(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)
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Issue 42    

Pissing in or pissing out? The 'big tent' of Green Alliance

Simon Matthews

En route to their crushing general election victory in 2001 the Prime Minister and his colleagues found time for a private working breakfast with some of the big movers and shakers in UK corporate capitalism - Glaxo Smith Kline, HSBC, Unilever, Tesco, Royal Bank of Scotland, Centrica and many others - 'to reduce the risk of rifts with business in the coming campaign.' (1) A few days earlier two other major players in the British economy, Shell UK and BP, announced their greatest ever profits, £9bn and £9.8bn respectively. (2) This was followed by curious press reports that both Shell and BP had hired ex-MI6 staff and a former German intelligence agent to infiltrate Greenpeace (3) and that Tesco had asked MI5 to investigate the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. In an obscure spat about salmon farming Tesco believed - apparently - that the RSPB had been infiltrated by 'foreign agents' who were

'posing a threat to the economic well being of British companies.' (4)

At a time when the offices of Glaxo Smith Kline are prone to attack by animal rights activists such jitteriness is perhaps understandable. But these threats - if they really existed - were hardly onerous. At the end of the day the upper levels of management were not disturbed. When the much derided list of 'People's Peers' was proclaimed on April 26 Sir John Browne, Chief Executive of BP, was one of the unsurprising beneficiaries. (5)

The corporations referred to above are all members or supporters of Green Alliance, arguably the most influential and well connected pressure group in Britain. (6)

Immediately after the 1997 general election Robin Cook helped provide Foreign Office funding for the Green Globe Task Force:

'to help Government achieve international objectives for sustainable development.'

The Green Globe Task Force shares an office with Green Alliance in Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1. The Green Business Evening at the 1998 Labour Party Conference was funded, somewhat alarmingly given their extensive road building interests, by Tarmac, a major Green Alliance supporter. The government has an Advisory Committee on Business and the Environment. It is chaired by Chris Fay, Chair of Shell UK. (7) The Kensington Tesco was the preferred location when the PM launched his 1999 'Annual Report'. In October 2000 Blair gave the major keynote speech to a Conference on the Environment jointly hosted by the CBI and Green Alliance. (8) Finally, the rumour post election that Nick Butler of BP would help the second Blair government 'radically change public services', confirms the influence that Green Alliance supporters have at the highest level. (9)

Origins

The ancestry of Green Alliance can be traced back to 1925 when Leonard Elmhirst (10) married Dorothy Whitney Straight and bought Dartington Hall, a stately home in Devon that is slightly smaller than Buckingham Palace and has less extensive grounds than Balmoral. (11) Among other ventures they started a progressive school, Dartington Hall School, an item of considerable expense. As Dorothy Whitney Straight was the daughter of William C Whitney (a major US political figure, lawyer and millionaire from the 1880s through to his death in 1904) and the widow of Willard Straight (a J. P. Morgan banking executive and high flyer in the US diplomatic service) it seems likely that the funding for this came mainly from her side of the marriage. The school, though, was not their sole endeavour. From 1931 Elmhirst was a major supporter of Political and Economic Planning (PEP), the prototype UK 'think tank'. Independently funded, it provided panels of experts who delved into economic, planning and social science matters. Elmhirst became Chair of PEP in 1939. A little later Michael Young (a former pupil of Dartington Hall School) became its Director. Young left PEP in 1945 to work as Secretary of the Labour Party Research Department. (12)

This period - the wartime coalition evolving into the Attlee government, Beveridge etc - was probably the apogee of state planning in the UK, the-man-in-Whitehall-knows-best era. One of the great landmarks of this was the Town and Country Planning Act (1947). Interestingly, a significant number of current Green Alliance members have had professional careers in the town and country planning field.(13) In 1954 Young and one of his colleagues, Peter Willmott left the Labour Party Research Department and set up, with funding from Elmhirst and Straight, the Institute for Community Studies to carry on (like PEP) 'research in the social sciences' and generally keep the torch of expert-led policy advice burning throughout the years to come.(14)

Declining optimism

However, post-Dien Bien Phu, Suez and Algeria, as the UK and other European nations either relinquished or were forced out of old markets and territories there was a marked decline in post-war optimism and the attractions of state planning. In its place, by the mid-60s, came concerns in the west about the future supply of raw materials and food. This was investigated in the 1968 Club of Rome report, which commented on 'the extreme gravity of the global situation' and predicted 'the breakdown of society by the end of the century.' (15)

As well as Young and the Institute of Community Studies (which had shifted away from government-led solutions) a number of individuals contributed to this growing debate advocating policies to address the major crisis then thought to be imminent. Prominent among these was Edward Goldsmith who launched a magazine,The Ecologist, in 1970,(16) which produced a number of gloomy books, including A Blueprint for Survival (1972), endorsed by 37 scientific experts and proclaiming:

'Governments are refusing to face the facts. Unless we minimise the disruption of the ecological processes and stabilise the population.we shall inevitably face the exhaustion of food supplies.and the collapse of society as we know it.' (17)

The book also called for 'a national movement to assume political status and contest the next general election'. Putting this into practice entailed Goldsmith setting up the paranoid sounding 'Movement for Survival'. A short time later this merged with a small group in the Coventry area which had been greatly influenced by the radical US environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. (18) The new political party was called People. (19) It contested 11 seats in the February 1974 general election, obtaining in some of these in the West Midlands quite reasonable levels of support by the standards of UK minority parties. (20)

Although there was then little electoral impact in national politics for environmentalist arguments, at local level, in London, the consequences were more noticeable. In Kensington and Chelsea (where there had been excessive demolition and motorway building etc) the May 1974 London council elections produced the Save London Action Group (SLAG) which ran a number of candidates and described itself as 'a strictly non-political party concerned with improving the environment.' (21)

By May 1978, the next set of comprehensive London local elections, SLAG had evolved into the Save London Alliance, several of whose members were also active in the Ecology Party (the name adopted by People in 1976). The best known of these was Jonathan Porritt. (22) The Save London Alliance fielded 98 candidates in 12 boroughs declaring that they were 'trying to end the current system of party political involvement in local politics.' (23)

Their impact was significant. Save London Alliance candidates attracted enough votes to affect the results in Ealing (a borough Labour lost), Wandsworth (a borough Labour lost and where Paul Ekins, now of Green Alliance, ran for the Save London Alliance) and in Westminster. The biggest upset came in Hammersmith and Fulham where the Save London Alliance put up 18 candidates. Their intervention resulted in a split vote in Addison ward, where Labour lost 2 seats to the Conservatives. Because of this the council became hung with the balance of power held by 2 Liberal councillors. After a week's deliberations locally and with their national HQ (and substantial press coverage in The Evening Standard and The Guardian) the Liberals voted to put the Conservatives into power and Labour into opposition. With the skids already under the Callaghan government this was a reasonably heavy blow to strike. A year later one of the Conservative gains in the 1979 general election was Fulham, a seat Labour might have held had they retained control of the local council. (24)

Green Alliance launched

Green Alliance was launched in July 1978, just after the Hammersmith and Fulham events, 'to raise the profile of the environment in mainstream politics', (24) by Lord Beaumont and Richard Holme, both major figures in the Liberal Party, and Maurice Ash, son-in-law of Leonard Elmhirst, trustee of Dartington Hall and a senior figure in the Town and Country Planning Association. (25) The subsequent, unpublicised, development of the organisation has been strikingly similar to that of both the Social Democratic Party (SDP), of which Michael Young was a founder member,(26) and the 'New Labour' project. In 1982 Tom Burke, an SDP parliamentary candidate and policy advisor to SDP founder member David Owen, became Director of Green Alliance. Burke was also active in the British American Project for a Successor Generation (BAP), the latest project seeking to integrate the Anglo-American political and economic elites. BAP funding came from, among others, Rio Tinto Zinc, (27) whose Chair from 1995 to 1998 was Richard Holme, and who today employ Burke as a Policy Advisor. Both Burke and Holme remain members of Green Alliance. In 1991 Tony Flower, another colleague of Michael Young, and, like him, (and Burke) active in the SDP, was appointed Director of Development. Currently, following registration as a limited company in 1995, the organisation is Chaired by Andrew Purkis (who is also Chief Executive of the Diana, Princess of Wales Fund, one of several Green Alliance figures connected to the Royal Family) (28), and includes on its board Burke and a number of quango members. Its funding and support comes from BP, Glaxo, Lever Brothers, Shell, the BBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Tarmac, Sainsburys, Tesco, the privatised utilities, the DETR, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Prince's Trust.

Green Alliance people

Membership of Green Alliance is by invitation only. A list of current individual donors and corporate members/funders can be found in their annual report. (29) Some caution should be employed when analysing this: after all, many people join an organisation for purely altruistic reasons without ever seeking (or needing) to become personally active in its affairs. The active membership will, inevitably, be smaller. Nevertheless among those in Green Alliance who can be traced - or whose background is known to the author - a fascinating profile emerges of those to whom the Blair administration talks on big environmental issues:

Inside the tent? A powerful political quangocracy of self-defining 'centre ground'; earnest and mainly SDP types, upholding the Establishment pro-European/pro-NATO outlook, with good connections to the Prince of Wales, the Anglican Church and the media (Dimbleby, ITV, Murdoch etc) and funded by UK big business - pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, the privatised utilities, the motor industry, supermarkets and road building. (37) There are also a number of figures from the current environmental movement.

Outside the tent? The trade unions, anyone in traditional to right Tory or mainstream to left Labour politics; anyone Irish; anyone who disagrees with the EU/NATO orthodoxy; no smaller employers; none of the old industries (coal, steel, shipbuilding, agriculture, fishing); and, ironically, given the background of Michael Young and others, no consumer representatives. (38)

A powerful corporate lobby

The actual impact of Green Alliance during the Blair years to date is hard to gauge. Certainly the concerns expressed by most people in the UK about the environment hardly figure in the organisation's publicity, publications and conferences. The abysmal state of public transport (fares up to eight times higher than other EU nations, few staff, poor wages, little investment); excessive fuel prices; the need - apparently - for enormous car parking facilities around shopping centres' supermarkets; (39) and the continuation of suburban sprawl, are not matters that appear to galvanise Green Alliance into making pronouncements that either reach the public domain or inform debate. Some members, notably Lord Melchett (over GM crops) and Jonathan Porritt (re: New Labour environmental credentials generally) (40), have expressed doubts.

But whatever its initial rationale and whatever the personal views and opinions of some of its individual members, Green Alliance looks like an enormously powerful corporate lobby heavily connected to the political forces that have reshaped the globe since the late 1970s. It was typical that when the new Blair government announced big changes to the remaining public services in the UK, support for this immediately came from Tony Colman MP (and Green Alliance) who said:

'as a private sector person you are more results orientated and more achievement orientated than the public sector.' (41)

In such a world the chance of any real environmental improvement seems slim.

The ability of the establishment to take forward a neo-Thatcherite agenda dressed in centre or left of centre clothing is surely one of the characteristic features of Blair's Britain.(42)

Notes

1 The Times 16 February 2001.

2 The Sunday Times 11 February 2001. Tesco also announced record profits (£1bn - The Daily Telegraph 10 April 2001) due mainly to their huge expansion in eastern Europe post 1990. Blair and Brown have so far rejected the idea of any windfall tax.

3 The Sunday Times 17 June 2001.

4 The Sunday Times 11 and 18 March 2001. The RSPB do indeed hold the radical view that large areas of the UK should revert to being a wilderness. See The Observer 29 July 2001.

5 Browne is not the first BP figure to be so honoured. David Simon (BP 1961, Rio Tinto Zinc/Bank of England 1995, CBI, European Business Round Table etc, a career profile not untypical of many Green Alliance figures) became Lord Simon of Highbury in 1997 and served in the Blair government 1997/1998.

6 The issue of conflict of interest with so many politicians, quango heads and industrialists all in the same lobby group also should be considered.

7 Fay joined Shell in 1970 having a major career with them in Nigeria, Malaysia, Turkey as well as a role with the CBI.

8 24 October 2000 - and available on the Green Alliance website.

9 The Sunday Telegraph 3 June 2001. Butler is a friend of Peter Mandelson and a member of the British American Project for a Successor Generation (which has now become just the British American Project). Some of the detail in this article should be cross referenced with previous research in Lobster, notably Tom Easton, 'Who were the SDP travelling with?' (no. 31), 'The British American Project for the Successor Generation' (no. 33) and 'Liddle and Lobbygate' (no. 36) and Gregory Palast, 'Systematic Corruption, Systematic Solutions' (no. 38).

10 Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) had a lifelong interest in rural economies. His brother Thomas Elmhirst (1895-1982) was a major figure in the RAF, holding many overseas intelligence appointments, culminating in his running the UK atom bomb team 1950-1953.

11 According to their website, 1000 acres managed by 40 staff.

12 Claims that Young personally wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto are probably exaggerated - though he clearly had a role in doing so. Ditto that he was solely responsible for the Open University.

13 The influence of this area in the '40s was immense. Desmond Donnelly (1920-1974) was Director of the Town and Country Planning Association 1948-1950 prior to becoming a Labour MP. Curiously he left the Labour Party in 1968, launching the Democratic Party (a kind of prototype and very unsuccessful SDP). His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography is written by William Rodgers.

14 PEP's later activities included advocacy of European integration. In 1978 - the same time that Green Alliance was formed - they were relaunched as the Policy Studies Institute.

15 The sudden pessimism may have been due to the effect the June 1967 closure of the Suez Canal (which lasted until 1975) had on western economies, and the general support for the closure in the Arab (i.e. oil producing) world. Note that Alexander King of Green Alliance was also a senior figure at the OECD 1968-1974 as well as being President of the Club of Rome.

16 Edward Goldsmith - son of Francis Goldsmith (1878-1967), Conservative MP for Stowmarket 1910-1918, who lived in France from the '20s developing an extensive hotel business - the Savoy etc, and brother of James. James Goldsmith helped fund the radical right wing think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, became an MEP in 1994 and ran the Referendum Party 1996/1997. He received a knighthood from Harold Wilson in 1976 for 'services to ecology'. This is thought to have been a Wilsonian joke. The real reason for the honour is thought to be Goldsmith's legal actions against Private Eye which had been prominent in the disinformation campaigns being run in the 1970s against the Wilson government.

17 In the small print The Ecologist advocated a 50% reduction in the population of Britain.

18 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb (1970) saying there were too many people in the world, advocating a tax on children and the UN breaking off diplomatic relations with the Vatican because of its teachings on birth control. Extracts from this had - apparently - been serialised in the UK edition of Playboy, where they came to the attention of the Coventry based group. Coincidentally David Icke was a young footballer with Coventry City during this period though there is no evidence of his involvement in ecological matters at this stage.

19 The name may have been influenced by the 1973 publication of Small is Beautiful - Economics as if People Mattered, by Ernst Schumacher, then President of the Soil Association and previously economic advisor to the National Coal Board. Not normally mentioned in accounts of Schumacher's life is that he was the brother-in-law of Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi atom bomb team.

20 The seats where People made their greatest impact were Birmingham Northfield, Coventry North East and Coventry North West, all with Labour MPs and all connected to the motor vehicle industry. There were no Liberal candidates in any of these seats. Edward Goldsmith ran in Suffolk (Eye) receiving a derisory vote.

21 West London Observer 26 April 1974.

22 Letter to the author from Jonathan Porritt 17 May 2001.

23 West London Observer 27 April 1978.

24 This was during the period of the 'Lib-Lab' Pact; i.e. a minority Labour government being sustained by Liberal votes in the House of Commons. The Pact ended a few months later.

25 The 1998 Green Alliance Annual Report says they celebrated their twentieth anniversary in July 1998. The Encyclopaedia of British and Irish Political organisations, though, refers to them being 'conceived as a political party'. Curiously the Irish Green Party began life using the name Green Alliance whilst the sister party of the Liberal Democrats in Ulster is the Alliance Party. It seems possible that the motive of those launching Green Alliance, at the time, was mainly political rather than the production of another pressure group.

26 Perhaps the Liberals saw the SLA votes across London as something they could harness, with Ash feeling this was a trend (like Michael Young and consumerism in the '60s) that should be encouraged. Jonathan Porritt maintains (17 May 2001) that there was no connection between Save London Alliance and Green Alliance - despite himself and Paul Ekins having been members of both.

27 Young rejoined the Labour Party in 1991.

28 The extent to which Rio Tinto Zinc crop up in connection with these matters reminds me that they can also be found in Tory MP, the classic Left Book Club account of who funded the British right in the

'20s and '30s.

29 Note that Simon Lewis - Buckingham Palace PR chief - is ex-SDP, ex-British Gas etc. A number of senior Anglican clergy also feature in the movement.

30 The membership does of course vary slightly from year to year but the better known figures listed here have remained constant for some time.

31 Monbiot says (Captive State pp. 212/3) that de Ramsey avoids public transport whilst travelling around London on official business.

32 The Times (10 April 2001) said the Dimbleby family were selling their newspaper chain, which they had run for over 100 years. They had a reputation of being very anti-union employers.

33 Forum for the Future share the same premises as Business in the Community, the pressure group funded by HRH Prince Charles.

34 Despite these Green credentials Gavron was a councillor when the Haringey refuse collection service was slated as the worst in London. It was later forceably taken away from the council by the District Auditor.

35 Lord Taverne originally chaired Prima Europe, which employed Roger Liddle. Prima Europe clients include Unilever, Glaxo, Rio Tinto Zinc, British Gas - the people who back Green Alliance.

36 The Trilateral Commission produced a report, Crisis of Democracy, in 1975 arguing that if citizens became too politically active modern democracies would become ungovernable: presumably an argument for Politics as if People Don't Matter.

37 The Labour candidate at this contest was the young Tony Blair.

38 BP merged with Amoco in 1998 and now employs 97,000 people worldwide. Their corporate HQ remains in the City of London whilst exploration work is based in Houston, Texas. In October Blair's long-serving personal assistant Anji Hunter joined BP - sometimes referred to as Blair Petroleum - at a salary reported to be £200,000 a year.

39 Green Alliance claim in their 1998 Annual Report to have 'negotiated' Margaret Thatcher's first contacts with the environmental movement. They also say that Tony Blair was the first Labour leader to address their gatherings, in 1996 - i.e. previous Labour leaders took little notice of them.

40 Tesco lobbied successfully against any tax on big car parks in 1998. Their official spokesperson as one of the big four UK supermarkets is Baroness Thornton, a former employee of the Institute of Community Studies (1979-1981) who later chaired the Greater London Labour Party (1986-1991). Thornton was a colleague and friend of Tony Blair, Cherie Booth and Charles Clarke in the Queensbridge ward Labour Party in Hackney in the early '80s, receiving a peerage in 1998.

41 See Green World no. 30, pp. 10/11, 'Can New Labour Go Green?'

42 The Daily Telegraph 25 June 2001

43 The Sunday Times 3 June 2001