The Incomplete and Utter History of Pagan Opera Part Two: Wagner

Don’t mention the war.


By 1837, Bellini had put northern European Paganism on the stage and given the opera world a Moon Goddess and a sassy High Priestess. One of his biggest fans was the new conductor at the Riga theatre, who just about manage to put on a performance of Norma before he had to flee to Russia to escape his debtors. On the way, the ship ran into a storm and had to shelter in a Norwegian fjord. This gave the conductor an idea for an opera of his own, and by splicing in a Scottish ghost story he came up with a hit. The opera was called The Flying Dutchman, and its composer was Wilhelm Richard Wagner.

To say that Wagner’s reputation today is a little tarnished is to put it mildly and for many he is still the man who provided the theme tune for the Third Reich. Whilst having Hitler as your number one fan would be a handicap to the reputation of any artist, Wagner didn’t exactly help himself either. Not only was he a pioneer of the sort of nationalism that would mutate into the Nazis, but his views on the Jews wouldn’t have been out of place at a Nuremberg rally either.

It is possible to mount a liberal defence of Wagner. Some of his best friends really were Jewish, he worked extensively with Jewish musicians and he refused to sign an anti-Jewish petition to the Reichstag. From a psychoanalytical perspective we can say that his racism was the result of doubts about his own parentage and his own need to feel persecuted. In his own opinion the inflammatory pamphlets that he wrote were a ‘poison’ he had to get out of his system. It may even be that the root of it all was the jealousy of a man unable to hand onto his money towards a group stereotyped as thrifty with theirs.

All this though only goes so far and doesn’t stack up too well against the offensiveness of his racist ravings. Neither can we defend Wagner on the grounds of being a really nice guy in private: he spent his life cheating on his wives, neglecting his children and bullying his friends.

Perhaps the best that can be said of Wagner is that whilst he was a racist, he was one of a rather different calibre to Hitler. Wagner wasn’t bothered about the Jews corrupting the racial purity of Germany, but he did think they were destroying its cultural ‘purity’. Wagner didn’t want to see Jews murdered, but he did want to see them ‘redeemed’ through art.

Providing that art was the task he set himself. Opera would never be the same again after Wagner, and German Jews flocked to see his performances just like everyone else.

Forging the Ring

The young Wagner was a radical socialist who in 1848 was to be found in Dresden making hand-grenades for anti-monarchist rebels. When the revolt failed he had to flee the country once again. His first operas bombed too and his early life was mainly spent gambling, being imprisoned for bankruptcy, divorcing, and hanging around in bars getting ‘Brahms and Liszt’.

The middle aged Wagner was by contrast more than happy to hang around in the court of the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria. This Ludwig was a curious kind of fellow. Never happier than when wandering around the Bavarian countryside talking to peasant, he aided the local economy (and the future German tourist board) by financing a series of fairytale castles form his own pocket. He doesn’t seem to have been interested in girls, but appears to have had a bit of a crush on Wagner. In the homophobic Bavaria of the late nineteenth century, Ludwig was under considerable pressure to get himself a token Queen, but he refused and never gave up hope of getting it together with Wagner. Wagner, very much a ladies man (involved with at least eight that we know about - although he did also spend a suspiciously large amount of money in his local dress shop) was quite happy to string the young King along if it meant he could plunder the royal treasury.

Relatively financially secure, he was now able to let rip on his greatest works, although Wagner and financial security never really went together - the only thing he spent faster than his own money was other people’s. What Wagner was writing now was his ‘new music’ that would transform opera and, he hoped, the people who listened to it.

The Flying Dutchman had showed him the way to go. His first commercial success had a come a few years earlier with Rienzi, but whilst Rienzi was in the style of French Grand Opera, the style of The Flying Dutchman was all Wagner’s own: it was loud, it was supernatural, it was about the redemptive power of love and the heroine died tragically.

He next turned his hand to medieval romance with Tannhauser, about a knightly minstrel who, shagged out after a year in the Otherworld with a mountain full of nymphs, enters an early version of the Eurovision Song contest. Early audiences gave it Nul Points, but after a minor rewrite it eventually became one of his most popular works. The Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley was so moved by a performance that he to turned it into a play - supposedly in a mammoth 67 hour long drug induced writing binge.

Wagner stayed in the Middle Ages for Lohengrin, a tale of a knight of the Holy Grail, an evil sorceress and a Swan-Prince. It features Wagner’s most well known piece of music, The Wedding March, which showed he could do quiet and romantic as well as loud and dramatic. Needless to say though that Lohengrin and his bride do not live happily ever after.

Wagner was now on top form and for his next work he tackled the Matter of Britain with Tristan and Isolde, possibly his finest musical accomplishment. It features some of his most heart-rendingly tragic music, elements of which have since been extensively borrowed by Hollywood. Those violins that play during on screen clinches are generally doing a version of the ‘Tristan cord’. The climax of the opera really is a climax as Isolde, holding the body of her dead departed lover in her arms, manages to sing herself to orgasm - a neat trick if you can do it.

Six Nights at the Opera

However these operas, good though they were, were just a distraction from Wagner’s great work, which he started whilst plotting the revolution in Dresden, and continued to work on for the next 27 years. This was The Ring of the Nibelungs, four linked operas weighing in at 16 hours all told - nearly twice the length of The Lords of the Rings trilogy. These days the last two are normally each played over two nights, so watching the whole thing takes nearly a week.

It was s serious bit of work for a serious purpose. His aim was to combine sound and spectacle, drama and dialogue, to create a work of ‘total art’. this in turn would be the start of a new religion. Wagner, who had little time for a Church he saw as clapped out and past its sell-by date, wanted a new nationalistic religion of art, and for his inspiration for this ‘art of the future’ he looked to the myths of pre-Christian Germany.

In writing The Ring Wagner, rather like George Lucas, started with part four and then wrote three ‘prequels’. He was characteristically modest about the scope of the story ‘it holds the world’s beginning , and its destruction’, he wrote to his friend Liszt. Chronologically The Rhinegold is first, which tells of how Alberich, one of the dwarvish Nibelung race, steals the Rhinegold from the mermaid-like Rhinemaidens, having been warned by them that to do so is to renounce love forever. From this gold he forges the magic Ring.


Meanwhile Wotan, Chief God, has had Fafner and Fasolt, a couple of Giants, in to build his fortress of Valhalla. As is ever the way with builders the bill is somewhat steeper than he expected and the Giants carry off the Goddess Freia as payment. Wotan steals the Ring from Alberich and swaps it, along with a heap of gold, for Freia. The two Giants fall out and Fafner murders his partner and takes all the loot for himself. Part one ends with Wotan in Valhalla, Fafner sitting on his gold, and both of them cursed by the Ring.

Part two, The Valkyrie, is about the brother-sister lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde. Wotan, their Dad, is told by his wife Fricka that this sort of thing shouldn’t be tolerated and so the titular Valkyrie, Brünnhilde, is sent to ensure Siegmund looses the upcoming fight with Siegelinde’s outraged hubbie. Brünnhilde refuses, and so Wotan has to do the dirty work himself, shattering Siegmund’s magic sword with his spear. Brünnhilde, for her disobedience, is imprisoned on a mountain top in a wall of elemental fire.

Next up is Siegfried. Fafner, we learn, has turned into a dragon but nearby is Siegfried, Siegmund and Sieglinde’s son, who has been brought up by Mime, Alberich’s brother. He re-forges his dad’s sword and uses it to kill Fafner and take the Ring. For good measure he does in his foster dad too, and goes in search of Brünnhilde. Wotan tries to stop him, but this time the sword breaks the spear, leaving Wotan powerless. Proving that although he may have a short temper he is not easily enflamed, Siegfried crosses the magic fire and rescues Brünnhilde who, now mortal, falls in love with him.

Finally in the Twilight of the Gods we are back in traditional opera territory with bodies littering the stage. Siegfried gives the Ring to Brünnhilde whilst he goes off adventuring, but he falls in with Alberich’s son Hagen. He is tricked into betraying Brünnhilde, and in return she helps Hagen treacherously murder him. As his body is consumed by the funeral pyre, Brünnhilde throws herself onto the flames. The Rhinemaidens retrieve the Ring, Hagen’s drowns trying to grab it and Valhalla is consumed in flames and the earth by a flood.

Waltzing Brünnhilde

Wagner’s source for the story is usually given as the Niebelungenleid, normally by people who’ve never read it. A much stronger case can be made for the Icelandic Völsunga Saga. Whilst the two books have common roots and were written down in the same century, the German book has clearly had a Christian gloss put on it whilst the Icelandic work is still discernibly Pagan. This is particularly evident in the character of Brünnhilde, who in the Niebelungenleid is converted from a Pagan warrior queen to a submissive Christian wife by, basically, being raped on her wedding night. Wagner’s Brünnhilde by contrast is the star of the show and not subservient to anyone, man or God.

Whereas Bellini just used myth and legend as a convenient backdrop on which to hang a conventional romantic tale, Wagner revelled in the allegorical power of myths. The result is a story that exists on many levels. To the socialist George Bernard Shaw, The Ring was a lesson on the evils of capitalism, whilst to the ex-politician Michael Portillo it is about the incompatibility of love and power. There is also the theme of civilisation in conflict with Nature, but that is not the end of it by any means.

Wagner saw the role of the artist as ‘to bring the unconscious part of human nature into consciousness’. Wagner’s tale of Dwarves, Giants and Gods seems to be demanding to be read on a psychological level, whilst the incestuous lovers (as the daughter of Wotan and Erda, the earth Goddess, Brünnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt!) and the final conflagration seem to imply magical change. Wagner was certainly aware of the potency of the symbolism he was working with. The opening scene of The Rhinegold actually came to him in a dream, and he seems to have believed that the themes of The Ring were working through him on a subconscious level.

Working out what exactly these themes are is something of a challenge. What, for example, actually is the Ring’s power and is its ‘curse’ actually a curse at all? Is Alberich a villain or a Promethean hero? Is Wotan aware that he is working towards the destruction of himself and the Gods? Pagans have a rare chance to get one over on the opera-snobs here as this sort of thing is meat and drink to us.

Perhaps the most difficult character in The Ring to explain is Siegfried. Blond, violent and stupid, it’s easy to see why the Nazis admired him, but harder to see why Brünnhilde bothers with him. As an orphaned, inbred, bastards brought up by a dwarf, Siegfried could be forgiven for having a few ‘issues’. In Wagner’s own view he was ‘not even half a man’ and it took Brünnhilde to make him whole; he is an animus in search of an anima.

Ironically, given Hitler’s admiration, the probable inspiration for Siegfried was the lefty anarchist Michael Bakunin, hero of the barricades in Dresden in 1848, and the sort of person who, had he lived a century later, would have found himself in a concentration camp.

The real hero though is Wotan, the flawed God. Literally spell bound by the runes on his spear, which are the bargains he has made for his power, his plan to beget a hero who can bail him out fails spectacularly, and he is forced to spend the last part of the story hiding in Valhalla, powerless to avert his fate. With rebellious offspring and a nagging wife, tied up with red tape and his career heading for the rocks, Wotan’s midlife crisis is the backbone of the story. Tolkien, who was mining the same seam of material as Wagner, took the ‘good’ aspects of Wotan to make Gandalf. Wagner, by contracts, gives us the God warts and all.

But if The Ring’s male heroes are flawed, the women are archetypal., and the men go to pieces when they’re not around. The cerebrally challenged Siegfried is lost without his Brünnhilde, and Wotan has to turn to Erda for advice in times of crisis. Whether she is really helping him, or whether she wishes the fall of Valhalla, is a question left enigmatically open.

Musically a feature of Wagner’s opera’s is what he called ‘infinite melody’. What had impressed Wagner about Norma was how the long flowing arias accompanied the drama rather than interrupting it. Most operas consisted of spoken dialogue interrupted by short songs, after which the cast paused to acknowledge the audience’s applause and adjust their corsets before carrying on with the story. Wagner would have none of this. Instead his operas are long, continuous pieces of music.

Another trademark is the use of leitmotifs, which translates as ‘leading-motives’. These are short musical calling cards that announce the arrival of characters or themes, rather like the way John Barry’s James Bond theme was used to accompany Sean Connery’s appearance on screen. With The Ring though, Wagner takes this idea to another level and combines them like runes, to create a complex subtext to the main score. The final Immolation Scene is made up almost entirely by these leitmotifs, all battling it out with one another, until finally ‘redemption through love’ ends the performance.

Wagner’s reputation as the ‘heavy metal’ of classical music is well deserved. To get the sound he wanted Wagner took an already bloated nineteenth century symphony orchestra and beefed it up with a few extra instruments. Finding singers, especially female singers, who can compete with the resulting noise has always been a bit of a challenge, and as people with large voices often aren’t small themselves, Wagner could well be responsible for the oldest cliché about opera singers.

Fortunately it’s what the performers sound like that is more important than what they look like. From the Rhinemaidens happy frolicking at the start of The Rhinegold, to Siegfried’s magnificent Funeral March and the final transformation scene, The Ring sounds fantastic. It can certainly be loud when the occasion demands, such as the famous Ride of the Valkyries. But The Ring also has its tender moments too, such as the budding romance between Siegmund and Sieglinde in part two, one of the most beautiful acts in all opera, and Forest Murmurs, in Siegfried, where the hero takes some time off from killing things to appreciate the beauty of the trees.

Twilight of the Gods

Having completed his work of ‘total art’ Wagner next needed a theatre big enough to put it on. Not finding one he leant on Ludwig for some money so he could build his own, the festival theatre in Bayreuth. There in 1876 was held the first Bayreuth Festival when the four parts of The Ring were finally performed together.

Compared with the party atmosphere at most operas of the day - the opening night of Norma had been ruined by the childish antics of the aristocratic audience, - opera at Bayreuth was serious stuff. Silence was demanded and late comers were not allowed in. The house lights were dimmed so that only the rectangular stage was visible and then the orchestra, hidden out of sight of the audience, started to play. Not only are all operas now like this, but what Wagner could be said to have invented the modern cinematic experience.

Wagner's influence on cinema music is almost as great as his effect on opera itself. Samuel Goldwyn, commissioning a score, once asked for 'music like Wagner only louder'. The music for the film King Kong has been called a Wagnerian opera with a film attached.

Wagner had one more opera in him before he was carried off to Valhalla, the six hour epic of the Holy Grail Parsifal. Wagner died the next year. His benefactor, Ludwig, followed him shortly afterwards. Stripped of his crown due to his failing mental health, he and his psychiatrist drowned in mysterious circumstances.

Wagner’s family ensured that the festivals would go on although, partly due to the titanic cost of putting on such elaborate shows, not to mention the stamina required by the audience to endure them, Wagner’s music never acquired the mass appeal he wished for. Tolkien brought a modified version of Heathenism to a mass audience, but Wagner is still for the elite.

Modern productions of The Ring generally remove the story from its mythological home and disguise its origin, which is a pity. Wagner has been rescued from the Nazis; perhaps it’s time to reclaim him for the Pagans.

Part Three: Arias in Avalon

The Incomplete and Utter History of Pagan Opera: Part One

What type of music is most typically pagan?

Not something you get asked every day, but I would guess that, Inkubbus Sukkubus fans aside, most of you would go for folk music. With its associations with camp fires, smoky pubs and the film The Wicker Man, its bawdiness, hints of ancient wisdom and tales of merry happenings all-in-a-month-of-May, it probably represents where most Pagans are coming from.

However, if you were to trot down to your local HMV and look for myth and magic amongst the CDs there, you’d probably have the most success in the classical music section. If you’ve heard the music from the films The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, then you’ll know that sword and sorcery is something that classical composers know how to do.

But could opera be considered pagan? Normally associated with overweight, overwrought and overpaid performers, opera doesn’t have a great image outside of the cultural elite. But all opera really is is telling stories in music and song, which is a tradition that goes back to the days when our pagan ancestors were in short trousers. What’s more, some of the greatest composers in the history of opera used pagan themes for their works, so even if Pagan music lovers aren’t listening to opera, millions of opera fans are listening to pagan music. So here I go with the pagan highlights from the history of opera, starting with someone I’m sure you’ve all heard of.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)

Opera was invented by the Italians, and at first things were fairly light hearted. However by the late eighteenth century the Germans had moved in on the act, and they took things a little more seriously. Up until this point opera had been ‘pagan’ only in so far as it extolled the virtues of wine, women and song, and occasionally ventured into Greek myth. However a certain Austrian child prodigy was to change that.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the big name in late eighteenth century music. His first mention in our story comes in 1787 when he unveiled his womanising anti-hero Don Giovanni, who after racking up two thousand and sixty five notches in the bedpost, eventually gets his comeuppance when he goes for one virgin too many. Cloaked, nocturnal, lecherous and ultimately hell-bound, he may well have been the inspiration for Dracula and all those other charming blood-suckers up to and including Buffy’s friend, Angel.

However Mozart’s main pagan credentials come from his last opera The Magic Flute, first performed in1791. A story of bizarre initiation rituals set in a Temple of Isis and Osiris, Mozart cobbled together the plot from Masonic ritual and a set of tarot cards. But the best song he gives to the Queen of the Night, Isis herself, whose main contribution to the show is her frenetic Revenge Aria. Female opera singers had always been known as divas, which is Latin for Goddess, but in the Queen of the Night The Goddess had finally arrived on stage in person, sadly just as Mozart himself shuffled off it.


Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835)

This was all very well as far as it went, but it wasn’t what most of us would consider real paganism. Come the early nineteenth century though there was something of a Celtic revival going. Men in Egyptian style robes started to appear at Stonehenge for the Solstice, and some poets started churning out passable imitations of Bardic verse.

Meanwhile in rural Sicily, a lad called Vincenzo Bellini had developed a crush on a posh bird who lived near him. Unfortunately he was too poor for her father to allow her to marry him, so he went off to the big city to write operas. They turned out to be smash hits and he became so rich and famous that the lady’s father eventually consented to their marriage.

Unfortunately by this time Bellini had got a taste for the limelight and he completely forgot about his childhood sweetheart. The smart set of Milan and Paris always considered him something of a country bumpkin though, partly because of his habit of intoning spells to ward off the evil eye as he wandered about, but they certainly liked his music. “Opera should make you weep and die,” he would cheerfully say. In true romantic tradition Bellini went around being miserable, breaking hearts (male as well as female - allegedly) and knocking out hit operas.

In 1831 he decided to jump on the pagan revival bandwagon for his third opera, Norma. Norma is the chief Druid in a part of Gaul where the locals have decided that they don’t really want an aqueduct and are starting to ask “what have the Romans ever done for us?” This being opera, though, Norma’s domestic life is anything but straightforward. She is secretly married to the Roman governor Pollione, who is in turn secretly knocking off Adalgisa, one of the younger priestesses. When she finds out Norma is a little cross, to put it mildly. First she considers killing her children, and then Adalgisa, before finally offering herself as a sacrifice to their God, Irminsul.

Irminsul is a rather odd name for a Celtic God. The word is Anglo-Saxon for ‘great pillar’ and usually refers to the great World Tree of Northern Mythology. Bellini would appear to have had a slight problem with Celtic names. Norma, a Druid Priestess? And what are we supposed to make of Adalgisa? Is she named after a type of pain killer?

Bellini’s words were actually written by fellow Italian Felice Romani. His influences can be traced back to Tacitus’ story of the German priestess Velléda who led a revolt against the Romans, and the Greek myth of Medea, a priestess of the moon-goddess who betrayed her people to help Jason get the Golden Fleece. The portrayal of the Druids in the opera, as bloodthirsty but enlightened, owes much to the concept of the Noble Savage which was then popular thanks to the writing of Rousseau and others. Contemporary politics may also have come into the plot. The Gauls’ simmering resentment against the Roman occupation could be a reference to the then state of Italy, occupied by the Austrian and French armies, and not yet an independent country.

But back to the music. Bellini wrote his music slowly, and this shows in the long flowing songs of the opera. His style was known as bel canto, which directly translates as ‘beautiful singing’. This means that Bellini keeps the instrumentals to a minimum and makes the singers do all the hard work, labouring over every word to make their point. Apparently it’s all quite poetic too, but as I can’t speak a word of Italian I’ll have to take that on trust. It does sound good though, especially the aria Casta Diva (‘pure goddess’), Norma’s song for peace, sung to the moon as she cuts the Golden Bough. You’ve probably already heard it, as it’s been used in the films The Bridges of Madison County and the recent A Midsummer Night’s Dream, amongst others.


True to form as a Romantic, Bellini died young, at the age of 33. Norma though has given him a measure of immortality, and has never ceased to be performed from then on. Despite being a challenging part for even the most talented singer, the role of Norma has always been popular as it provides a welcome break from the usual tragic-heroine-done-in-by-her-no-good-lover roles. Fittingly then for the most famous pagan priestess in opera history, it was the greatest soprano of the twentieth century, Maria Callas, who made the role her own. She put in over forty performances on stage, was recorded twice, and came to be regarded as the definitive Norma.

Modern Pagans owe something of a debt to Bellini and Romani. Not only did Marion Zimmer Bradley use the plot of Norma as the basis of the first of her Avalon series of books, but, as no less a personage than Professor Ronald Hutton has pointed out, the opera also marks something of a watershed in the history of the neo-pagan revival. Whilst the contemporary Druids of the time were male sun worshippers, Bellini and Romani had their Druidic grove led by a priestess and meeting at night to worship the Moon. It was to be over a century before Gerald Gardner was to popularise the same idea.

Part Two: Wagner

George Bush and the Invasion of Britain

A leader with no military experience launches a foreign war based on dodgy (or fabricated) intelligence. His technologically advanced army crushes the opposition and a government of exiles is brought in. The Commander-in-Chief himself announces ‘Mission Accomplished’ with a mock battle but four years later his army is locked in fierce guerrilla fighting as the soldiers battle former allies.

No, it’s not the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the Roman invasion of Britain in 43CE. It seems that the twenty centuries that separates the gladius from the guided missile haven’t really changed the nature of war and conquest.

The parallels came to me whilst reading John Peddie’s The Roman Conquest of Britain. The book was written in 1987, so it is now within my price range. Peddie had served in the Burma campaign in the Second World War, and he used this experience to fill in the gaps left by the historians and archaeologists. The result is not a definitive version of what happened, but certainly a best guess.

It’s strange to think, but the British/Indian Army in Burma in 1942 found itself in a very similar position to the Roman Army in Britain 1901 years earlier. They were an infantry army facing a lightly equipped but more mobile foe who was also on foot, and relied primarily on boats for transport backed up by animals. As they advanced, they were confronted with the problem of a large and alien civilian population to control.

The Romans though had the easier time on the battlefield. Once they’d pinned down the lightly equipped Celts on the Medway the legionaries made mincemeat of their opponents. Peddie is fairly convinced that that would have been that for organised British resistance, and so he’s fairly sceptical about what happened next.

The invasion had been launched by the Emperor Claudius. A man of no military experience at all, who indeed had been regarded as somewhat mentally retarded for most of his life, he suddenly found himself in charge of the mightiest war machine in the ancient world.

Great admirer though I am of both Robert Graves and Derek Jacobi, we should put aside the notion of Claudius being a frustrated liberal: during his reign more people were executed for treason or died in the arena than under his infamous predecessor Caligula. True, he was on the throne for longer and probably did face a large number of plots and revolts, but that doesn’t get away from the disturbing fact that here was a man who evidently knew that blood oiled the Roman wheels of power and wanted to make sure the machinery of office was well lubricated.

Gladiatorial games were all very well, but what the Roman public really wanted was war. The excuse was that Druids of Mass Destruction were hiding in Britain and threatening to arm Gaulish terrorists. They also had a chap called Adminius who claimed to be the rightful chief of the powerful Trinovantes tribe. In fact Gaul, Asterix cartoons aside, was always one of the most peaceful roman provinces, a condition of tranquillity no doubt brought on by the million odd citizens slaughtered by Julius Caesar, and Adminius appears to have had more friends on the banks of the Tiberis than the Thames. However they seemed good enough excuses at the time and so Claudius invaded.

Roman Generals knew their stuff in those days and Claudius’s man, Aulus Plautius, appears to have delivered the goods. However Roman Emperors were supposed to do their dirty work in person, so Claudius had to come to Britain. Fearful of plots at home he was away from Rome for the minimum time he could get away with, which was six months even with Roman roads. This left him just 16 days in Britain. Although in the country for only slightly longer than the average American tourist, Roman historians record that he duly delivered a great victory over the Britons at Colchester, helped in part by the 1st century equivalent of the Abrams tank - the war elephant.

Peddie takes all this with a very large pinch of salt. It is inconceivable that the Roman and British forces stood and stared at each other for three months whilst they waited for Claudius to arrive, and only the very best of luck would allow even the most brilliant general to bring to battle a foe in just 16 days. Equally no Celtic Chieftain worth his woad would make a stand against Roman war elephants in a place like Colchester. That the Battle of Colchester, it seems, was fought entirely for the benefit of the Roman chroniclers, all of whom were either still in Rome or safely ‘embedded’ with the Roman military.

Claudius returned in triumph, but that was not the end of the story. Although the Romans had landed in Britain in overwhelming force, and had the active support of most of the Atrebates, they had only fought the tribes of the extreme south-east, relying on the acquiescence of those further north. Resistance appears to have tailed off after the first victory and although the Trinovantes chief Caractacus led a successful guerrilla campaign, he was eventually betrayed by the Brigantes tribe and sent to Roman as a prisoner. He appears to have been fairly defiant in the face of imminent execution and so Claudius, perhaps thinking that sending such a feisty foe to his death would only create a martyr, pardoned him.

Superficially all seemed to be going well for the men in skirts, and Plautius returned home in triumph.

However a study of the military archaeology of the time paints a different picture. The Romans appeared to have deployed themselves across the conquered territory in about 130 small forts. This means that about half of the 40,000 Roman soldiers who invaded were now tied down in small garrisons apparently battling 'Druidist remnants'. Roman Generals weren’t fools and they would surely have only done this is if they were facing a hostile population that could not be trusted unless a cohort of infantry was parked at the end their street. Roman soldiers didn’t go off to war expecting to be home by Saturnalia, but clearly this was shaping up for a long and difficult occupation. There was a precedent in Gaul. Caesar claimed to have wrapped up the campaign when he defeated Vercingetorix at Alesia, but as he crossed the Rubicon on his way to Rome he left behind him an army that was just beginning six years of bloody tribal conflict.

In Britain it was four years before the storm finally broke. The powerful Iceni tribe in what is now Norfolk had so far sat out the war, content to see their old enemies the Trinovantes laid low. However it was soon clear that Rome was after subjects, not allies, and so when the new governor threatened to disarm them, they rose in revolt. That governor, Publius Ostorius Scapula, had also run into trouble trying to push the borders of Roman Britain into what is now Wales, and Rome’s legions had actually had to retreat and abandon some of the border forts. He died five years later “worn out with care” as the historian Tacitus rather poetically puts it.

Claudius didn’t fair much better and the popularity boost from his British adventure soon evaporated. He eventually left office when his wife poisoned him. He had become a god, but was deeply unpopular and regarded as a brutal and debauched leader. Romans were particularly scandalised by his drinking (in pubs with the proles) and his sexual antics (ladies only - no boys).


Britannia did eventually become a reasonably settled province, but it certainly wasn’t easy. In 60CE Boudicca torched London, Colchester and St Albans and wiped out half a legion of troops. In 69CE the puppet state of Brigantia in the northeast revolted and although the Romans appear to have rescued their ally Queen Cartimandua, popular feeling appears to have favoured her rebellious husband and so the Romans evacuated and left him to it.

Wales seems to have been a running sore and although the Romans seem to have been largely content with just securing the border with a series of forts, the garrisoning of which must have been amongst the least enviable postings in the Empire. However they did invaded Anglesey in an attempt to wipe out those religious fanatics the Druids. The first time they tried this the Brigantes revolted and the second time the Iceni, so either the ancient Brits were great opportunists or the Druids were actually quite popular, despite the Roman propaganda about human sacrifice. Roman Legions also invaded, and then retreated from Scotland. It did get better, but in 260CE Britain was part of the independent Gallic Empire and in 286CE it was actually independent under a chap called Carausius.

That the Romans did eventually manage to pacify this rebellious little island in the end said more about their ability to use soft power than brute force. After Boudicca’s revolt the Romans seem to have given up ‘shock and awe’ and gone over to ‘hearts and minds’. The Rome was often as not more of a franchise than an empire, and friendly local chiefs were given villas and allowed to carry ruling their own people as Romanised Celts. Despite this, Roman troops never actually left and right up until the end Britannia continued to require more than 10% of the Roman Army as garrison. If you include National Guard and Reserves, the US has about the same percentage of its army deployed in Iraq today.

All of which goes to show that there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that military history isn’t just a series of Decisive Battles and that even the Romans, who literally wrote the book on empire building, could get bogged down fighting interminable insurgencies. Are there any further comparisons to be drawn between Claudius and Bush though? The former advocated public flatulence whilst the latter is famous for his verbal gaffes, but Claudius is also regarded by modern historians as an able administrator who cemented Roman Known World dominance. Bush is almost certain to be remembered as the man who took a global superpower and almost drove it into the sand.

Finally Claudius was succeeded by a man who initially appeared to be a great leader, but who went mad in office and fiddled the capital city burnt down. Dubya hopefully won’t be….

The Pixie of Wild Garlic

I’d like to tell you of the only encounter with The Gentry, or elves if you prefer, that I’ve been involved with personally. It not much of a story, but it is mine, and I’m relating the story to you as I know it.

It takes place in the spring of 1997, at a time when I living on a camp in the Bollin Valley in Cheshire, on the site of what is now Manchester Airport’s Second Runway. I guess most of you will have seen these protest camps on the TV, with their airy treehouses, claustrophobic tunnels and rickety benders. Not everyone’s idea of a great place to hang out, but I loved it.

True, the toilets were a little primitive, and when it rained (which it tends to round Manchester way) there really wasn’t much to do except sit by the fire and drink tea. But for most of the time we played in the woods, told stories by the campfire, drank cheap booze and sang songs very badly (there are some recordings – but only the very brave should listen). Just like our Pagan ancestors of yore no doubt.

Like all the big protests of the nineties, the people involved in trying to stop the building of the runway came from a variety of backgrounds and generally speaking we all tended to coalesce into individual camps which evolved their own character as time went by. At Manchester Airport we had the leery, beery ‘trolls’ of Flywood camp, a small copse of trees surrounded by a palisade. The anarchist punks of Flywood had thoughtfully located themselves next to the main road so they could get first pick of the groceries dropped off by well meaning locals, and where it was a shorter walk to the off-license. Fuelled by beer and free food they constructed the biggest of the defended treehouses, Battlestar Galactica it was called, and the Cakehole, the deepest and most sophisticated of the tunnels.

Next to them was Cliff Richard camp, so called because it was located next to a cliff and a bloke called Richard chose the site. The name led to many a joke on the theme of ‘the camp Cliff Richard’. When the authorities eventually came to remove it a few journalists did try to run stories on how “the camp Cliff Richard has been penetrated by the sheriff’s men” but no paper was brave enough to print them.

The inhabitants of Cliff Richard were the veterans of the direct action movement and include the famous Swampy amongst their ranks. There was no compromising with these guys (and girls) and their entire camp was surrounded by six foot high wire fencing ‘borrowed’ from the airport authorities. To make life as difficult for the bailiffs there wasn’t even a door to the camp – you could only enter or leave via one of the aerial walkways that linked the treehouses.

This spirit extended to their tunnels, which were so narrow and twisty that only underweight vegans could actually get down them, and even the wiry Swampy got stuck once or twice. Come eviction time though this proved a rather false economy. Whilst the expert rescue teams employed by airport to get the protestors out refused to venture down the tunnels, conditions were just so unpleasant down there that everyone came out of their own accord after a few days.

Flywood and Cliff Richard were the serious camps, but I lived at Wild Garlic. Located at the heart of the development site, where the new runway would cross the beautiful river Bollin. We were as far as possible for civilisation and being located in the valley we were completely out of sight to the outside world. The camp itself was a cluster of ash, beech and birch trees on a slope with farmland at the top and water meadow at the bottom. We were definitely rather more chilled out than the big camps. Whilst Flywood and Cliff Richard put up defences to keep people out, we decorated out ‘front door’ with ribbons to invite people in. Our token defensive gesture was a wooden drawbridge over the muddy puddle that marked the limit of the camp, but come the day the authorities decided to pay us a visit even this was defeated by a policeman with longer than average legs.

However don’t think we were a complete bunch of hippies, direct action protest camps were always about practical action rather than spreading good vibes. Anyone who turned up at the camp with a penny whistle could expect to have it nailed to a tree if they tried to play it, and Bob Dylan songs were definitely banned. Whilst we would make music round the campfire at night and get outrageously drunk, we also put a lot of effort into our defences. Our treehouses were pretty good and we had two decent tunnels as well.

But anyway, I’m in danger of doing a bit of a Ronnie Corbett and getting off the subject, which is Pixies. Now as the people who wanted to build the runway over 100 acres of Cheshire Greenbelt didn’t want us eco-warrior types running around just anywhere building camps, they decided to put a fence round us to keep us where we were. They would build their fence during the day, and during the night it would sort of fall down. If anyone asked who’d done it, we’d say it was the mischievous pixies who, as everyone knows, live in the woods.

This went on for a few months as the airport builders tried to get a warrant to evict us from what were, legally, our homes. This wonderful legal situation, that a pile of logs in someone else’s tree could be your home, all came about because a postman once delivered a letter to “The Chestnut Tree, Wanstead” during the campaign against the M11 motorway in London. Ever since trees have been legal dwellings. For a few years I had to put Wild Garlic on my list of previous addresses when being police checked for work. I don’t know what their computer made of that.

Eventually they got there order and we waited for the fun to start. Things were getting a little tense in the camps. At River Rats a novice climber had an accident whilst being taught to climb by someone who it turned out didn’t know much more they did. John, a nice guy who can be found at the Stockport Pagan Moot, was out walking one night when he was attacked by unidentified men-in-black and beaten up. In Wild Garlic someone left their candle on in their treehouse when they popped out and set fire to the thing. Very spectacular, but not clever.

So this was the background to the night when Kim saw her Pixie. Kim was at that time a final year Journalism student. Her ambition was to write like John Vidal from the Guardian. John was actually commuting between The Guardian’s office in Manchester and the Cakehole tunnel in Flywood, where he liked to play his classical music underground. He was rather upset when he had to fly to Brazil at the crucial moment and couldn’t actually be there to be evicted. When Kim actually met John he was, err, rather more enamoured by her than he was by him – and he stopped being her hero after that.

Kim was from the Liverpool Earth First! group, a bunch of radical anarcho-greens, and so was not the sort person to be found out in the woods contemplating her navel and talking to the spirits in the trees. It was therefore a bit of a shock to her when she leaned out of her treehouse one night and saw on the ground below her a real live pixie. From what she described the fellow was about two feet high and looked a bit like Dobby the House Elf. She looked at the pixie, the pixie looked at her, and then it ran off through the undergrowth.

And that is all there is to the story of the Pixie of Wild Garlic.

Me being a horrible cynic though I didn’t really believe Kim had seen a pixie. Two other people though confirmed that something had been in the camp that night. One person saw the thing running off, but it was too quick for him to identify, whilst another heard but it but didn’t see it. I never actually found the tracks that night but my opinion at the time was that she’d seen a fox, as we knew they visited our camps, and in the darkness her mind had played a trick on her.

Now, though, I’ve had more time to tune in myself to the spirits I’m not so sure. I’m now prepared to believe that maybe pixies pretend to be foxes sometimes to confuse the cynics, or that maybe pixies are just foxes that you catch a glimpse of in the night at special times. Nor I suspect would anyone else who’s heard a vixen’s mating cry in a lonely forest at night think that there’s any ‘just’ about being a fox, they are spirits of the forest in their own right.

Certainly though Kim’s story isn’t unique. Many people found living in the camps abrought on mystical experiences. Many found living in their treehouses brought on powerful dreams and some felt able to communicate with the trees they were guarding. Others saw black cats leaping from tree to tree or heard drumming coming from empty camps. In the woods of Newbury an amphibious beast launched itself out the canal whilst security guards claimed to have seen the ghosts of Civil War soldiers whose graves had been disturbed. I myself met Gandalf down a tunnel, but that was I think the result of something I’d found growing in another part of the woods.

What all these stories have in common is that it is now impossible to go back to the original sites to see for yourself, for they are all now under concrete and tarmac. But that’s another story, and one that hasn’t ended yet.

Pagan, Peer and Priest in GM Crops Raid!

My good self (left) and Jo Melzack are taken into custody

It is 5:05AM on 26th July 1999, a bright clear morning and at Walnut Tree Farm, Lyng, Norfolk a farmer is about to go to work in a field. An everyday rural scene except that the farmer is Peter Lord Melchett, Fourth Baron Melchett, ex-Labour minister and Executive Director of Greenpeace, and the field is a crop of T25 maize, genetically modified to resist a powerful weed killer.

A carefully planned Greenpeace operation had begun the previous night with five convoys converging on Lyng from around Britain. Shortly after 5AM Iain McSeveny, Greenpeace’s dour Scottish accountant cut the lock to the field and began a chain of events that would eventually see twenty-eight people, including Lord Melchett and myself, on trial in Norwich Crown Court and the whole future of GM foods thrown into doubt.

The Heavy Metal arrives

The crop is head high, six acres of ‘green concrete’, and a toxic desert in which nothing else lives. The tassels on the crop are just beginning to descend prior to pollination, at which point each head of maize will release 25 million grains of GM pollen. Greenpeace intends to stop this happening, and has brought a powerful tractor and mower for the purpose.

Melchett makes the final adjustments and the machine sets off, cutting through the crop at a good pace; the whole operation should be over in less than an hour. Nothing is being left to chance and a lorry is waiting to return the crop to its owner, the German multi-national corporation AgrEvo. There was however one factor that hadn’t been considered – the Brigham brothers, whose family has farmed this land since the 17th century.

First on the scene is a very angry William Brigham. He is treated cordially; after all it is his land even if it’s not his crop. There had been a meeting in the village hall the previous week, Melchett tells him, when over a hundred of the villagers had called for the crop to be destroyed. Mr Brigham had not attended, under the orders of the chemical company he explains. He storms off in a foul mood, his expletives recorded verbatim by John Vidal, a Guardian journalist invited along by Greenpeace to ensure fair play.

“running like Penelope Pitstop”

Next on the scene is younger brother Eddie, a man of few words. He is sitting on top of an industrial loader fitted with a huge bucket. His brother removes the gate from the hinges and Eddie rams the Greenpeace lorry out of the way.

He then drives straight through the field – and the crowd of people on the other side. Adrian O’Neill, a campaigner from Beverley, later described John Vidal and myself as both “running like Penelope Pitstop” to escape. Fortunately no one is hurt and Eddie heads for the mower, bringing the bucket down and stopping it dead. I decide to check that the driver is all right, but as I make my way to the immobilized tractor I suddenly find Eddie heading back towards me, leading to another rapid dash to safety. His mission accomplished, Eddie then leaves the field to cause some more havoc on the road, squashing the Guardian press car on the way.

GM maize; bag it, bin it

Undeterred by this setback, the Greenpeace team stop bagging and begin trampling the crop, whilst strimmers are unloaded and started up. By now the local police are arriving and over the next half-hour they very politely round up the protesters, some of who are now a long way into the maize. There is a feeling of anti-climax as we all stand in a line waiting to have our details taken. Perhaps two thirds of the crop is still standing, ready to pollinate.

We are loaded into various police vehicles and driven away. Arriving in Norwich the station staff are a bit surprised by their new arrivals especially Lord Melchett. “Is that Lord as in House of Lords?” asks the desk Sergeant. I find myself in a cell with Mick Waldrum, a Forester by trade and our tractor driver, who I’ve known since we were both part of the successful campaign to save the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada. Mick had been driving the tractor for most of the previous day to get it to the rendezvous. None of the windows opened and the cab's previous occupant appeared to have been an incontinent dog.

You're under arrest my Lord

The police do their best to make us comfortable, and we are cheered by gifts of food and newspapers from local well wishers. Rather ironically the headline in the local paper is “GM Crop to Stay”. However as time passes it becomes clear that we’re going to be staying too. The unfortunately named Sergeant Frame eventually tells us that we are being refused police bail and will have to spend the night in the cells.

Next day we appeared in Norwich magistrate court charged with the Criminal Damage ‘without lawful excuse’ of the crop, and more bizarrely with theft of it as well! Twenty-seven of us were freed on bail, but orders had come up from London that an example is to be made of Melchett and he is marched off to Norwich jail. Next morning he too is freed, but not before he receives a cake with a file in it, courtesy of the GM-free Iceland supermarket chain.

The Lyng 28 wedding photo

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and our story now moves forward to April of the following year and to the city of Norwich, where the Medieval Anchoress Mother Julian had created a bit of a stir by suggesting God was both male and female. Perhaps the issues today aren’t quite as profound, but the swarm of journalists suggests that the world is certainly taking note of the case.

In the Crown Court the twenty-eight defendants spill out of the dock and into the public gallery. The jovial Judge David Mellor opens the proceedings and the prosecuting barrister, the appropriately named Mr Farmer, tries to make his case.

He claims we are merely publicity seekers who have destroyed a vital scientific experiment, but unfortunately his witnesses keep letting him down. First Judith Jordan, representing AgrEvo (now renamed Aventis) admits that no studies had been done on the escape of GM pollen, then William Brigham admits that his crop was indeed imminently about to pollinate and that the nearest non-GM crop was only 400m away. Finally Sergeant Chipalfield, chief arresting officer, says that we were polite and determined and apparently not after publicity.

Next day Owen Davies Q.C. starts the defence case. “This isn’t a question of who did what but why they did it. AgrEvo has not sought damages; instead these people are on trial as common criminals.” A ‘lawful excuse’ for Criminal Damage is to prevent damage to other property, as in the case of a fireman who breaks down the door of a burning building. In relation to the charge of Theft he asks, “Did they want the crop to put in their sandwiches or freezers?”

First in to bat for Greenpeace is Peter Melchett. He talks about his fears of the escape of GM crops, which the Government’s own research has said, is inevitable. Greenpeace, he says, has no problems with medical use of GM or laboratory experiments. Instead of field trials of herbicide-resistant GM crops, the government should be investing in chemical free Organic agriculture. He is aggressively cross-examined by Mr Farmer, but manages to keep a straight bat.

Rev Carroll

Next it is the Reverend Malcolm Carol’s turn. A Baptist Minister, Malcolm travelled down to Lyng from Yorkshire with myself. Having only been told at the last moment of the plan he had come equipped for anything, and had even brought his flippers with him in case we were going to sea! (Described in court as ‘clothes for when it is wet’). His subsequent campaigning has seen GM crops banned from all Church of England land.

One by one the other defendants gave their evidence. About half work for Greenpeace in some capacity or other, including Paul Belotti, a grandfather and the Caretaker at Canonbury Villas. The rest are volunteers from around the country and include a Beauty Therapist and a volunteer for the Woodcraft Folk. None had ever been accused of dishonesty before, with the exception of local Oxfam campaigner Michael Unwins, shamefully convicted of stealing a cabbage in the early nineteen sixties.

Other witnesses are also called including Dr Mark Avery of the RSPB. Dr Avery sat on the committee set up to oversee the Government’s GM field trials. He tells the court that this committee first met to plan the trials in October 1999 – after the Lyng crop had been planted. This rather undermined the charge of disrupting vital scientific work.

Greenpeace had prepared a dossier of scientific opinion on the dangers of GM technology, later published in a book. In the event this never came before the jury and the job of explaining what our concerns were fell to one of the defendants, Chris Holden, a recent graduate of Cardiff University. Alone of all the people involved with the trial; Chris had actually done some genetic engineering and could explain what it was. The term ‘engineering’ he explained, was misleading. Genetic Modification proceeded by trial and error and the results were always unpredictable.

Eventually it was my turn at the crease. I explained how as part of the Greenpeace local groups network I had led tours round supermarkets pointing out GM products to shoppers. Two days after a tour round my local Marks and Spencers the entire chain had gone GM free! Under cross-examination Mr Farmer tries to bowl me a few googlies, but I manage to fend them off.

From the Greenpeace website

Martin told the jury that "science advances in various ways and that in terms of the methodology of a scientific experiment, you need to know your methodology before you start the experiment - the Committee that was going to decide how they were going to run the field-scale experiments didn't meet until July 1999 and didn't publish their guidelines until late 1999." Martin said of the GM trial at Lyng, which had been planted in spring 1999, "I don't think it had scientific value or monetary value - perhaps it had some political value."
He told the jury that the GM maize at Lyng couldn't be sold, swapped or exchanged for anything else, and was scientifically non-viable, adding, "unless the farmer grows ornamental maize, I can't see what value it had."

Eventually, at the end of two and a half weeks of evidence Judge Mellor sums up, describing the Greenpeace team as having the mindset of “an elite military unit”. The experience had certainly been a testing one for the group. Sitting silently in court whilst the prosecution attacked us one by one was probably more nerve racking than the action itself. Some relief was provided by an evening spent on Peter Melchett’s Organic farm meeting his herd of Red Pole cattle (causing two to give birth), which reminded us that it was the green fields of England that we were fighting for.

Eventually the jury retires and for two anxious days we waited for the verdict, leaving the court only to take lunch under the Green Men of the Norwich Cathedral cloisters. Eventually the jury return, having dismissed the Theft charge but unable to agree about the Criminal Damage. Rather downcast we return to our homes to await the retrial.

Meanwhile, back in the real world there had been significant events. On 12th April, in the middle of our trial, the boss of Aventis had received a letter from rival company Advanta. There was worrying news from Canada. Kept secret until our trial was over the story broke on 17th May, the same day Prince Charles spoke of wanting a more spiritual view of Nature.

A batch of oil seed rape from Canada had been contaminated with GM seed, possibly from a nearby field. The contaminated seed had then been sown across thousands of acres of the British countryside. Initially the government said nothing needed to be done, but when Greenpeace threatened legal action the order went out for the contaminated crops to be destroyed.

Front page of every broadsheet

The central plank of our defence was that if GM crops were grown in the open, the pollen would escape: on the wind, on the backs of bees and deer and on farm machinery. If GM pollen reached a conventional crop that field would become partly GM. If cross-contaminated crops have to be destroyed then they have clearly been damaged. And, as long as the danger is immediate and the means reasonable, causing damage to prevent greater damage counts as ‘lawful excuse’ in law.

So in September we returned to court for the second innings, and ran through all of the evidence again. But this time the jury was unanimous. We were innocent.



*************************************************************************************

Well, it will soon be ten years since that happened. Bizarrely the BBC is still showing the clip of me being nicked whenever it covers a story on Greenpeace activists getting acquitted. Even my mum is sick of seeing it.


As a campaigner you can choose the battles you fight, but not the ones you win. In the last decade Greenpeace has won other victories, but we've yet to save the Amazon rainforest, switch the country to renewable energy or cap carbon dioxide emission. But we did stop GM crops in this country.

In the last decade GM food has slipped off the radar a bit. The verdict so far appears to be that whilst it may not be as dangerous as was feared, it isn't as useful as was hoped. However I'm still proud of what I did. We certainly didn't win the battle against GM food single handed - that fight was won before Melchett and co even entered that field. However we kicked the GM industry so hard whilst it was down that it still hasn't got up. And whilst GM crops are stalled in the starting blocks organic agriculture has had a decade to prove itself.

Maybe the jury is out on that too, but I know which way want farming to go.

The Real Secret Rulers of the World

(This was written for Pentacle magazine in February 2008. I put it here to show that I did see the credit crunch coming. Sort of.)

It may have been the Sun what won it, but was it Pentacle what postponed it?

Well maybe not, but last Samhain I wrote an article in this very journal laying into the timid and toothless environmental policies of our two main political parties and then, lo and behold, they decide not to hold a general election after all.

The Conservative Party had just published Zac Goldsmith’s eagerly awaited green policy document. It was a libertarian view of a sustainable economy where the government taxes all that’s bad and doesn’t do a lot else. Cynics like me who remember the bad old days of the ‘biggest road building program since the Romans’ and other great Tory policies of the past were left briefly stunned. The Tories going green? Whatever next?

Well, we had news that the US commander in Baghdad had asked for urgent reinforcements of solar panels and wind turbines. It eventually turned out that the US Army was more concerned about the rate that insurgents were blowing up its oil tankers than its carbon footprint, but for a while we were prepared to believe anything.

However as soon as the ink had dried on Zac’s report we had the phoney election and the Tories had to quickly get themselves some real polices. Zac had evidently been hoping some of his green taxes would make it onto the manifesto to balance out the promised cuts in inheritance tax (not something that he’d ever had to worry about himself as his billionaire dad had selflessly spent the last few hours of his life on a plane to Mexico to ensure Zac never had to pay any) Unfortunately for Zac, political reality scuppered that. Asked if he would go for the idea of taxing the parking spaces of out-of-town shopping centres to encourage people back into town centres, Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne replied “Do you think I’m off my rocker?” Perhaps not a question a politician should ask, but it signalled the end for most of Zac’s green taxes.

The government meanwhile weren’t doing much better. Whilst many people distinctly remembered Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, whilst he was with Overseas Development, producing a report supporting Contraction and Convergence (the idea that all nations will gradually reduce their emissions until they all produce the same amount of CO2 per person) but trying to get hold of one has proved to be a bit like trying to lay hands on the Holy Grail. Officially the report doesn’t exist and is just a mass hallucination.

So it was just as well really there wasn’t an election as it would have been a bit tricky trying to work out who to vote for. I’d have either have to have spoilt my paper or voted Liberal Democrat - if there’s a difference. So why are our politicians so useless? The question must be asked, and for my money the answer is it’s a conspiracy.

Now since the internet came along most conspiracies have met their Waterloo. The army of people who shot Kennedy? All named and shamed on the world wide web. The fleet of white Fiat Unos that did for Lady Di? You can get their registration numbers on Wikipedia. The b*stards who seed the clouds so we all get drenched every Beltane? Well, I’m sure well find them soon. Illuminati, Shape Shifting Reptiles, the Gnomes of Zurich; all outed and exposed, which is certain death for a good conspiracy theory.

But here’s one you probably haven’t heard of: the Mont Pelerin Society. Not a great name, I’ll grant you, especially when you discover that Mont Pelerin is a resort in Switzerland. However we can blame the Mont Pelerin’s for the demise of Zac’s green taxes, the government’s woeful failure to regulate climate destroying air travel, the chaos in Iraq and even the fate of the Northern Rock building society.

The Mont Pelerin Society has just celebrated its 61st birthday. Things weren’t exactly great in 1947, even in Switzerland, but with fascism defeated and a huge US aid package getting the war ravaged economies of Europe back on their feet you’d think they’d have reason to be a tad optimistic. However for the Mont Pelerins the world was going to hell in a handcart rapidly.
The Mont Pelerin’s beef was with Keynes, not the concrete cows of Milton, but the theories of the economist John Maynard Keynes. An old fashioned liberal, he believed the free market was a powerful, but dangerous beast, and only by government intervention, strict regulation, high taxes in times of economic boom and lots of government spending when it went bust, could prosperity be maintained. All those taxes also meant plenty of money for schools and hospitals, but that was really just a side-effect to the economics.

Keynesian economics had rescued the world from the Great Depression and provided the industrial muscle to defeat Hitler, and they were about to raise the economies of Germany and Japan from the dead, which isn’t a bad track record really. However all those taxes didn’t go down too well with a certain well heeled faction of society or with those economists who believe that big business knows best.

So the Mont Pelerins set about changing the world. Their mantra was freedom. Specifically they meant the freedom of corporations to do whatever they wanted, but in their campaign to get their message out they used the broadest definition of freedom they could get away with. Their work, which they thought would take a generation, was to subvert the name of freedom to suit their definition.

By any standards they were spectacularly successful. In the sixties freedom meant sex, drugs and public nudity, by the end of the next decade it meant privatisation, tax cuts and unlimited consumption. Keynes was quietly shuffled off to the old economists home. The neoliberals were in charge. The Mont Pelerins hold that all taxes are bad - sorry Zac, that government regulation is worse - RIP Contraction and Convergence and that corporations can do what they want - even if they happen to be a major building society whose reckless investments would threaten the whole UK banking sector.

Now a conspiracy isn’t a real conspiracy unless someone dies horribly, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that neoliberalism leaves more than its fair share of bodies in its wake. The first experiment in running a neoliberal state was in Chile in 1973, when General Pinochet, having overthrown a democratically elected government and then tortured and murdered a few thousand of his fellow citizens, invited in the President of the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, and his Chicago chums to advise on free-market reforms.

Chile provided the model for a whole series of economic ‘rationalisations’, the most dramatic and purest of which was what happened in Iraq after the US and British occupation. The entire government, army and police force was dismantled overnight and the whole country thrown open to the multinationals. To deal with the subsequent unrest the world’s largest army of mercenaries was then flown in. The results we see on TV today.

The effects of our own dose of neoliberalism is somewhat milder, but never-the-less we can still see its effects. The gap between rich and poor, which was actually falling in the 1970s, has increased exponentially, and whilst neoliberals don’t like governments spending money on things like the environment, they don’t mind your taxes being used to bail out failing building societies like Northern Rock. After all, the alternative would have been for a lot of rich people to loose a lot of money. (Small investors were already largely protected by a government scheme.) Indeed the reluctance to actually nationalise the failed Rock, even after several billion pounds worth of tax payers’ money had been bunged their way, was illuminating. It was as if having paid for the goods the government was reluctant to actually take them out of the shop.

Indeed Northern Rock is illustrative in another way. Its disgraced, but still extremely rich, chairman Matt Ridley had a column in the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s where, in addition to calling for less regulation of the banking sector, he used to be a prominent Climate Change denier. He certainly wasn’t the only one, and environment policy certainly wasn’t the only area where governments preferred the advice of big business to that of their electorate, or even common sense. Across the pond, for example, Bush has consistently refused to reveal the names of the advisors who put together his energy policy, almost certainly because one of the them was the disgraced former head of Enron, whilst over here when Labour wanted to look at how to reform social services they asked Derek Wanless, one of the board of Northern Rock who had failed to foresee its doom.

The problem, of course, is what we do about it. If neoliberalism was just an economic theory the path would be clear. The old joke is that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion, but even the most die hard disciple of Friedman et al would have to admit that the series of economic collapses that have ricocheted around the world over the last quarter of a century indicate that all is not perfect in the world of neoliberalism. However if it really is a conspiracy then something more direct would be needed.

It’s ten years now since the ‘Battle of Seattle’ - the start of global anti-capitalist demonstrations that have continued ever since. Rioting has its limitations as viable strategy for building change though, and as people frequently point out, the anti-capitalists know what they’re against, but seem a bit hazy as to what they’re actually for. A more serious problem though is that so successful has the Mont Pelerin Society’s campaign been to redefine freedom as an absence of government interference that your average Starbucks-smashing masked anti-capitalist is just as likely to hold these views as his braces wearing yuppie nemesis. A more viable solution appears to be needed.

Now asking people to love government isn’t going to go down too well I know, especially amongst such an anarchic lot as pagans, but really there isn’t a lot of choice. But more government doesn’t just have to mean big government. Local democracy is surely the way forward, and also the way to challenge the perverse freedom of the Mont Pelerins. The way this can happen may be about to be shown in London.

Now whether a city of eight million people can ever be called ‘local’ is a moot point, but unlike most of us Londoners are able to directly elect their leader. By the time you read this we should know which Have I Got News For You contestant has managed to become Mayor. For a chap who cycles everywhere Boris Johnson is remarkably unpopular with environmentalists, whilst his opponent, despite trying to cover the city with tower blocks, has made a lot of green friends by introducing the Congestion Charge. This is the sort of government meddling that makes neoliberals see red so it’s not too much of a surprise that it has become a political hot potato.

At first sight this would appear to be a simple matter of letting the voters decide, but one company has other ideas. Sad to say the company is Porsche. In the Fifties that first icon of cool, James Dean, drove one. In the Sixties Steve McQueen raced through the night at Le Mans in one whilst in the Seventies legions of Gaulois smoking French rally drivers slithered over icy mountain passes in theirs. However when neoliberalism arrived in the City in the eighties and the stock brokers swapped their bowler hats for braces, Porsches became a yuppie fashion accessory and it was all downhill for the company. Your average Porsche these days isn’t even a sports car, but a truck sized monstrosity called a Cayenne.

Ken Livingston has pledged to make these gas guzzlers pay £25 every time they visit the City. If the people of London don’t like that they can always vote for Boris, but for Porsche this wasn’t enough and so they’ve launched a legal challenge. Democracy and big business once more seem to be at odds and if the Mont Pelerins had their way the Germans would be the ones who win.
But despite all this I refuse to be the peddler of doom and gloom. If you are concerned about the state of the world but worry that giving up money may not be practical or desirable then Keynesian economics offer a solution. If you worry that the multinational corporations can’t be stopped then worry no more. They fear government regulation because it works.

There are also hopeful signs that the world of economic theory is moving in this direction too. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development is a forum where global economics are discussed and where those who disagree with the neoliberal consensus can be knocked back into line. In the mid nineties it drew up a plan, known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, to let the multinationals conquer the world. This nefarious scheme which had the fingerprints of the Mont Pelerin Society all over it, but swift action by campaigners exposed the secret plot and in the aftermath of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ European governments bottled out.

Now, a decade later, the OECD appears to have changed its spots. Looking ahead to the state of the world in 2030 it identifies the main threat to the world’s economy not as protectionist governments, and certainly not masked anarchists, but, wait for it, environmental degradation. Perhaps even more surprisingly it, actually believes that governments should do something about the problem before it’s too late. I’ll repeat that again so that the gravity of this statement sinks in: governments should do something about it. The details are a bit vague and this isn’t exactly the same as saying old Keynes should be disinterred, but it is a seismic change.

Finally, in case anyone still thinks that economic theory is not only dull but useless, I’ll end by quoting the man himself: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood……..Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

For too long those scribblers have belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, but perhaps the madmen will in future hear a different voice.