:
M11
The M11
Link road was designed to take the M11 East Anglia to London motorway
further into inner London. Though short in length (less than 4
miles), the damage was to be colossal, as it would have to be routed
right through the Victorian suburbs of Wanstead, Leytonstone and
Leyton, entailing the demolition of 350 homes. After many years of
often rowdy, Public Inquiries, the Government got planning
permission. However, by this time the road was an anachronism, as it
was clear it would just encourage more car commuting into central
London. Those local people who hadn't already moved out of the
blighted areas in the road's path joined forces with young
environmental activists to mount the most sustained campaign of
non-violent direct action against a road scheme that the country has
ever seen. Phil McLeish was one of those environmental
activists.
 “I
got involved in the M11 campaign around March '94 at the height of
Operation Roadblock - the proactive direct action phase of the
campaign. From mid-March through to mid-April we had people coming in
from all over London - the country even - all doing their bit to help
stop the road being built. That was a manic time: droves of
mud-coated people I didn't know always coming and going; wonderful
communal meals from John The Cook; three phones all permanently busy;
lots of places to get to know, all weird and wonderful names -
Leytonstonia, Euphoria... not so much a community movement as a
movement community. The campaign hadn't always been that big.
Although there had been local opposition to the road for a decade or
so, most of the local residents had abandoned hope, until a handful
of Twyford veterans turned up in September '93. Direct action
remained a fairly specialist activity for the first couple of months
and while some locals may have sympathised with what was happening,
few of them felt it to be "their" campaign. But on November
6th, all this changed. A 250 year old sweet chestnut tree on George
Green, Wanstead, had been ominously fenced off. This tree lived on
common land, land which had survived the Enclosures Act, land which
local residents had been led to believe would be preserved intact,
since the road would be in a "tunnel". Having gathered for
a "tree dressing" ceremony, schoolchildren, pensioners,
respectable (and less respectable) Wanstead locals now found their
way barred. What happened next, neither security guards, the police,
local residents or even the organisers had expected. Together,
everyone pushed down the fences, reclaimed the land and rescued the
tree. With 70 year old women now cheerfully committing "criminal
damage", any division between activist and resident dissolved.
The campaign to save the tree became an urgent local issue; by the
time this tree was finally cut down in December, media interest had
turned the Link road into a national issue.
At first I
found it quite weird to live life in front of cameras, videos,
journalists, sixth formers doing research, and all the rest, but
quite quickly you get blase about it, and it becomes normal. We liked
to think of the media as mere reporters, but in fact they profoundly
changed the course of the campaign. At first our phone tree was made
up almost exclusively of local residents along with a few other
people from the wider London area. This changed after the eviction of
Wanstonia - five large houses in Wanstead right in the path of the
road which were declared an 'Independent Free Area' & defended to
the last during February '94. By the time of the eviction of
Claremont Road in December '94, our supporters were scattered from
Southampton to Newcastle. Our TV celebrity status meant that people
had heard of us and as a result we had a permanent influx of visitors
and supporters. In fact, it often felt like we had more supporters
than we knew what to do with. Given this, there was less of a need
for us to enthuse the local population, and we came to rely more and
more on the young eco-activists excited and inspired by our media
images: people being airlifted off roofs by their ankles, bodies
silhouetted against the skyline, high up on top of cranes, sitting on
the transport Minister's roof, climbing up crown courts, Parliament
even... The campaign grew and established itself, but we never again
felt as rooted in the local community as we did during the defence of
that tree.
Operation
Roadblock could never have happened without the media. We did our
best to network the event but we would never have managed to get the
numbers we did were it not for all the publicity around the Chestnut
tree and the Wanstonia eviction. If the three axes of all direct
action campaigns are community rootedness, media success and economic
disruption, then here we were focusing on the third. We planned to
organise a massive rota of daily direct action to make work on the
road physically impossible. As a feat of Organisation it was
certainly impressive. Eventually, though, numbers started dwindling,
and we ended Roadblock after a month. We never again had the energy
for another offensive like that. In part, I think we had lost faith
in our ability to actually stop the road. We'd thrown at them the
biggest sustained bout of daily environmental direct action in
British history and it hadn't worked. Subtly, unconsciously, we
became a movement of spectacular symbolic resistance rather than a
campaign to stop a local motorway.
 In
Wanstead we were campaigning to defend the (old) commons, the call
was a conservative one: leave our Green as it is. Most of our
publicity, much of our talk, was around the M11 Link and its
stupidity. As things began to center around the defence of Claremont
Road we were much less constrained when it came to defining the
meaning of what we were defending. We could have focused more
explicitly on housing and homelessness, but as it happens the battle
was pitched much more on a cultural level. We defended Claremont as
ongoing performance art, as an experiment in communal living, and as
a (car) free space. One crucially important context for this was the
Criminal justice Bill. "Defending, diversity and dissent"
was one of the slogans of that summer: this was nearer to the feel of
Claremont than "homes not roads". But the shift also had
psychological reasons. After the early phase of the campaign where we
were always running about, spontaneously doing actions and enthusing
people, there was a felt collective need for us to better control and
define our own space. The campaign was settling down,
institutionalising itself. And so people set to work. The street was
painted and filled with psychedelic sculpture-barricades, above them
the nets, treehouses, ariel walkways and towers went up; inside the
houses, bunkers and lock-ons and tunnels were hidden in tons of
rubble.
The
eviction of Claremont Road, when it finally happened, was wonderful.
It was the longest eviction in post-war British history. Along with
the other two campaign high points it was downplayed by the media. But
it was the most extreme and intense week which I have ever
experienced. After all the waiting and preparing, it was a complete
cathartic release. Hundreds of hours of labour instantly transmuted
to experience and rubble. As an end, it was perfect.
|
A
crucial element in the success of the 'anti-roads movement' has been
its ability to back up its protests with sound transport arguments.
Radical academics of the calibre of John Adams, John Whitelegg,
Stephen Plowden and others have provided the theory and the research.
Pressure groups, led by Transport 2000, have produced reports which
have cogently applied this research to present-day Britain. And the
likes of ALARM UK and Friends of the Earth have acted as active
channels for the ideas to reach the local groups campaigning at
grassroots level.
NEW PROTEST GENERATION
But the
Summer of '93 was important in another respect as well. Twyford Down
brought into the anti-roads movement a new type of protester - young,
mobile, committed environmentalists. These were the people who threw
themselves in front of the bulldozers and 'locked on' to the diggers
and cement mixers. The group who camped on Twyford Down called
themselves the Dongas Tribe, after the medieval trackways
crisscrossing the Down. Their efforts to protect the land were to
provide inspiration to a new generation of protesters. To the
embarrassment of the Government, these "deep-green" people
won the respect and affection of the middle-classes of the Home
Counties, who identified with their fight against inappropriate
development and landscape destruction. What The Economist was to term
'the classless protest' was beginning to emerge.
Emma Must,
who was to receive a major international award for the role she
played in the protest movement, first got involved at Twyford Down:
"I was working in the local library. Each day as I travelled to
work by train, I witnessed the beginnings of the destruction of
Twyford Down - a landscape that had been etched on my mind since
childhood. I simply couldn't stand back and do nothing. Many others
felt the same, and we determined to try to halt the devastation in
whatever peaceful ways we could - by lying in front of the
bulldozers, locking onto massive machines and networking frantically
to alert as many people as possible to the horror of what was
happening."
GREEN UPRISING
There has
been much debate over why direct action sprang up so forcefully at
this time around the issue of road-building. There is probably no
single answer.
There were
hundreds of young people, environmentally aware, dissatisfied with
the 'go-for-growth' ethos of the 1980s, who were affronted by the way
in which Britain's cities and countryside were being remorselessly
eaten into to cater for the motor vehicle. The horror of putting a
road through Twyford Down, overlooking the ancient city of
Winchester, part of the rolling Hampshire countryside, and the site
of an iron-age village, a bronze-age burial site and medieval
trackways, encapsulated all the anger and frustration of so many
young people who felt their world was being sacificed on the altar of
materialism.
Twyford
Down was the catalyst which unleashed a torrent of creative protest
that carried over into other road protests and, by the mid-1990s, is
energising a range of campaigns on green issues like animal welfare
and land reform.
Also,
prior to Twyford Down, radical direct action organisations had
emerged in Britain. Groups such as Earth First! and Reclaim the
Streets had made contact with ALARM UK and a number of joint actions
had been organised around the country.
The direct
action movement asked many questions of the large, established
environmental organisations. Many of these organisations were slow to
embrace the new movement, but there are signs in the mid-1990s that
some of them are adapting to take account of this new form of
protest. Further than this, though, the shock waves that are
reverberating from direct action are stimulating new thinking, with
growing emphasis on local campaigning and co-operation.
ROAD ALERT!
The
national direct action group, Road Alert!, which was to become a
sister organisation of ALARM UK, sprang out of the Twyford Down
protests. People like Rebecca Lush and Emma Must, who had both gone
to jail rather than give in over Twyford Down, had come to realise
that "it was not a case of one road through one hill, but
potentially a thousand roads through a thousand hills by the early
years of the 21st century." With others, they set up Road Alert!
to specifically concentrate on the direct action side of anti-roads
campaigning. Rebecca Lush said, "Many people have been inspired
by the protests that have sprung up since Twyford and have wanted to
defend their land too. Road Alert! exists to help these people by
passing on protest skills and helping others to get involved."
Road Alert! has attracted support from hundreds of young people
around the country. Tim Allman, another of its founders, explained
the appeal: "There were a lot of people who didn't like what was
happening around them, but who didn't see what they could do that
would make much difference. Direct action changed all that. It
empowers people. It makes them feel that they, as individuals, can
make things happen."
The close
working relationship between Road Alert! and ALARM UK has ensured
that, in Britain, the direct activists have not been seen as a fringe
minority, but as an integral part of the anti-roads movement.
Interestingly, there have been few of the splits and schisms that
have crippled so many protest movements over the years.
GROUND BREAKING CONFERENCES
This
unlikely alliance of direct action campaigners and Home Counties
stalwarts was in evidence at ALARM UK's first National Conference in
Birmingham in the early months of 1993. At that stage the Twyford
Down protest was still to reach its dramatic climax, the Oxleas Wood
climbdown was six months away, and the victories at Preston and in
Yorkshire were still to come. But there were clear signs that the
campaigning techniques first adopted in London, together with the
emerging drama of Twyford Down, supported by sound intellectual
arguments put forward by the likes of Transport 2000, were beginning
to mould together a formidable movement.
Corridor
Alliances A sure sign of the growing strength and maturity of the
anti-roads movement is the way local groups have banded together over
the last few years to fight road construction along specific
corridors. The A36 Corridor Alliance, formed in October 1993,
consists of over thirty groups each opposing a particular scheme
along the A36/46 between Southampton and Bristol. SCAR (South Coast
Against Road-building), started in April 1994, is made up of nearly
forty groups opposing DoT plans to construct a 230 mile superhighway
from the Channel Tunnel to the West Country. Similar alliances are
being set up along both the A1(M) and the Felixstowe to Holyhead
Euroroute. By developing this additional tier of campaigning, groups
are now effectively challenging the DoT's piecemeal approach to
constructing strategic routes.
The
Conference reflected the nature of ALARM UK. It was all about
enabling local groups to meet each other, to campaign more
effectively and to marshall the transport arguments more efficiently.
Neither global nor constitutional issues featured on the agenda. To
take votes or pass resolutions would have been quite irrelevant. The
Conference was deliberately and carefully structured to meet the
requirements of the local groups. The speakers were largely from
member organisations outlining their campaigns. The workshops were
focused on practical campaigning and applied transport matters. There
was ample opportunity during the day for campaigners to meet each
other often for the first time.
By the
second ALARM UK Conference, only 18 months later, the changes that
had taken place had been dramatic. Numerous groups, including a good
number of the 250 ALARM UK groups then in existence, had successfully
challenged the Department of Transport. The Government had dropped
one third of its National Roads Programme in a Roads Review it felt
obliged to undertake. And direct action protests had sprung up in
over ten further places, most notably in East London against the
hugely controversial MI I Link Road.
Case history 6:
M1-M62
The
Calder Valley in West Yorkshire was threatened by a new motorway
linking the M1 and the M62. The people of this region of hilltop
farms and industrial towns united against a scheme which would have
transformed the distinctive character of this corner of northern
England. Charles Elstone of the local campaign, CRAG, picks
up the story.
 “Being
an active member of the M1 -M62 campaign was frightening,
frustrating, thrilling, depressing and fun. I was frightened when we
learnt from other road campaigners how much work we had to do;
frustrated by the off-hand attitude of the DoT; thrilled by the hard
work of so many people and by our TV programme; depressed when I fell
out with the others. But what fun... the DoT said they would not
write to our Chairman any more, so we put him in the stocks and
gagged him (this got coverage in all the local papers and on the
TV)... one village would be totally surrounded by three motorways, so
we called it "The BermudaTriangle no-one gets out alive. "
The M1-M62
Link was a new Motorway linking junction 25 on the M62 to either
junction 38 or 39 on the M1. The alternatives were the Purple Route
over hills and open countryside, or the Yellow Route down the Calder
valley through mainly urban areas. The Link was proposed in February
1992 and cancelled in October 1993.
I started
as a NIMBY – the yellow Route was at the bottom of my garden -
but very soon I changed my mind. I went to a meeting five miles away
where it was agreed to fight the whole idea of a Link and to try to
stop Purple and Yellow factions forming. This became our strategy and
both it and the slogan SINK THE LINK were adopted by all the groups
being set up by local communities along both routes.
The DoT,
by ignoring some places as venues for their exhibition and by issuing
a biased questionnaire, caused a lot of resentment which led to a
self-sustaining momentum. The local groups soon wanted to coordinate
their individual campaigns and formed CRAG (Combined Road Action
Groups). After four months, we had persuaded our two local councils,
three local MPs (two Labour, one Conservative) and MEP all to oppose
the Link. A little while later, we presented a twenty thousand
signature petition to Parliament and went to Downing Street with our
MPs. Within twelve months we had completed our own questionnaire
covering six thousand households which showed only 6% to be in favour
of the Link; and the TV programme about us was shown on Channel 4.
I think we
were able to keep up this momentum because each group had one or two
activists and this meant that CRAG never had less that twenty
strongly committed people. From the start we recognised the
importance of the local press, radio and TV and we learnt how to
write a Press Release. We were lucky to be in an area where each town
and village had a Summer Fete and there was always a Sink the Link
stall. We caught the public's imagination and got hundreds of people
writing to their local councillors and MPs.
I will
never forget my time on the M1-M62 campaign, the new friendships
forged, the skills and energy people brought to the task, the
unlikely combinations of people with different politics and ideals
who found that not only could they work together but that they could
learn from each other. I still find it difficult to pinpoint why we
achieved so much, but near the top of the list must be having so many
really active members and having a snappy slogan like Sink the Link
which became recognised throughout West Yorkshire. But maybe it is
Mrs Thatcher who should be thanked most because many of our activists
were unemployed, early retirees or redundant and were able to give
all of their time to fighting the campaign.”
|
Case history 7:
M25
"Yesterday's announcement that the Government is dropping
plans
to widen part of the M25 to 14 lanes marks the end of a transport
policy that stretches back to the early days of motoring."
Christian
Wolmar, The Independent, 4.4.95
The M25 is
London's bypass. It is a massive motorway, eight lanes wide in
places, encircling the capital, completed in 1986. It was designed to
take long- distance and freight traffic away from London and the
prosperous commuter towns on its outskirts.
But, in
1989, barely three years after the last section had been opened, came
the bombshell: the Department was proposing to widen sections of the
M25 to 14 lanes. The well-heeled citizens of Surrey, Berkshire and
Buckinghamshire rose up in revolt. They had been promised that the
new motorway would spell the end to the their traffic problems,
allowing their smart towns and villages to return to the peaceful
days of old.
The
success of their campaign to stop the widening of the M25 is full of
instructive lessons. First and foremost, it was a campaign rooted in
the local communities. It is frequently the case that governments can
ignore pressure groups or professional agitators. But they dare not
dismiss the united voice of thousands of voters. And this was a
people's revolt happening in the Conservative heartlands - the
wealthy, influential middle-classes of Middle England on the march.
The local
councils and constituency MPs, the latter all Conservative, could not
afford to ignore these people. Runnymede Council drew up a
thoroughly professional alternative to the Government's widening
proposals. Friends of the Earth and the Council for the Protection
of Rural England (CPRE) provided useful information on environmental
issues and campaigning techniques. Surrey CPRE performed a crucial
coordinating role.
Rarely can
a government withstand this sort of well- informed, passionate
protest coming from people whose votes it treasures. It was not
surprising, therefore, that a month before Local Government Elections
in the areas concerned, the Government announced its intention to
drop its original widening proposals.
The
campaign had played it right. Its main target was to use the weight
of public opinion to change the minds of politicians rather than
concentrate all its efforts on the Public Inquiry.
Thus, the
dropping of the M25 made another huge hole in the Department of
Transport's Roads Programme. In Christian Wolmar's words, "If it
is impossible to justify such a widening of the busiest motorway in
the country because of the resulting environmental damage, how many
other road schemes are equally vulnerable?" The
Independent 4.4.95
|
THE "URBAN TWYFORD DOWN"
The
Government had feared direct action in defence of the historic Oxleas
Wood in South East London, but it was taken aback that the
protest against the M11, a motorway being built in an unfashionable
part of East London, resulted in the longest campaign of direct
action against a road in British history. For over eighteen months,
pictures were flashed around the world of masses of people - old and
young, conventional and alternative - taking on the bulldozers in an
awe-inspiring defence of homes, urban green spaces and communities.
DoT IN DIFFICULTIES
The
Department of Transport, once virtually unassailable, was in severe
difficulties. Something had to crack.. The DoT was failing to
respond to the well-researched intellectual criticism its policies
were receiving not only from Transport 2000 and its increasingly
well-respected Director, Stephen Joseph, but also from major
industrial and economic interests. In August 1994, the Transport
Secretary John MacGregor - a man quite unable to cope with the
developing situation - was replaced.
Moreover,
the turmoil created by the anti-roads movement had created the right
environment for other forces to undermine the Roads Programme. The
Department of the Environment, worried about Britain's inability to
meet the targets for reducing emissions levels agreed at the Rio
Summit, became increasingly critical of the DoT. The Treasury,
concerned as ever to reduce public spending, was able to earmark
roads as a progressively easier target for making savings. The
Department of Transport no longer felt confident enough to shun its
expert critics; radical transport academics and consultants like Dr
Phil Goodwin and Keith Buchan have been invited to join official
bodies. Neither could the Department afford to ignore two momentous
reports published in late 1994. The Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution, comprising some of Britain's top scientists, called for a
halving of the Roads Programme and real investment in alternative
transport modes. A report from SACTRA (The Standing Advisory
Committee on Trunk Road Assessment) produced evidence that,
generally, far from solving problems, new roads simply generate more
traffic. And, finally, both the main opposition parties have adopted
policies which promise a significant move away from road-building.
By 1995,
it has become clear that a change is underway at the Department of
Transport. Though there are still numerous battles left to be fought,
a new Secretary of State, Dr Brian Mawhinney, has signalled a
strategic move away from road- building. Crucially, the Department
has abandoned any plans to build enough roads to accommodate the
potential growth in traffic levels. Steven Norris, Mawhinney's
progressive deputy and a man long convinced of the need for sensible
investment in alternative modes, has become more prominent.
None of
this means that road-building is a thing of the past, but all
political parties are looking to scale it down considerably and are
looking at other ways of dealing with the country's transport
problems. This is a world away from boasting about the largest
road-building programme 'since the Romans'. A transport revolution is
taking place. Back in 1990, it was clear that London had been ready
to respond to a radical way of campaigning against road-building.
Just five years later, it is has become equally clear that this sort
of dynamic campaigning across the country is bringing about a
fundamental shift in the nation's transport policy.
Acknowledgements
Roadblock was written and compiled by John Stewart, Jonathan Bray and
Emma Must.
Many thanks to Denise Carlo, David Croker, Charles Elstone, Chris
Gillham, Phil McLeish and David Marcer for their local stories.
Also to Simon Fairlie and Gina Harkell for their valuable comments on
the text.
Cartoons by Rob Hider and Brick.
Photography by Alex MacNaughton, Alexander Apperley, Tom Hanley,
Steve Johnson and others. Norwich protest picture supplied by
Eastern Daily Press. Oxleas Wood Tree Hugging picture supplied by
Times Newspapers Limited.
Print version designed and produced by Jugatsu.
We are grateful to the Goldman Environmental Foundation without whose
financial assistance Roadblock could not have been produced.
