Chapter 34

Reprise

Motorbikes have played an important role in my life. Ever since I took the plunge and bought a Honda 550 from a guy at Greenpeace, whom I was convinced was a police plant, I’ve loved them. After the chain snapped on the Honda and wrapped itself around the back wheel, causing me to fight the bike for about 500 yards down Goswell Road, I decided to buy a shaft-driven bike and, being envious of Tony Marriner’s BMW R100RS, I began looking out for one.

I found, hidden away at the back of a shop exclusively selling stylish Italian motorcycles, a beautiful, smoke red R100 RS, upright and staid by comparison with the sleek lines of the Italian bikes. I paid £2,000 for it and sold it, two years later for £1,800, to Dr John Large, a nuclear engineer and Greenpeace consultant. He had it for years. He broke both stands (side and centre) and used to park it by leaning it up against walls, a habit which caused the hitherto pristine fairing to become scratched, chipped and ugly. Years later, the clutch gave out and he sent me a jokingly indignant letter of complaint.

On my return from my Antarctic six year stint, I bought another BMW R100RS which Gaye and I used to travel all over Europe before I traded it in for a K range bike – the ever-reliable ‘black bike’. I sold that to a colleague just before I got married in 2000, on the grounds that bike riding for a family man was not the most sensible or safe way of getting around and in any case, we needed the money. But two years ago, I bought a K100 RS Classic, 1984 which I’m planning to have restored and repainted so that, in my dotage and when the kids have left home, Gaye and I can once again take to the road in the carefree abandon which only comes with biking.

My campaigning instincts would not let me rest, no matter how much I tried to turn myself into a bona fide consultant. I fretted about Greenpeace still. I worried that Sellafield was still operating, still creating its waste streams for which there was no accepted management solution and still poisoning the Irish Sea with its poisonous waste. The BNFL national nuclear dialogue had been useful in that it demonstrated to the nuclear industry that anti-nuclear campaign groups were, in the main, reasonable, well-versed in the issues and, to some extent, collaborative. The stakeholders involved in the dialogue included government departments and the civil servants that ran them.

Soon after the dialogue ended, I was asked to help set up a national stakeholder dialogue to precede the arrival of the Liabilities Management Unit (LMU) which was the forerunner of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), responsible for the de-constructing of the old Magnox station around the country and managing the UK’s stockpile of legacy waste. Fred Barker was an automatic choice as a partner for me in this venture and we worked together for a number of years acting as consultants for Defra, then the DTI and other offshoots of the nuclear industry. Fred told me that he had never earned so much money as he had while working with me: he must have been poorly paid beforehand, then, as we didn’t earn fantastically well and the irony of his statement was not missed by me or Gaye. Years earlier, during the BNFL national dialogue, Fred had complained so bitterly that I was wearing a stakeholder hat during the meetings, but a consultant’s one when setting them up, that I was forced to resign my consultancy with the Environment Council, a move which cost me around £10,000.

In late 2002 I was in the far north of Scotland having a meal in the famous Scrabster seafood restaurant after having visited the Dounreay plant as part of my DTI duties. I had previously applied to join a new government committee which was to examine all the options for the long-term management of the legacy radioactive waste created over the past 50 years by our love affair with nuclear power and its deadly daughter, nuclear weapons. My mobile phone rang: it was the chairperson-elect of the committee, offering me a position on the committee which I accepted. I was now in the employ of the government, although, curiously, I was not an employee when it came to sick leave, holidays or pension. Government committee appointees are in a strange never-never world of duality, neither an employee nor a consultant. Nonetheless, at £300 a day plus expenses, it was not to be sniffed at, as well as looking good on my CV. And in any case, I now had the opportunity to parade all my prejudices against disposal, a practice I had campaigned against for decades. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more prosaic the situation became.

Had it not been for the successful campaigns against radioactive waste disposal in the Atlantic all those years ago, a committee to examine radioactive waste management options would not have been necessary. Subsequent campaigns against the disposal of waste at Billingham, Elstow and other places dotted around the country and, more importantly, the stunning campaign Friends of the Earth ran in the 90s against the ‘Rock Characterisation Facility’ at Longlands Farm in Cumbria, had demonstrated that opposition was organised, well-informed and determined. Successive government plans to impose disposal on communities or in the international commons of the oceans had been defeated time after time. Now they had been finally forced to deal with the problem in a sensible and rational way – by seeking the advice of a properly constituted and expert panel of individuals. I considered myself just as expert on radioactive waste management as any other member of the panel of thirteen people who formed the first incarnation of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, despite my lack of diplomas and fancy titles.

Among those individuals were some friends: Professor Gordon McKerron was someone whom I knew from the past, as was Professor Linda Warren. Fred Barker was there as well, of course: my nemesis/partner never seemed to leave me. Professor Brian Clark was a new acquaintance, alongside most of the other appointees. Within weeks of the committee beginning its business, the chairperson, a woman of extraordinary presence and clearly a considerable asset to the committee, decided that a job she had been offered to join the Irish Water Board was a chance she could not afford to miss and she jumped ship. Gordon McKerron became our new chairperson. Within the first few months, Professors Bavistock and Ball had either resigned or been fired from the committee for what I can only describe as quite extraordinary behaviour. They seemed to think that the review we were charged with carrying out was exclusively a scientific exercise and were outraged to the point of rudeness when social sciences were mentioned. After their departure and the recruiting of a female Army colonel called Fiona Walthall – apparently she held the highest rank in the army you could aspire to – we were finally all set to begin work in earnest.

With a few months to go before the deadline set by government for the final report to be presented to ministers of the sponsoring departments, we were required to declare our individual positions on radioactive waste management options. This was basically a choice between disposal and storage, the ‘exotic options’ such as entombment in polar ice, firing off to the sun, etc. having been rightly condemned to the realms of fantasy. Unsurprisingly, I found that I was in a minority of one in my view that storage had the edge over disposal.

As the time drew near for the report to be presented, a draft was written by three of the committee members. They wrote through the night. The rest of us had perhaps three hours to review it but there was no time to examine, to ponder, to cogitate on what the words actually meant and what we had meant by them. Professor Andy Blowers, hugely influential in the debate and the architect of the recommendation contained in the report, calling for communities to volunteer their involvement, crafted the phrases which called for a recognition that disposal was the best option, but only ‘in the current state of knowledge’, and, in order to increase that state of knowledge, there should be an ‘intensified programme of research and development’ into the uncertainties around disposal. In my innocence, I supported these recommendations and signed up to the report, making its findings unanimously supported by all committee members.

I thought that I had signed up to a series of recommendations which would be undertaken in sequence: i.e. if the research programme increased our level of knowledge to the point where we could demonstrate that disposal was safe, and if we could then find a volunteer community to accept a repository, then we should initiate a disposal programme. In fact, I had signed up to a package of recommendations which most of my co-committee members as well as government officials and ministers saw first and foremost as a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card and secondly, as actions which could be carried out in parallel. The speed with which the report’s findings were accepted and then published amid suitable trumpeting was unseemly and clear evidence that we had been used as a convenient fig leaf for the government’s revived nuclear power aspirations. Even before we had finalised and submitted the report, the government announced its plans for an additional 10 gigawatt of nuclear generated electrical capacity.

In September 1976, Sir Brian Flowers, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power, released their sixth report called ‘Nuclear Power and the Environment’ in which he recommended that, ‘There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future.’ It seemed quite clear to me, that CoRWM had been convened to definitively remove that hurdle which had dogged governments for 30 years.

I wrote to the sponsors, after we were disbanded, with my views about the process which I considered to have been flawed, and the way in which the government had interpreted the recommendations and findings of the report. I also wrote to show that in my opinion, most people interviewed during the CoRWM process had opted for storage. I applied for membership of the second incarnation of CoRWM, as did Andy Blowers. Neither of us was accepted although Andy was at least given the privilege of an interview, something denied to me.

I received an email suggesting that in 2005 there should be a reunion of Rainbow Warrior crew and Antarctic expeditionaries in New Zealand to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the sinking of the Warrior and Fernando’s death, and to celebrate the winning of the campaign to protect the ‘sixth continent’ which had been afforded the legal force of the Antarctic Treaty to ensure that no mining took place there at least until 2041, 50 years after the historical agreement which the expeditions Greenpeace undertook in the 80s were pivotal in securing. It was a trip that Gaye and I could not resist and we set about making plans to travel with the kids half way round the world to see old friends and re-acquaint ourselves with the past. Paul Brown, my old mate from the Guardian, and his wife Maureen, were also invited as ‘honorary Greenpeacers’ and we made plans to fly together as a group.

Before we left, Gaye made me promise to book myself in for a hip replacement operation. Over the previous two years, I had developed a pronounced limp and the last x-ray taken at the hospital showed significant and extensive deterioration of the right hip joint. I was constantly in pain and doing anything at all which involved movement was painful. I knew if I didn’t have it done, I’d end up in a wheelchair, but for now, I put such thoughts behind me and planned for the trip of a lifetime for me, Gaye and the kids.

Amy must have watched The Incredibles cartoon film at least six times but still insisted in watching the last few minutes of it yet again as we circled Auckland, waiting for clearance to land. She wasn’t that interested in the fact that 10,000 feet below was the collection of islands, beaches and building in which I had left a small part of my heart thirteen years before. I never thought I would go back to New Zealand but here I was, about to go through the immigration rigmarole again, this time – my seventh – with my young wife and two daughters in tow. I was bursting with pride and couldn’t wait to see old friends, especially my 8-12 watchmate, Ken Ballard, who had stayed in New Zealand after the final trip south, married a beautiful Maori woman, Tanya, and now had a child of his own.

In the intervening years, we had lost Mike Maloche, the carefree helicopter pilot who so skillfully flew us safely back to the Gondwana through one of the strongest winds I had ever experienced in the Antarctic. The first night at the reunion, I sat talking and drinking with Chris Robinson, the guy who drove the inflatable in which we confronted the seamen dumping radioactive waste into our Atlantic ocean in 1978, twenty-seven years previously. Chris died of liver cancer in 2008. There, too, was Henk Haazen, our logistics co-ordinator from the ‘nervous centre’ on the old Black Pig in 1986, Susi Newborn from the very early days of Greenpeace in London, Jim Cottier, Bob Graham, Pete ‘Gloomy’ Bouquet and many, many more. As we approached Waiheke Island where we were to hold the gathering of veteran Greenpeacers from those distant days, I was already dreading the parting scheduled for three days hence. With these people is stored a wealth of determination, dogged resilience and purposefulness. These people built Greenpeace from nothing. They shared situations of unutterable, jaw-dropping danger which they faced with stoicism beyond their years. In those people resides quiet, mutual respect. In every eye contact an entire history of experience and memories is exchanged. Every single one of them could be entrusted with your life or the lives of your wife and children. Many is the time I’ve had to rely on these people and I did so with absolute certainty that they would not let me down, nor I them.

The three days we spent on Waiheke Island will stay with me forever. We spent the second day reminiscing in twos, threes or as a group as one after another we told our stories of fun, joy, heartache and fear: stories which have since been enshrined in Greenpeace legend, stories which deserve telling but which will remain the precious and largely private memories of a group of cognoscenti, the better to bind them together. Some of those stories are contained in the previous chapters, but one deserves repeating here as it is illustrative of the lengths to which we were prepared to go in order to get our message out to the world.

We had film of Greenpeace swimmers forming a human picket line in the open ocean, directly in the path of the giant whale factory ship, the Nissin Maru. As we left for the Antarctic that year, 1989, it was our intention to disrupt the Japanese whaling season in the Southern Ocean as much as possible and the departure of the Nissin Maru from Australia was too good an opportunity to miss. We sped as fast as the MV Greenpeace would go to an area where we could intercept her and brave crew members volunteered to form the human barrier by forming a line of swimmers in what were undoubtedly shark-infested waters. Despite their presence, which the captain of the factory ship had been made aware of, the vessel ploughed through the picket line. As you can imagine, the film was dramatic and we needed to get it back to shore quickly, but we only had a helicopter with a range insufficient to make it back to the Australian mainland.

Ken Ballard called David Iggulden, a Greenpeace supporter and back-up person who had been active in the Antarctic with Robert Swan in previous years, and who was known to us as a highly reliable and very effective logistics person. ‘Iggy’ hired a fixed wing aircraft which was available at Lord Howe Island and agreed a mid-air rendezvous point with Ken. The plan was to transfer the can of film from the helicopter to the fixed wing ‘on the wing’. But how? At the appointed time the helicopter took off from the ship and made the rendezvous. Ken had attached a long line to a weighted bag carrying the can of film and through radio communication and visual alignment the two aircraft closed on each other, the helicopter flying at a height which allowed the weighted bag to be played out on its line. The fixed wing had to fly close to stalling speed so as not to overshoot the helicopter and the pilot somehow maintained position as the can dropped lower and lower, foot by foot, closer and closer to the open door on the side of the fixed wing aircraft. By deft manoeuvering at the crucial time, the bag was drawn close enough to the plane for Iggy to grab it. He quickly removed the can, allowing the still weighted bag to be thrown clear of the plane for Ken to retrieve carefully and slowly back into the helicopter.

The film was screened that evening on Australian TV and franchised around the world. Japan’s determination to fly in the face of international outrage at their continued whaling activities was announced to the world in the most dramatic way.

After the ‘memory fest’ we indulged in during that day on Waiheke, we visited the olive grove which had been planted in memory of David McTaggart. Fifty people duly wound their way up the steep-sided hill to pay our respects to the old boy. On the narrow plateau at the top, a Maori group led by the local elder greeted us with a traditional hukka. It was traditional for the male elders of each ‘side’ to greet each other first, and only after the intimidating ‘hukka’ of greeting had been performed by the Maori elders. As this was being performed by Maoris in full tribal costume, contorted faces, screams and all, Emily calmly marched to the front of the group and stood watching the proceedings. She was one of the first to receive the traditional Maori greeting of nose-to-nose intimacy. After our response, delivered by our own elder, Captain Jim Cottier, we exchanged songs although our offerings were a weak rendition of a Maori song which only four of us knew followed by a gutsy rendition of the highly appropriate What shall we do with the drunken sailor?

In fact, both Emily, just ten, and Amy, then only five, went ‘native’ quite quickly. We didn’t see Amy for hours on end and then she would appear, in strange garb – headband, poncho – in the company of other kids to announce casually that she was ‘off to the beach’. What a place for kids to be brought up.

We told our tales and relived our pasts in an atmosphere of overdue and genuine bonhomie. Each telling brought memories to technicolour life and the presence of the people with whom those experiences were shared served only to focus the poignancy and sharpen the pain – so relatively recently did we do these things but so finally were they gone, so utterly were they irretrievable and so long ago did it all seem.

I craved to learn what people had done after they turned their backs on Greenpeace and how they had carved an alternative living out of the shards of a life so brutally shattered and contorted by a fledgling organisation’s demands. Many have remained with Greenpeace in one capacity or another. Others left in the aftermath of the bombing when the money came flooding in from a stunned world eager to empathise with a band of environmentalists at the loss of their ship and of their friend.

The bombing was a watershed in the development of Greenpeace. Some say it facilitated the organisation’s growth into a global force. Others feel that it vulgarised and sullied an organisation once driven by its heart not its head and made it complacent and flabby. One thing is certain, however: The veterans with whom I now stood and who created a global organisation through sheer determination and cussedness have no Greenpeace pension, no compensation for the years they worked for next-to-nothing while building a colossus to hand on to those who could choose Greenpeace or an equally adequately-paid position in the commercial sector.

Once Greenpeace divested itself of its undesirable elements and could afford decent wages, it was surprising how attractive it became to people who previously had given the organisation a wide berth. These veterans had, by and large, demonstrated in a post-Greenpeace life the sort of adaptability they demonstrated while building Greenpeace and without which it could not have survived. Photographer, ship charterer, ship builder, carpenter, policy adviser, restauranteur, tour organiser – each has taken what life has dealt them and moved on, scorning the temptation to cling to and suck from the teat of an organisation which could so easily have become a security blanket, a benevolent fund, a provider, rather than an awkward, demanding tool through which to change the world at considerable personal cost.

As we left Waiheke earlier than expected due to unavoidable logistics of travel and combining family holidays with meeting up with old friends, the goodbye we received was enough to turn the stoniest of hearts into soups of nostalgia and melancholy. Fifty people lined the veranda of Henk and Bunny’s house as we drove our campervan out of the valley. They hooted us a farewell fit to cause me to pull over when we were out of sight and weep like a baby. In every one of those people, I saw heaving seas, ice-scapes to make you draw a sharp breath, perilous situations and a bonhomie which all the smuggled endangered species in the world couldn’t buy. I saw Greenpeace on that veranda. It exists in the hearts and minds of those people and in those we have already left behind – McTaggart, Maloche, Shaw, Robinson, Cummins, John, Johnston, Periera and others.

As we left New Zealand on the ball-breaking flights home via Hong Kong, I tried to assess what this trip had meant to me personally, to my family and in the greater scheme of things. We had used our two and a half weeks well and had managed to cram in the whole nine yards – dolphins, glow-worm caves, hot springs, geysers, Maori dances, unbelievable beaches and precious time with even more precious friends. But what of the organisation which had been the catalyst to bring us all together so long ago? How is it faring?

The reunion allowed us to wallow and luxuriate in the company of old friends and in our memories of the past, but also to question what those who had followed us in Greenpeace were doing with the legacy we had left them. Some of us were not impressed with the way in which things were going and I dug out the document I had drafted years ago with McTaggart and others at David’s farm in Italy which called for restraint on pay, greater focus on campaign objectives and strategy and a less hierarchical structure in the offices. Offices which were now paying their senior staff a comparable wage to commercial corporate executives. This document, in its first draft known as the ‘East Grinstead Declaration’ (named after the place it was first concocted), was leaked to the Observer newspaper and Geoffrey Lean wrote it up under the banner of ‘Founders turn on Greenpeace incumbents’ (to paraphrase) and caused a great stir, especially as McTaggart, correctly, accused me of leaking the story. While he publicly expressed disgust at the leak, privately, he expected nothing less. This is the Observer story:

Greenpeace ‘fatcats’ leaders condemned by founders

Greenpeace’s leaders are paid too much, have lost their focus and must become more democratic, say the founders of the environmental organisation.

In a devastating report, 16 founders, led by David McTaggart, for many years Greenpeace’s guiding spirit, complain about falling membership and a loss of “inspirational initiative”. They express “profound concern about what seems to be happening to the Greenpeace we helped to create.”

Their report was sent to the pressure group’s 25th anniversary celebrations last week in Vancouver, Canada. It was written after a meeting of the 16 at Mr McTaggart’s farm in Italy last month. Those present included Nick Hill, the first captain of the Rainbow Warrior, Monika Griefahn, who became environment minister of Lower Saxony, Pete Wilkinson, one of the founders of the pressure group in Britain, and John Castle, a long- time skipper of Greenpeace boats who spearheaded the action against the Brent Spar.

They write that – together with others who could not attend – they “can legitimately claim to be the founders of the organisation which is now managed by those at whom this document is directed.” They add that they “have a right to insist that the organisation which broke new ground in environmental campaigning continues in that tradition, continues to be at the cutting edge of environmental reform and does not simply become part of the institutionalised political landscape of the 21st century.”

They say that the amounts paid to Greenpeace’s leaders are alienating its supporters. Thilo Bode, its international executive director, is paid the equivalent of pounds 68,800 a year – roughly what a City international equity trader earns. Lord (Peter) Melchett, the executive director of Greenpeace in Britain, is paid slightly over pounds 40,000.

The report calls for a “ceiling on salaries” and “a levelling out of the hierarchical structure” and adds that “the current methods of attracting new people are not necessarily going to provide the organisation with committed environmentalists.”

It says: “Many supporters – whose hearts and minds were touched by Greenpeace’s simple, direct and straightforward approach – are disappointed by the salary levels reported in the media and are now withdrawing their support.”

The number of paying supporters worldwide has fallen from 4.8 million in 1990 to just over 3 million today. The report describes the slump in membership as “a warning sign which demands careful review” and says that membership levels provide “one of the surest ways of measuring the effectiveness of campaigns, strategies and tactics.”

It says that members – who have traditionally been used mainly as a source of funds – should be enfranchised and involved more. “There is a need to encourage the internal democratisation of the organisation, leading to the development of a different culture.”

Peter Melchett said last week that he “welcomed” the report, which was circulated at the Vancouver meeting. It was “very interesting and very helpful” and “would certainly be taken into account.” He added that it “did not seem to be all that unexpected, given what some of the people who have left Greenpeace are saying. We are an organisation of passionate people with passionate views.”

Back home and with the CoRWM experience out of the way, I looked around for new challenges, but first I had to get my hip replaced. In February 2006 I was admitted to Ipswich hospital and underwent what the admissions person charmingly reminded us inductees was ‘major surgery’. I found myself in the company of old men and women as we listened to the advice being given in the ‘pre-operation’ class we were all advised to attend. At 59, I was one of the youngest patients there and felt like a spring chicken compared to others, but of course, I couldn’t walk like a spring chicken and the operation was an absolute necessity. Within four days I was back home, walking with sticks, but on the road to recovery although it wasn’t straightforward.

The untimely announcement regarding government intentions to build a new generation of nuclear reactors came while CoRWM (www.corwm.org.uk) was still in the throes of writing its final draft report. Thus the nuclear debate had gone from assessment (of the disposal option for nuclear waste in particular) into the aspiration to implement disposal and the CoRWM draft report which indicated its majority preference for disposal was clearly instrumental in giving the government the confidence vit needed to make the announcement. My value to the process was clearly over. They now needed implementers, not facilitators. They needed pro-nuclear apologists rather than genuine assessors. Nuclear new build was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’ as the odious Blair put it. My work just dried up almost overnight. I made a keynote speech for the Nuclear Industry Association at which I was the only anti-nuclear voice. I made them laugh, I was controversial and I was constructive while being pointed and, of course, unflinching, in the anti-nuclear message I gave. But it didn’t change anything.

I was approached by Good Morning TV after the speech and invited to be interviewed with a hint that they were looking for a ‘green’ anchor person. Gaye will tell anyone that cares to listen that I blew a chance to have a regular spot on TV by being dismissive, long-winded and too technical for GMTV, apparently. I also gave the keynote speech to Golder Associates about stakeholder engagement and, to my relief, and largely thanks to the efforts of a senior Golder Associates consultant, Mark Hannan, I was asked if I would accept a job with Golder. Given that I was close to broke at the time I was asked, I was very surprised to find myself replying in the negative.

‘No, thanks, I won’t take a job. I haven’t had a job since I was in my teens and I’m not going to break that habit in my 50s.’ An awkward silence followed in which I reflected on what I had just said. I quickly added, as I imagined Gaye’s face looming across the dining room table, ‘But I’d be happy to accept a consultancy’.

And so, between the years of 2006 and 2010, I worked, part-time, as a stakeholder consultant to Golder Associates, a company which assisted mining companies all over the world. Their nuclear activities mainly involved de-watering, site characterisation and decommissioning work, but the company never seemed to fully appreciate how valuable and pivotal stakeholder engagement can be to a business, and despite a desire to make it work, my consultancy with Golders came to an abrupt end when the Department of Health-financed project I inherited from a Golder colleague had its funding withdrawn in the aftermath of the 2008 comprehensive spending review. A £250,000 a year project was terminated at a stroke and my consultancy with Golders followed suit within a matter of weeks.

The biggest cloud on the horizon just now is the revival of the nuclear industry and the prospect of building new, larger and equally dangerous nuclear plant at ten locations across the country, one location being Sizewell, about six miles from where we live. Perhaps the looming spectre behind even that unwelcome development is that the opposition we could count on in the 80s is no longer available: to all intents and purposes, there is no co-ordinated, organised or cohesive anti-nuclear movement in the UK today.

Was it all worthless? Will Greenpeace be reduced to a historical footnote, a curio for future generations to pore over, research and wonder at as we do today with the Luddites and the Levellers? What on earth was it all about? Was it a genuine attempt at fundamental change or just a conscience-salving distraction for middle-class, guilt-ridden intellectuals? Perhaps it was both. Are they working quietly, effectively and busily behind the razzamatazz of the headlines to change political policy to put ‘green’ at the heart of contemporary politics? I like to think so, but the evidence is to the contrary.