The Climate Camp is too self-regarding to be effective

Charming though they are, the protesters should spend more time convincing others their arguments are sound

Peter Beaumont
The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009
Through a fence and beyond the hay bales, past the polite inquisitors who call for a "media escort" and towards the lines of tents and hastily installed turbines and solar panels is… well, precisely what? The Climate Camp on London's Blackheath is helpfully labelled in multicoloured letters and signs, but its naming does not answer the question of what it represents. Nor do its temporary inhabitants who on Friday were being buffeted by squalls of rain.
I spot Leila Deen, famous for a minute or so for sliming Peter Mandelson. Behind her, a squad of campers, some wearing balaclavas, is being put through direct action training, charging silently among the marquees.
What bothers me is a question of function and purpose. Is this, presented as one of the models of the "new protest", all that it advertises? What is the Climate Camp in London for? Answers – some vague – are supplied by the camp's handbook in its 10 reasons to be camping here. It talks about the "tall buildings" as a symbol of the "transnational corporation", and streets as home to banks, poverty, activists and politicians. Other answers are supplied by campers: veterans of Greenham Common and Kingsnorth, and the Vesta wind turbine factory occupation on the Isle of Wight. They talk about the camp as a model of an alternative way of sustainable living. Of its organisation, through consensual democracy – everybody has an equal say in the decision-making process – as an exemplar for a new kind of society.
Its critics have levelled many charges whenever it has appeared over the last few years: for sloganeering that combines anti-capitalism with a global-warming message; actions that invite confrontation with the police; for the involvement of a sometimes aggressive anarchist fringe; even for the dilettantism and grandstanding of some of its more middle-class supporters.
And while some criticisms have a kernel of truth, it remains hard to argue that a movement fighting climate change and promoting social equality is a bad thing. But that is not the question. Rather, Climate Camp should be judged on its own ambitions. How effective is the camp in inspiring change?
It is confronting this issue that lies at the heart of one of the key works on grass-roots organising: Rules for Radicals written by Saul Alinsky who inspired US radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. A revolutionary in outlook who began agitating for social change in the Chicago stockyards in the 1930s, Alinsky's methodology has proved to have had a greater relevance and longer shelf-life than perhaps he ever expected. In recent history, it not only informed Barack Obama's early political organising, but its tactics have been adopted by the US Republican right to disrupt Obama's health policies. So how does the Climate Camp fare judged by his rules?
In some respects, Alinsky, who died in 1972, would have admired the Climate Campers' dedication. "Liberals protest; radicals rebel," he wrote. "Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action." Alinsky, however, is unlikely to have approved of much of the Climate Campers' methodology. The problem with the Climate Campers is not a lack of conviction (as some commentators try to argue); it stems, rather, from an obsession with its own structures and its relationship with media and the police.
More seriously, seen from Alinsky's point of view (he believed in "not rhetoric, but realism"), the Climate Camp suffers from a preoccupation with measuring its achievements in terms of the protests it has undertaken rather than a series of achievable goals that those outside the camp movement can easily identify with.
Alinsky insisted the radical must be able to make a persuasive case for why change is necessary and urgent, a task to which the theatrics of protesting are subsidiary. He taught another crucial lesson, one that has been highly visible in the right's campaign against Obama's health reforms, that campaigners should avoid targeting abstracts such as phenomena and institutions; instead, they should single out individual figures to act as the "personification… of a particular evil". To lever their positions through ridicule and criticism.
I mention Alinsky because he seems to crystallise many of the failings, not just of the Climate Camp, but of significant sectors of the wider anti-war and anti-globalisation movement which have struggled either to articulate precisely what is their message or who have chosen, literally at times, to pitch their tent at the margins of the political debate.
While the campers are articulate in explaining the logic of this positioning and tactics in their rejection of the "hierarchical structures" of both mainstream politics – which they believe to be redundant – as well as many of Europe's green parties, which many believe to have sold out, it does not change the fact of where they have chosen to locate their activism. Outside of the conversation with decision makers.
I sit down with Martin Shaw, a 44-year-year old veteran who had his back broken in an encounter with the police. He admits that Climate Camp has had to confront how to balance living both by its own radical ideals – saying "something must happen now [on climate change]" – with being more inclusive. Shaw believes things are getting better, not least in persuading local communities into which they parachute to engage with them.
"Ten years ago, we were much more closed. But we're not naive. We recognise the media are supported by advertising from firms involved in air travel and cars with which the problem of climate change is intrinsically linked."
Another rationalisation is supplied by Ruth, a Greenham Common veteran, who believes that, as Greenham may not have "changed anything in itself", it became a symbol of an anti-nuclear movement which impacted on the public consciousness and ultimately on policy makers. A symbol. Like Brian Haw, the anti-war protester, on his endless, solitary vigil outside Westminster.
And that is the greatest threat to the campers: that their political relevance is defined not by a meaningful encounter that challenges both the political mainstream and a wider community, effecting change, but is defined, as it increasingly appears to be, by the act of protest itself.
Because the reality of an organisation for successful political change is that it requires a mass movement behind it, drawn not just from those who already passionately believe in it but from those who have been persuaded. And those who may be persuaded.
Climate Camp, with its often hazy message and complex inner negotiations, with its indulgent obsession with its own workings, its insularity and the suggestion of elitism of its direct-action hard core, is in danger of becoming about Climate Camp, the institution, rather than about the wider fight to halt global warming. With all its energy and motivation, that would be a shame.