Camp for Climate Action 2008

The Camp for Climate Action 2008 took place between the 3rd and 11th August in a field outside the of village Hoo St. Werburg's outside Chatham and Rochester, on a hill overlooking Kingsnorth and its coal-fired power-station.

In its third year, the camp is an event that aims to take action on the issue of climate change over and above the usual demands to tinker with our lifestyles, or for government and businesses to 'do more'. Instead, it is a demonstration of how ordinary people can do much, much more, despite corporate and institutional reluctance.

Last year, at Heathrow, the camp received a great deal of media attention because of the absurd legal over-reaction of BAA, which threatened to criminalise members of the National Trust using the Piccadilly line. This year the camp received media attention because of the behaviour of the police. Unfortunately, the articles I've read have tended to be euphemistic: what do 'violent scenes', 'police brutality', or 'heavy-handed police tactics' mean? It is possible to get more of a picture online, and at the bottom of this blog I'll put some links if you're interested to find out, but these films and images will to take a sequence of events out of context.

Doesn't this focus on policing draw attention away from what it was really about, climate change - wasn't the camp getting attention for the wrong reasons? I don't think so, I think it's getting attention for inevitable reasons. I also think that if you were put off from going, this time, last time, or the next, because of the way the link to non-violent direct action drew the attention of the law, it's more important that you go next time round. I spent four nights at the camp, and this is my report.

Kingsnorth was the focus of action this year because it is the first case in the UK of coal power being proposed as a way of solving the problem of how to provide enough energy for future business-as-usual needs, reducing CO2 emissions, and improving energy security. Six or seven more projects are in the pipeline, along with already active plans to carry out open-cast coal mining in Scotland, Wales, and the North of England to supply the new demand. The problem is that the claim about CO2 emissions reduction is greenwash. 80% of the new station proposed by the energy company Eon will be a standard coal-fired power station, albeit new and more efficient, 20% will be given over to exploring carbon capture and storage technology that may never materialise. Meanwhile, the reduction in emissions on offer is far far less than it is thought necessary to avoid a potentially dangerous 2 degree celcius rise in average global temperature.

The protest day, Saturday, had four parts: orange, green, blue, and silver. Preparations were made on camp, and throughout the preceding year, for people to plan and participate in these groups. The orange group was a simple march from the camp to the station. The green group attempted to go over land to reach the station and climb over the fences. The blue group attempted to reach the station via the River Medway, and the silver, which didn't work in the end, hoped to get kites into the air above the station. On the day, the march passed off successfully, and some members of the green group succeeded in climbing the outer fence as well as the inner fence, which fortunately wasn't electrified at the time. But that group only reached the fences after running a gauntlet of police, hitting, threatening, chasing, and blockading them along the way. Only those that climbed over the second fence were arrested for aggravated trespass. Meanwhile, a few members of the blue group reached an outlet pipe for cooling waters from the station, dropped a banner, and were also arrested.

But for me, the important part of the camp was the camp itself, and the workshops, learning, co-working, networking, and organizing taking place there. The camp was divided into different neighbourhoods based on regions, and people in those regions had been working together for some time to organize their own cooking, social, and other needs. Tellingly, there was no 'South East', or 'Kent' neighbourhood, even though the camp was in Kent, so people from this area drifted into either 'London', or 'South Coast'. The neighbourhood is also the point of contact for the form of direct democracy practiced at the camp: a 'spokes' system. Each morning the neighbourhoods would meet to try to reach consensus (not universal agreement) on both local and camp-wide issues such as dealing with drunks, cooking the next meal, welcoming new people, or how to defend the gates from invasion by the police, and what position to take in negotiation with them. 'Spokes' would then represent the neighbourhood at a camp meeting. This form of consensus decision-making relies on, even demands, the engagement and participation of everyone in the meeting, and people use hand-signals to show their agreement, disagreement, or when they wish to say something, to help speed things up. It feels strange at first, and people are self-conscious about it, but when it works it is an obvious advance on a traditional structure where a few people dominate and there is no opportunity to balance them out. Obviously, a minority were most active, even within this 'participatory' process, because some people were more experienced and confident than others, but it was obvious that there was plenty of opportunity to be included, as long as people were prepared to take responsilibity for their own participation.

There were a huge number of workshops, and I couldn't possibly summarize all of the ones I went to here. If you want to know more about one you see on the camp website, come and ask me. Overall, though, people agreed that a 90% reduction of emissions would be necessary, and that direct action was an effective was of achieving political aims. Frankly, if you didn't agree with that, you wouldn't be there. But most of the workshops focused on solutions: how to do anything from build a compost toilet to build a mass social movement, to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. For me, the most interesting thing was the growing interest in popular education as a way of reaching out beyond the usual political suspects to other people and the constraints they face in their everyday lives. There was also a lot of discussion about 'class', and how to engage with people who are just too oppressed to get political, or with those with historically-based political-class identities who feel threatened by the anti-coal, anti-industrial, and often, anti-capitalist stance of many camp participants.

But that is not all. The camp was in a field, borrowed for a week or so from a sheep farmer. The camp had to have as little impact as possible. All toilets were compost toilets: habitual flush-users had to remember to keep their solids and liquids separate: wheelie-bins and saw-dust for solids (later to be the basis for a good crop of potatoes), and straw bails for the liquids. Or did the straw-bails end in potatoes? I can't remember, and didn't think about it too much. Hand-washing was a priority (there was no outbreak of the squits, as you might of heard in the press), and that, and all other grey-water waste ran off into the soil (no chemical soaps), after filtering through straw bails. All the food was vegan, as meat and dairy draw on a much larger carbon-footprint, and many were heard to say 'I haven't eaten so well for months', or 'give the cops a meal, then they'll support you'.

All week, people were under pressure from the police. It didn't go away after the police had their wrists slapped in the press after the events of Monday morning. I arrived on Monday evening, and it was obvious people were very stressed. The police had entered the camp at dawn at a weak point at one of the gates and tried to seize some vans which they claimed were abandoned. People were sleeping in them. The police smashed the windows and batonned campers who tried to prevent them. Around the camp on Tuesday I saw people with sticking-plasters and bruises, people who were still clear physically shaken-up and exhausted.

There was an alarm almost every morning, at some point between 3 and 6 am. Riot police were not always trying to get in, sometimes they were 'just testing', but they must have known it would be enough to cause an alarm, get people up, tire them out, wear them down. The weakest gate took a lot of energy to defend. On Wednesday, a line of campers sat at the feet of a line of police officers, the gate of the field behind them. The police officers were digging their knees into the campers backs, trying to force them forwards so they could establish control of the exit. A comedienne spent the afternoon mocking them, and, with the help of music and video cameras, eventually managed to diffuse the tension and dissuade individual officers from pressurizing the campers at their feet. That night there was a storm, and the police gave up trying to hold their ground at that gate. The atmosphere on camp on Thursday leavened considerably.

Many people had trouble entering and leaving the site, as police claimed to have found a stash of knives that appeared to signal some people's violent intent, justifying stop and search of everyone entering and leaving. Or some people had hidden their knives so they wouldn't be confiscated by police when they entered: travellers' penknives and camp kitchens' cooking knives. Whether or not your stop and search team were humane or aggressive depended on the atmosphere, the time of shift, and the force you chanced upon. Good luck if it was the Metropolitan police. On Friday things were tense and people were arrested: mobbed to the ground, forced to submit with the use of pressure points, cuffed, and gaffer-taped before being dragged into the back of vans, if they refused to co-operate or had misunderstood. Hearing about that incident was the point at which a friend of mine decided she wanted to leave, terrified of being 'kettled', or surrounded and kept on-site by police, attempting to prevent anything 'criminal' happening on the Saturday. And there were the helicopters, buzzing over day and night, drowning out conversations and workshops, and keeping people awake, taking pictures of campers in case they later commited a crime, or had done in the past. Legal observers, campers after a training session and wearing orange tabards became the focus of aggression, no doubt because they kept reporting incidents and linking them to officer numbers: standing on fingers, kneeing in backs, hitting, verbal confrontations, 'feeling' women during searches.

It was more than just incidents. Throughout the week campers discussed ongoing negotiations with the police. The police were demanding unimpeded access for all emergency service 'and related' vehicles, an on-site mobile police station and unlimited, unconditional (later downsized to 12 pairs of Kent Police) patrols around the site. The campers refused: no-one could see how any police presence would do anything other than disrupt the camp, given what was going on outside, and what had already happened. Many people were outright opposed to the police from the start, but clearly they had already had experiences that many others were now having for the first time: harrassment, 'repression'... political policing. The police refused to distinguish between themselves and the ambulance and fire service, even though their roles were clearly different. There was a subtext to these negotiations. Firstly, if the police controlled the access, the site could no longer be a squat, and would no longer require a legal process to enter, and riot police would be able to sweep in and put the camp to an end at will, on any pretext. Secondly, the longer the negotiations went on, the closer it came to Saturday, and the point when any more negotiation would be pointless, and attention turned to the power station.

Political policing has three levels: that written into the law, that exercised by commanders, and the everyday politics of choosing a career in the police force. Beginning with the Criminal Justice Act, and going on with later public order and terrorism legislation, it has become very easy to find a pretext to disrupt or prevent protest, even peaceful protest, if it is possible to claim even a tiny minority might be associated with crime of some kind. Commanding officers have to deal with operational success, which has a lot to do with control, media perception, and face within the force, rather than the law. The first prioirity appears, from the police demands to the camp, to be in control of the situation even when it is not necessary. Preventing a mass protest that spills over the constraining boundaries of what has been sanctioned often appears to involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For individual police officers this is their career, and its continuation depends on following orders. It's strange how matters of conscience (like hitting ordinary citizens on flimsy pretexts) seems to arise less in policing than it does in the military.

An obviously convenient side-effect of the policing was that people would stay away, or leave, if they were concerned for their safety, or their clean-criminal-record-dependent careers. This, you might say, is one of the goals of political policing. By enforcing this boundary of fear between protestors on one side and people who might want to protest on the other, the police are able to legitimate their use of tactics against domestic extremism, developed to combat radical animal rights activists. It also has a practical effect on the work of movement-building that many campers are striving for: it is much harder to develop links with other ordinary people when they have to work against this impression of 'dangerous', 'criminal' radicalism. The knowledge that the police are not the good guys, at least when it comes to protest, is one that is hard to come by. It is the function of political policing that you could spend an entire lifetime and never find out. It seems that only by experiencing it do you believe it enough that it will stay with you. I'm sure that, as I use the term political policing, I sound strange to some readers, giving an impression of police that is different: negative and clearly ideological. Again, that is the point of a form of policing that attempts to move all press cameras and reporters to a safe distance before wielding the stick. Until I was personally affected by it, I didn't believe it either. This is why I think that the issue of policing and the issue of climate change are linked. To achieve the change it is thought necessary to achieve in the time it is thought there remains, environmentalists are likely to be confronted with police drawing on the grounds of law, and beyond-the-law operational and on-the-ground practices, trying to prevent them.

There was, already, a great deal of pluralism shown during the camp, at meetings and workshops. We are not talking about a small number of middle-class, white student radicals who have just discovered Marx and Kropotkin, Porrit and Monbiot in the same university term. We are talking about representatives from almost every environmental NGO in the country, from unions, as well as authors and journalists of repute, academics, life-long labour, environment, peace, anti-nuclear, race- and gender-equality, animal and civil rights activists, students, yes, as well as pensioners, people in wheelchairs, local people of the Hoo Peninsula, and just people, with jobs, homes, families, and an evidence-base for at least one strong belief. But that pluralism, the bio-diversity of the movement, will die away if those participants become socially and legally isolated by police action. Many people have been inspired and motivated (and infuriated) by going to the camp for the first time, but there's a danger just as many have been put off, even if they are supportive of 'the camp's' position. For that pluralism to continue to exist, differences must be in contact with eachother. Tolerant disengagement is not enough. If you think 'this is not for me', it is more important that you go next time than me.

http://blip.tv/file/1167973
http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/406076.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/places/features/kingsnorth_power_station/