The climate camp at Heathrow is coming down and the core group, which set it up and steered the event, is celebrating what they say has been a successful week of protest education and discussion. Good luck to them, but don’t buy the guff that it was a model of a new low carbon-based society or the birth of a utopian political movement.
I went to the camp twice, and to the HQ of the metropolitan police once for a briefing last week. Frankly, it was easier and far more pleasant getting into Scotland Yard. A small but anonymous faction of the old protest movement at the climate camp had decided from the start that the ‘corporate’ press is actually the enemy, and therefore has to be excluded. There was to be no appeal and the policy was rigorously enforced via a media police team. As a sop, the press was allowed a guided tour of certain parts of the camp for one hour a day.
This was plane stupid. Just when the campers were saying that climate action had to become a mass movement and were appealing to the public to join them, they were deliberately keeping the media out – the very people needed to open up the debate.
I refused to go on the absurd camp tour. On a personal level, every journalist and photographer I talked to felt insulted. Why is a journalist – good or bad – not classed as a citizen? Why could not journalists inform themselves by going to the lectures and debates? Why should they not enjoy the same rights as anyone else? Why was my partner allowed into the camp but not me? Why could I only talk to people I had known for years only in the company of a minder?
If there is one thing more aggravating than a British policeman stopping you on suspicion that you are a terrorist when he knows for a fact that you are not, it’s a jobsworth protester trying to have you thrown out of a site that he himself has squatted.
On a professional level, it is truly daft. Genuine journalists are welcomed around the world. I, and many others, have been welcomed into the camps and villages of freedom fighters, soldiers, political parties of all hues, environmentalists, land right groups, the dispossessed, the starving, human rights groups, NGOs, mass murderers, separatists and fundamentalists . They all believed in a freedom of the press and many risked everything to talk to us. In every case we were treated courteously and able to ask anyone whatever questions we have wanted.
But not at Heathrow. This was mass media mismanagement , North Korean-style, circa 1970. The government spooks of Sudan and Indonesia never tried to manipulate journalists like this. The foreign press was astonished. I felt sorry for the sympathetic people on the camp’s media team who had to enforce the rule. The argument they parroted included: that no political or social organisation would allow people to walk around their offices or sit in on strategy meetings; that people would feel uneasy; that it was a decision based on giving everyone equal access.
Rot. This was an open access site with public meetings. No journalist was asking or expecting to listen in to anyone’s private conversations or plans. If anyone felt uncomfortable, all they had to do was decline to be interviewed or photographed, or to ask journalists to leave the room.
Moreover, everyone knew there were hordes of undercover journalists in the camp precisely because access was denied. After all, anyone could get in just by arriving anonymously and pitching a tent. Anyone could go to any open meeting and write anything they wanted.
So it boiled down to this: the only people excluded were those journalists trying to be honest who could help them make their points to a wider public. Anyone who wanted to write lies was facilitated. Wow! What a weird world that this new ‘movement’ has been born in.
How has it got to this? The paranoia comes from years of being rolled over by certain newspapers and being consistently harassed by the police. It has led to a defensive culture and deep mistrust and mistakes. It is also a hangover of American authoritarianism and Puritanism, which built up during anti-globalisation protests at Seattle, Genoa, and Prague.
But that was then. Action against climate change is too important and urgent to be hijacked by a small group. It needs the full force of all the green groups, unions, local authorities and others behind it. No argument was ever won by people trying to hide or manipulate freedom of movement or speech. It is an ugly culture that cannot welcome its potential friends, and debate with its enemies, and which feels it must control people’s perceptions so crudely.
This movement is in real danger of associating climate change action with secrecy and dishonesty. It’s an easy step from trying to manipulate the press to manipulate information. Via its media strategy it threatens to become one more totalitarian, exclusive group that is neither liked nor taken seriously. Rather than being armed with “nothing but peer-reviewed science”, as it proclaims, it seems to be armed with ill-founded suspicion.
