Review of the Year 2025

January

The start of my first year of being a Unison branch secretary, and I'm at a protest against the privatisation of a much loved care home. In 2024 we'd forced Derbyshire County Council to change it's plans to close ten Day Centres and privatise eight Care Homes, but the sting in the tail were plans to sell of Ada Belfield home in Belper.

 
Belper Together had run a good campaign to reverse the decision and organised a Save Ada Belfield rally that attracted press and TV coverage. I took a few photos, including the one on the left, which ended up as the main press photo of the campaign for the rest of the year.

February

I'm down in London for the first direct action of the year. Greenpeace chose a cold but clear morning for their Breaking Point action at Shell headquarters. It was a jointly planned action with Greenpeace Philippines, and we prepared with a delicious vegan Filipino meal in Canonbury Villa, where a delegation from the country told us how their food culture was influenced by both the Spanish colonial occupation and the US military bases.

The next morning we surrounded Shell headquarters and blocked the doors with water filled glass display cases holding domestic items damaged in storms. Then we smashed the glass. My team was round the back. We didn't get in any photos, but we properly blocked the doors. The police don't make any arrests. 

A couple of weeks later I'm in Leicester for the Unison Branch of the Year awards. It's great to be back in the city I took my degree in, and the event is a lot of booze filled fun. Even better, the branch wins an award! We get Campaign of the Year for saving five Day Centres for older people last year. It's great that I was able to use my Greenpeace skills to do it, and even better that Unison recognised this. My team are over the moon. 

I get to explore a bit of the city before I head home, and a veggie curry house that does the world's most amazing aubergines. 

March

Having celebrated ten years since exploration for shale gas ended on Barton Moss, it was the turn of Frack Free Lancashire to celebrate this year.

We had a reunion at the gates of the Cuadrilla Preston New Road site outside of Blackpool, where it really is all over. Cuadrilla need to be gone by the end of the year. 

It was great to meet the old gang again and celebrate a real vistory over the fossil fuel industry. A minor win in the grand scheme of things, but a win never-the-less. For some people it was the making of them, and for others the best thing they'd done in their lives. A victory worth celebrating.

April

I'm back in London again for another Greenpeace action. The Global Oceans Treaty is one of the most important environental treaties ever negotiated. Despited having helped draft it, the UK had still not ratified it. 

To jolly them along, Greenpeace had a message for Foreign Secretary David Lammy. The plan was to hang a banner saying "Lammy Don't Dally" on the arch linking the Foreign Office to the Treasury. It was one of the most heavily policed parts of the UK, so the plan was particularly cunning. 

My minor role was to drive the climb team to their jump off point and then retire to a safe distance, so I missed the real fun. In the end it all went like clockwork. The cover story was so effective the Actions Coordinator had to confess to security that they weren't really doing a survey of the stonework. The action was noted by the government. 

I also managed a free gig at the Manchester Arena, courtesy of Jacob Collier. Greenpeace had him perform on an iceberg, and in return he let local groups have stalls at his concerts. We managed to get a few people signed up to our global oceans campaign, but the man and his audience seemed strangely mismatched. 

May

I'm not particularly religious but I do have my gods, and one of them had a statue unveiled in Burslem in May. Lemmy may have moved out when he was ten, and never showed any sign of wanting to return, but most of Stoke appeared to have turned out to watch the unveiling. 

It's a great statue, and the lyrics to his original Hawkwind song Motorhead serve as an inscription. Some of his ashes arrived with a motorcycle escort to be interred in the base, and Motörhead guitarist Phil Taylor was there, as was one of the Rocking Vicars, Lemmy's first band. I also bumped into Lemmy's first girlfriend, who's a local green campaigner. 

Anyway, back to the activism, and the government still hadn't committed to signing the Global Oceans Treaty, so the Manchester Greenpeace Group took up the cause. Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell was Leader of the House of Commons, and so responsible for allocating Commons time for bills to be debated, so we went after and 'Lammy Don't Dally' became 'Lucy No Excusy'.  

First of all, the Secret Squirrel team went around in the dead of night putting up fly posters around the
city centre, some of which are still there. 

Then, after a few weeks, we started running street stalls in Lucy's constituency, which is now mostly trendy bars and cafes around marinas and canal basins. Her constituents seemed to be clued up people and they were soon sending her emails asking when the government will ratify the treaty. 

The pressure worked, and it was from one of the people who sent an email that we found out the government had committed to ratifying the treaty 'by the end of the year'. They didn't manage that, but the bill to do so is most of the way through parliament, and the UK will join the treaty early next year. Sometimes we win!

May was also the month in which I join up with Extinction Rebellion for the annual protest at the British Insurers Brokers Association meeting in Manchester. Working with XR is always fun, and they pushed the boat out this year - literally - with a life sized 'sinking Lamborghini' that belched smoke and played music. Sadly, there are no heroes in the insurance industry, and everyone is involved in fossil fuels in one way or another. 

My job was again to coordinate the press, with some success. A few insurance companies have now made a commitment to not cover new fossil fuel projects including Chubb, a company we'd been targeting for a year or more. 

June

Greenpeace took us all its local group activists out to rural Staffordshire for a team building weekend. It was a lovely weekend of talks, workshops, excellent vegan food and Scottish country dancing in the magnificent Ingestre Hall, which is over by the local council and cheap to rent if you clean up after yourselves. 

Our 'Lucy No Excusy' campaign was hailed as a success, and we learnt about the plans for the next year.

June was certainly conference season, and I was in Liverpool for the Unison local government conference. We debated how to deal with the rise of Reform UK and I ended up being the last speaker of the conference, although I only got 30 seconds as we needed to proceed to the vote. 

I was able to stay with my parents and visit some of my old haunts in Southport. 

June was also the month of Glastonbury. Once again, I had a free ticket courtesy of Greenpeace. Whilst hanging around backstage I found myself speak to one Mr Billy Bragg. We discussed a George Orwell book we both liked, and he name dropped that he obtained his copy from 'Weller'. Other celebrities I almost bumped in to were Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott, Simon Pegg, Bella Ramsey and Idris Elba. 

Festival highlights included the Kaiser Chiefs, Peter Capaldi guesting with Franz Ferdinand, Terrorvision, seeing an amazing set by The Prodigy, being a roadie for Elvana, having a distant view of Kneecap (whilst working) and being in the mosh pit for Lambrini Girls, which led to a minor injury. 

July

The heat wave continued throughout July, except for the weekend of Chesterfield Pride, where our Unison stall was flooded. The good weather was great for camping, but it was not good for our reservoirs, some of which now had sheep grazing in them. To show people what a climate crisis looks like, Stuart took his drone to the Woodhead Reservoir and we did some filming for the Greenpeace group. 

This year it was forty years since the French government bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. The tragedy was remembered in a variety of ways, including an excellent series called Murder in the Pacific by the BBC, which is essential watching. In Manchester we showed a different film, Edward McGurn's 2023 documentary Rainbow Warrior, at an event for Greenpeace donors. It was a reminder of why we do this. 

August

In August I was a guest of the Lewes Greenpeace Group, as they were celebrating the time when their small town had been home to the global headquarters of Greenpeace. They had an exhibition, mostly consisting of the memorabilia of John Pay, the former head of Greenpeace International books.

How Greenpeace ended up in Lewes is a strange story, but only one of several strange stories in the history of Greenpeace, my version of which I was able to tell as part of the week's celebration. You can watch it here.  

I also discovered Lewes is a very small town. 

Meanwhile, it has been a year of Far Right thugs shouting at hotels, and in August they arrived in
Manchester. On some protests we outnumbered them, and in others they outnumbered us and it got a little hairy. 

It wasn't on the scale of last summer's riots, but whereas in 2024 the tabloid press was mostly on our side, this year it was very clearly stoking the flames. The actual asylum seekers very sensibly stayed away, but the volunteers we met who worked with them said they were the 'loveliest people you could meet', which is nobody said about the fascists. It was a dangerous business, although I avoided serious injury. 

September

As I now have adult children (allegedly) my wife and I were finally able to have a holiday outside of peak season. We went off to Orkney and spent the best part of a week looking at historical sites from the Neolithic to the Second World War. 

It was a wonderful week looking at stone circles, climbing inside passage tombs, trying to decipher Viking graffiti, looking at bits of First World War battleships and drinking beer and whiskey. The weather was mostly pleasant, and the one stormy day caused our ferry back to Scotland to be cancelled thus extending our holiday. 

Holiday over, I was back in Liverpool again, this time with Greenpeace. The Labour party conference was on and Greenpeace had a new campaign telling people that it was fossil fuels, not renewables, that was pushing up their electricity prices. We launched a postering campaign to start things off. Policing of the conference area was pretty tight, but we managed to get a few up before we caught the attention of the Merseyside plod.

Other teams put up signs in bus shelters and we made our mark. A lot of Scousers showed their support and we were noticed in the conference. 

October

We continues the Great Gas Rip Off campaign with street stalls. 

Sadly, in October we said goodbye to the Manchester Greenpeace Group's veteran member Ian Brown. A very private man, his family were able to reconstruct his life for his funeral. As well as supporting Greenpeace, and the anti-fracking campaign, he was a huge jazz fan and many Manchester bands had their performances recorded and archived by him. He also edited the Manchester Wildlife Trust's magazine, and his archive of old copies is now in Manchester Central Library. He will be missed. 

November

I became Branch Secretary of Unison Derbyshire at the end of 2024, and spent most of the year rebuilding the branch. This didn't leave much time for campaigning, but towards the end of 2025 a campaign more or less fell into out lap. The Derbyshire County Council teams that assess Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) had been failing for some time due to understaffing. A disastrous OFSTED report did little to help the situation, nor did our attempt to organise the staff, who were leaving the department as fast as we could enlist them. The only comment from new Reform UK council leader Alan Graves was that the problem was one of 'overdiagnosis'. 

However, towards the end of the year two things happened. Firstly, DCC appointed a no-nonsense external head of SEND who told them that they had no alternative but to significantly increase staffing. Then a group called SEND Sanctuary UK organised a national series of protests involving leaving empty shoes outside town halls. 

In Derbyshire, this brought a lot of parents of SEND children together. Unison Derbyshire joined them for the protest, then teamed up with sympathetic councillors to form a pressure group to get the council to provide the resources the SEND teams needed. 

Meanwhile, it was that time of the year again when world leaders try to solve the climate crisis. The USA didn't even bother this time, but some of the others did. 

As usual, Extinction Rebellion organised a rally in Manchester to encourage them, and my union provided the PA. This one proved a little different from previous XR events, as the Far Right turned up. The police did little whilst fascists thugs intimidated families with children except stop us dealing with the problem. We managed to complete the rally with no serious problems, but two women wearing kaffiyehs were later assaulted as they left the rally. As far as I'm aware the police have made no arrests despite the incident being filmed by the perpetrators.

December

Our SEND campaign meanwhile was almost immediately successful. We didn't need to organise a second County Hall protest as DCC voted to give SEND almost all the team had asked for. It was a significant, if easy, victory and became the subject of my first self-penned article in the Morning Star. 

We didn't have much time to celebrate though as DCC then announced they were closing eight care homes, leaving fifty residents to find new homes and two hundred staff at risk of losing their jobs. 

I tried to rally as much opposition as possible and Linsey Farnsworth MP asked a question to Keir Starmer at Prime Ministers Question Time. I was able to brief her personally as I was already in Westminster for a different event. She was also able to get me into Portculis House and though the tunnel that leads to Westminster Hall. 

The event that led to me being in London was a mass lobby of parliament by Unison migrant care workers. The care sector relies on migrant workers, but the current visa scheme means that if a carer falls out with their sponsor they only have a sort period of time to find another before they are deported. This gives bad employer the power to exploit their staff. With over 100,000 vacancies in the care sector Unison wants sector wide visas to allow staff to leave abusive bosses.

The press the point Uniosn managed to get about 700 migrant care workers to London. Many were able to get into parliament and speak to their MP personally, including some of my members. It was a great day that hopefully will do some good. Sadly, the current government seems to be prepared to risk the collapse of the care industry, and the NHS, to appease the Far Right. 

So, a lot of activity, some success, but a lot still to do. Oh well. Roll on 2026.