Review of the Year 2023

Activism is how I pay my rent on planet Earth.This has been my year.

January

The year began with Greenpeace and medley of other groups continuing their campaign against high energy bills. We suggested renewable energy and home insulation. We take our campaign to the street of Altrincham and Glossop and find that nobody in either town liked their local Tory MP much. Graham Brady at least took the hint and announced he wouldn't be standing again in Altrincham. The government though didn't listen to us, but decided to bung the energy companies several billion quid. This rather shot our fox  After that the campaign should really have been about why tax revenue was being used to bail out the world's biggest polluters. 

In January Greenpeace sent me to Leeds to tell new supporters about what Greenpeace local groups did. I enjoyed free train travel thanks to Trans Pennine Express, who left mw waiting for a ghost train at Guide Bridge station and only removed it from the electronic sign board when it was seconds away from the platform and I was starting to wonder why I couldn't see it. All a perfectly normal for a day on Britain's privatised trains. What was not perfectly normal though was the life-sized Spinosaurus by the canal at the back of Leeds railway station. 

February

February saw me hanging out with two quite different groups of eco-warriors. Earth First! had their Winter Moot in a squat in Rusholme. Entering via a padlocked door, with a friendly security man parked outside all weekend, it was anarchy touched with some very cerebral discussions about sociology. 

Once upon a time Earth First! did more than just talk - it was central to the Road Protests of the 1990s - but although it's no longer a dynamic or mass movement it's children are everywhere these days: decentralised and anarchic, although usually rather less keen on sociology. The best part of the weekend was the talent show on the Saturday evening. Whoever you were who sang 4 Non Blondes' What's Up, you were brilliant. 

Later in the month it was down to Canonbury Villas for the first in-person meet-up of Greenpeace Local Group Coordinators since COVID. It was great to be back at HQ, and the revelling and quaffing was suitably epic. We also got to meet the new team and almost every manager had left over the previous twelve months. There was a mixture of the usual suspects and new faces and Manchester was well represented although Stuart, our video expert, may have made himself too widely available as a film editor. 

March

We'd been showing the Greenpeace film The Cost of Living for three months by this time, but in March I got to meet some of the cast by helping to organise the first showing in Malby, one of the towns where it was made. I met some of the very forceful miners wives who had supported their communities through the strike and who were now dealing with the cost of living crisis. This was a part of the 'red wall' where the women at least were not voting Tory. They weren't really into social media and organising film showings, which is why I ended up doing most of that, but I imagine they were difficult to say no to when they appeared on your doorstep. 

I also watched a different film in March as the Manchester group
campaigning against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline had its first event, a screening of the documentary EACOP: A Crude Reality. EACOP is one of the largest and most destructive fossil fuel projects in the world, and with significant victories in the USA in recent years it was one of the few pipelines left standing. It was also a way for the Greater Manchester Climate Justice coalition, which formed for the COP25 in Glasgow, to offer practical support to the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) in the world. 

April

It was back to campaigning on the cost of living again in April as the Manchester Greenpeace Group joined the Warm This Winter coalition for a day of action. This time we targeted the Conservative MP for Cheadle, Anne Robinson. Number one son even dragged himself out of bed to join us. We had a script to follow and thanks to our video ace Stuart we managed to film ourselves doing it. We were only one of eighty events happening across the country, but we managed to be most of the subsequent video the coalition put out. We can't really say we won, but as the government was trailing the opposition in the polls by a country mile, neither could they. 

However, the big story of April was that XR decided to go for a big protest in London that they called, appropriately enough, The Big One. I went down as part of the organising team and pitched camp in the Greenpeace warehouse for the duration. The Greenpeace Events team are fully occupied with preparations for Glastonbury, so the whole weekend is organised by Local Groups. 

We set up in the early hours opposite Oliver Cromwell's statue outside the Houses of Parliament. When we arrived we were outnumbered by the police, but by lunchtime there was a good sized protest going on and the police reluctantly closed the roads. The police insist we take down our banners, allegedly because they're attached to 'historic' railings, but almost certainly so they can observe us from parliament. The clue is that the railings are less than a decade old, and only added after Greenpeace climbed over and put a gas mask on Cromwell to highlight London's air pollution. 

I start of in charge of the money, which is a challenge in the rain, but by the afternoon the Sun comes out and I move front-of-house. We've organised a pretty good event, even if I say so myself and our team even had its own bespoke hats made. 

The next day is more of the same, but with a march and a 'die in' as well. I only briefly get to look around the rest of the site, but it's a marvelous mix of theatre, protest and general mingling around. XR certainly seem to have done their job in getting people to turn out. Alas, unlike their illegal protests, the media doesn't bother and it's only reported as 'local news' in London. 

I head home and just about have time for a shower before it's time for our annual walk to remember the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932. This year we're joined by Boff Whalley, the former Chumbawamba guitarist, and Commoners Choir. We meet up with the mass swimming trespass and the choir perform next to the water. Stuart once again makes a brilliant video of the event, although some of his clips end up on the cutting room floor as he fails to notice the wild swimmers disrobing in the background. 

May

Manchester's Stop EACOP campaign continues with a protest at the national BIBA insurance conference at GMex. Unfortunately, I'm laid low with a gippy tummy, so my contribution is just coordinating the social media and press from my sick bed. 

Back for the first time since COCID in May was Manchester's best free day out: Envirolution. We've missed it, and the weather is great for us. We've a campaign against Deep Sea Mining which involves children painting pictures of the amazing creatures that live at the bottom of the sea, so it's good that we're doing it outside with plenty of time and space. 

As usual, it's food and drink and we meet Afzal Khan MP again, and he endorses this campaign as well.  

June

We continued with the Deep Sea Mining campaign and in June we tried a fancy photo shoot at Castlefield. Sadly, the wind blew out the candles and our creative reach exceed our creative grasp.

A few days later it's flames of a different sort that attract my attention as, whilst on my evening walk, I find the local woods on fire. It's almost dark by the time the Fire Service arrive, but they manage to stop the whole hill going up. 

Manchester Metropolitan University had a sustainability festival in June, It was just in time for Greenpeace to release their new video, a jazz/rap version of Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop, so I get to play that on an endless repeat to the students.

The next day it was time for me to head down to the Glastonbury Festival. Once again I'm a team leader for Greenpeace, but by getting there early and volunteering for extra shifts I get more time off during the festival weekend. Our team has to do some pretty unpleasant jobs but as a reward I get to see Seize the Day, Headmix, Seth Lakeman, surprise guests The Foo Fighters, Sparks (with special guest Galadriel), The Chemical Brothers, Unthanks, Billy Bragg, Steve Hillage, K Klass, Alison Goldfrapp and Elton John, who was wonderful. Even better, I went to the Sunday morning talks and got to meet Professor Alice Roberts and Dr Janina Ramirez, who were both wonderful. 

July

In July Sinéad O'Connor died. Her music, her activism and her troubled life touched me, but her relevance to me was that I was living in Ireland in the 1990s when the dam burst and a tsunami of allegations engulfed the Catholic Church and people realised Sinéad had been right.

Because of this she gets her own blog entry. 

August

In August I had a holiday. The family went to Shropshire and I finally got to climb Caer Caradoc. It was a good day out, but I didn't find Merlin's treasure. 

September 

Greenpeace launched it's new campaign, Operation Climate Vote, in Manchester. This involve door knocking to try to get people to sign up to a voting block big enough to influence the general election. Not a bad idea, but Greenpeace were certainly being ambitious. 

However, Marple people were certainly up for it and so we started our door knocking there. I can't say it was a campaign that caught my imagination though.

Slightly more exciting though is the start of the Derbyshire badger cull. This butchery has been going on for a decade now, and badgers are dying but TB is not going away, just as the scientists said. Even some farmers are now openly saying that vaccination should be given a chance. 

Opposing the cull not particularly effective as the government tends to just extend it until they have their quota, but we don't want to make things too easy for them. Additionally, the area we cover is also a black hole into which numerous protected birds disappear, and if the people killing the aren't the same ones shooting the badgers then you can call me Trufflehunter. Besides, what's not to like about tearing down country lanes in the middle of the night with the police in hot pursuit, sneaking around the countryside with night vision equipment and going face-to-face with an armed farmer in the dark?

October

In October we were visited by Patience Nabukalu, a Ugandan climate activist and friend of Greta Thunberg. She was in the UK to protest EACOP and arrived in Manchester after a difficult journey and not having slept for 36 hours. Despite this she immediately headed off to the HQ of the insurance company Chubb, where security stopped her getting in to talk to anyone. Instead she addressed our gathering outside.

I had the job of looking after her whilst she was in Manchester. She wanted to buy enough cheap clothes to avoid freezing to death, eat the nearest we could find to African food We went to Primark, Nandos and Old Trafford. I told my 21 year old son "I'm having your day out."

Thanks to this and other actions Manchester was finally achieving what we set out to do at our rally in support of COP26 in Glasgow and bring the voices of the Global South to the city. The insurance industry also looks like a good target for campaigns. They are not climate change deniers and know the risks from climate change. 

Also in October I went to Liverpool to meet the people who put together The Waiting List. This was complicated arts project funded by Greenpeace that involved some organic paper made with wild flower seeds and ashes from the Brazilian rain forest that was buried in a site owned by Tesco that overlooked the port where soya grown on what used to be Amazon rainforest is imported. The aim being to highlight the stupendous number of people on the waiting list for an allotment.  

November

In November I got to do my Kinder Scout walk and talk again, this time for University of Manchester students. They were very interested and asked some interesting questions about the Mass Trespass and Just Stop Oil, which is an interesting couple of movements to contrast.

Also this month I decided to have a bit of a career change and swap from being a Social Worker and occasional UNISON Steward to being a UNISON Convener and occasional Social Worker. 

December

COP28 was taking place in the petro-state of Dubai and goes about as well as can be expected. Well, maybe it went a bit better than that, but it still wasn't either good or enough.

The start of a genocidal campaign in Gaza by Israel somewhat distracted people from organising anything significant in Manchester about COP, and put paid to my plans for a ten year anniversary of the Barton Moss anti-fracking protests. However, we did manage a decent enough rally and march which briefly shut down a few branches of climate destruction funding banks. Sami the polar bear was able to come out for his one and only appearance of the year.