The Last Road Protest In Britain?

Overhead fly planes from the two runways at Manchester Airport, producing seven and half thousand tons of carbon dioxide a day.

At one end the three lane motorway that is the M67 ends in the two street village in which L S Lowry was born, the resulting traffic jams made worse by the construction of a loss making Tesco superstore.

At the other end is Britain's oldest National Park, across which lorries crawl 365 days a year.

In between lie the three Woodhead tunnels. Two about to be allowed to become derelict whilst the third, one of the newest railway tunnels in Britain, has not seen a passenger train pass through in more than half its life.

Welcome to the Integrated Transport disaster that is Longdendale.

Situated between Manchester and Sheffield, Longendale has a reputation as the 'Haunted Valley' with UFO hunters often camping out in search of the Longendale Lights. Cynics would say these are just aircraft coming in to land at Manchester Airport, but I do know someone who had an encounter with a 'ghost car' near the Devil's Elbow.

However there is nothing mysterious about the traffic congestion in the valley. Every day lorries rumble through the villages of Mottram, Tintwistle and Hollingworth a few feet from people's houses and a few inches from pedestrians.

A bypass was proposed, first in the seventies and then again in the noughties when it was killed off by campaigners and the Peak Park Authority, although this didn't stop the promised Tescos being built alongside the non-existant bypass.

But, like all the best villains, the road has risen from the grave. Not a bypass this time, but a possible Peak Park Motorway. 

Meetings are taking place across the Northwest of England to discuss a possible new road through Longdendale and that the public are not invited to participate. Department of Transport consultations on the a Route Based Strategy will be held in Warrington on 29/09/2013, Preston on 26/09/2013, Liverpool on 1/10/2013 and Manchester on 4/10/2013. ‘Local stakeholders’, as groups like GTi  are known, are not invited.

Meanwhile, as mentioned below, the Department for Transport appears minded to let the old Woodhead railway tunnels fall into disrepair, possibly preventing the newest tunnel ever being used again for trains. It seems not even Arriva, who had previously bid to reopen the line as part of the Trans-Pennine rail franchise, were consulted.

What is striking about the DfT's letter asking for opinions on the future of the tunnels is that there is no mention of the traffic congestion in Longdendale. As far as the DfT is concerned, cars are from Venus and trains are from Mars. They are apples and cabbages, and can never be considered together in a strategy. Only more roads can end road congestion and only more railways can end train congestion. That the two are in any way related seems to be beyond their ken.

No doubt the Route Based Strategies will suggest a Peak Park Motorway. No doubt the new planning laws will see the Public Inquiry take place somewhere a long way from Longdendale. No doubt it will be a whitewash.

But equally, no doubt the campaigners will be back, lying in front of the bulldozers if necessary. 

We probably reached Peak Conventional Oil in 2007 and possibly Peak Car in the same year. Climate Change, as the IPCC reminded us today, is the big problem for twentifirst century.We do not need a Peak Motorway.

At some point sanity will kick in and we wills top building new roads. There will, one day, be the last road protest in Britain, and maybe this will be it.

So who's in then. The Last Road Protest In Britain?

Watch this space.

Privatised War: Greek Style

copywrite Karl Kopinski

So Greece took the blue pill, accepted the bailout and has embarked on a wholesale privatisation of its state sector. Ah well, such is the way of the world now.

Not that everything's going to be sold. The military, for instance, will still control its own tanks. For anyone who remembers 1967 this might be a bit ominous.

War is certainly privatised these days in other ways. The second largest contingent in the Iraq War, after the US Army, was the foreign mercenaries, but at least they came a long way second behind the state funded Grunts. 

Surely nobody would be daft enough to let the sell off the whole of their armed forces?

Well, yes. The ancient Greeks did.

What's a Greek Earn?

The Greek hoplite was the Main Battle Tank of the Classical Era. Heavily armed infantry in armour with big shields, their drill and discipline made them invincible in a frontal attack on level ground. Unlike the pouting hunks of the film 300, they fought with the spear rather than the sword and were probably a bit chubby, as a fat cushion helps with wounds.

The hoplite had to buy his own armour and equipment, but was then paid for the time he served defending his city. They were given a food allowance and wage on top of this. By the fourth century BCE this worked out at about 130 grams of silver a month, which in modern money would be about fifty quid. It was worth a bit more than that then, but a glut of trained soldiers after the Peloponnesian war meant mercenary pay was no more than that of a typical skilled worker.

This made the hoplites solidly Middle Class. The aristocratic cavalry of the Upper Class had trembled before its spear points whilst the humble slinger and javelin men of the Working Class had had to accept supporting roles and a third of the salary. Only in Athens, where the plebeian oarsmen of the navy held the balance of power, was the Middle Class hoplite not supreme.

The fought off the Persians, then they fought each other.

Finally, with not a lot else to do, they fought

for the highest bidder. By fourth century BCE there were probably fifty thousand mercenary hoplites knocking about. For comparison Athens, past its prime but still the leading city state, could just about muster ten thousand citizen hoplites and Sparta, the top land power, no more six thousand spearmen, although they these were hard as nails.

There was even a place you went to to buy mercenaries all to sell your services. This was Cape Matapan, at the bottom of the Peloponnese. A nearby cave was reputed to be the entrance to Hades. There, presumably, men in togas and red braces bought and sold hoplite futures which, if you were unlucky, could be a trip down the cave.

If you had the money you could head south and raise an army that would make the greatest cities in Greece quail. The Persians had the dosh, but they seemed to have given up on the quarrelsome Greeks and preferred to spend their time freeing their slaves, developing the Arts and the postal service and spreading peace and good government across the Known World. For some reason history has written them as the Bad Guys in this story.

copywrite roman-empire.net

An example of the sort of military might money could buy occurred in 401BCE. A force of 10,400 mercenary Greeks was employed by the Persian usurper Cyrus the Younger. His private army did the job and soundly thrashed his brother's royal troops, but unfortunately Cyrus lost his head during the battle. Literally.

The Ten Thousand then found themselves unemployed and a long way from home. The Persians managed to separate the officers from the men and then bump them off, but the democratic Greeks just elected some more. They then spent the next two years fighting their way home again.

The story has been read by generations of British Public School boys as a tale of daring-do under difficult circumstances. What has not been recorded is the Persian's opinion of what was effectively a rogue armoured division pillaging its territory for a couple of years, upsetting the freed slaves and no doubt messing up the postal service.

So with so much fighting power available for those able to pay, where could the cash come from? The city states could only just afford to pay their own citizen soldiers. In Athens at this time economic reform had made the rich richer but everyone else poorer. (Plus ça change, but lets move on.)

Phocians Rock

Where there was money was though was at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here an elderly peasant

woman sat on tripod breathing in hallucinogenic gases. Her ranting were then turned into cryptic advice by the resident priests to be given out to anyone who paid enough tribute. Allegedly the priests were also open to a little persuasion from other interested sources if they could match said tribute. The priests were therefore sitting on a pretty packet.

Unfortunately for them Delphi was located in Phocis, a rural backwater of a place that was in 356BCE being threatened by neighbouring Thebes with dire consequences if it didn't make amends for numerous alleged religious offences. Delphi was one of the holiest sites in Greece, but, alas, temptation got the better of the Phocians and they nicked Apollo's gold and went shopping at Cape Matapan.

Using money looted from the gods caused some problems. The Phocian had to pay their men time-and-a-half and ended up with "the worst naves, and those who despised the gods". However they assembled 20,000 of these desperados and soon started kicking ass.

Epaminondas

Thebes had one of the most formidable armies in Greece at this time thanks to the reforms of a rather dislikable character called Epaminondas. The elite of the army was apparently made up of 150 gay couples. They did wear skirts, but whether or not they liked quiche is not recorded. When they eventually died to the last defending Thebes from Alexander the Great's dad, the victorious and somewhat homophobic Macedonian was both impressed and a little grossed out. He ordered the official scribes not to record any allegations of "unseemly" acts by the dead soldiers. As Epaminondas didn't marry or have children you wonder how common such "unseemly" behaviour was in Thebes.

Epaminondas had been dead for six years in 356BCE and so it was someone else who had to take field against Phocis. As the city could only muster 12,000 citizen hoplites of its own they were hard pressed from the start, and it soon got worse as Sparta and Athens soon decided that they disliked the warlike, arts-hating Thebans more than they hated each other and threw in their lot with the temple robbers.

A very messy war then engulfed the region for a decade before the money ran out and the Macedonians stepped in. It was estimated that Phocis had got through 10,000 talents of silver in the course of the war. A talent is 26 kilograms so that's a mountain of silver. To put this into some sort of perspective Athens was taking in no more than 400 talents a year in taxes. The Phocians were made to pay the money back, but being piss poor to start with and devastated by war they were eventually saddled with a thousand years of debt (once again, lets just move on...).

It had all been spectacularly pointless, but that wasn't the end of the Greek Mercenary by any means.

When Philip's son, Alexander the Great, invaded the Persian Empire in 334BCE he found the Persians had bolstered their own cavalry with no less that 48,000 hoplite mercenaries. That meant that Darius actually had seven times as many true Greeks fighting on his side as Alexander did, even though he was supposedly leading a Pan-Hellenic army out to get their own back for the Persian Wars. It seems the Greeks preferred regular pay (and post) to revenge.

They've Got A Lot Of Gaul(s)

All this should have been a dire warning on the perils of privatising war, but it gets worse.

In the northwestern Greece is the city of Phoeniki in Epirus, whose most famous General was Pyrros of the infamous victories. Shortly after he died in a siege, knocked out by a woman armed with roofing slate after an elephant got stuck in a doorway, the citizens decided to save themselves the bother of guarding their own city walls by recruiting a gang of wandering Gauls to do the job instead. It seems they didn't ask for any references.

These Gauls had been serving with Carthage in the Punic Wars but they had pillaged a city they were supposed to be guarding, tried to betray another, gone over to the Romans and sacking a Roman temple before being expelled from Italy.

True to form, their love of money won out over their dedication to the job. A fleet of Ilyrian pirates sailed past and the Gauls discovered they could make more money for less work by selling the citizens into slavery.

From the Black Death to Blackwater.

And that really should have been that for the mercenary army.

copywrite Graham Turner

But after the Black Death called half time on the Hundred Years War, several English armies went rogue, including one that kidnapped the Pope. He offered them a choice of a 5000 crown ransom and his blessing or 10,000 crowns and a solemn curse with bell, book and candle and, just like the hoplites who thumbed their noses at the gods to fight for Phocia, the English opted for the cash and the curse.

The Renaissance perhaps marked the high point of mercenaries in Europe as the Swiss banks were more than prepared to lend wannabe monarchs a sack load of gold to raise an army. The Swiss had also cornered the market in soldiers for hire, so it was really a win-win situation for them. However, as Machiavelli and other noted, that this meant battles were usually fought to the last crown rather than the last man.

March or Die, Columbia Pictures, 1977

Although armies of the Age of Reason often employed non-native soldiers, such as the legions of wandering Scots and Irish, the days of the true mercenary were drawing to an end. After the French Revolution nationalistic fervour became as essential to victory on the battlefield as the musket, and so mercenaries were generally banished from European battlefields and sent to garrison Europe's overseas empires instead.

The wars of the twentieth century saw entire nations in arms, but with the ending of the Cold War the massed conscript armies were replaced by fully professional forces. Perhaps therefore it's inevitable that the mercenary should have returned. Is an American who enlists with Blackwater to defend an Iraqi oil refinery really that much more of a mercenary than a British soldier sent abroad to fight for a cause most of his nation couldn't give a toss for?

However if this the direction of travel in warfare we should perhaps heed the warning words of the ancient historian Polybius "My object, in commenting on the blind folly of the Epirotes, is to point out that it is never wise to introduce a foreign garrison, especially of barbarians, which is too strong to be controlled."

In 2008 69% of the US military in Afghanistan were private contractors.

Bibliography

Armies of the Macedonian and Punic Wars by Duncan Head
Alexander the Great's Campaigns by Phil Barker

Save The Woodhead Tunnels!

(Reposted from the Glossopdale Transition Initiative blog)

The Woodhead Tunnels, in Longendale, Derbyshire are in danger and immediate action is required to save them.

The three tunnels, which have not seen a train run through them for thirty two years, have up until now been maintained by the National Grid who used them for high voltage cables.

With now complete on installing cables in the new 1953 tunnel the National Grid has no more use for the older tunnels. The Department of Transport will therefore decide this month on whether to purchase the tunnels in order to maintain them for future use. If the 1953 tunnel were to be reopened for trains the Victorian tunnels could again be used for electricity - unless they have fallen down.

Simon Burns MP, the Minister of State for Transport, has written to Andrew Bingham MP asking for his views by the beginning of September.

Successful campaigning by the Save The Woodhead Tunnel group extracted from the
previous government a statement that they would consider the 'option' of preserving the tunnels, but the letter from the department appears to show how hollow those words were.

All this occurs at a time when the Highways Agency is consulting on Trans-Pennine Transport solutions. With the Woodhead Tunnels gone before the consultation has even started, the proposed Trans-Pennine Motorway could have the field to itself.

Keeping the tunnel open will cost £25,000 a year. By contrast the cost of the aborted inquiry into the Longendale Bypass alone was £16 million, or £39,000 a day.

Estimates of future traffic along any Trans-Pennine Motorway are unreliable - that's why the Public Inquiry ended - as are the potential saving of a rail alternative. However English Nature estimated that the road would add 15,840 tons of CO2 a year to the atmosphere, whilst the Translink proposal for reopening the tunnel estimated it could save 100,000 tons a year.

What To Do

If you want to see the tunnels saved for possible reuse, then you need to email or write to Andrew Bingham as soon as possible. Personal letters only please, he hates mass circulation emails and cards.

Andrew Bingham
Office of Andrew Bingham MP
20 Broad Walk
Buxton
SK17 6JR

andrew.bingham.mp@parliament.uk

My own email to Andrew Bingham (please don't copy - use your own words)

Dear Andrew

I am writing as I believe the Department of Transport is currently considering whether to purchase the Victorian Woodhead Tunnels from the National Grid in order to preserve them for future use.

I note that they are making this decision at the same time that the Department is consulting with stakeholders over proposed Trans-Pennine transport solutions, in which road building in the Longendale Valley will be on the table.

I strongly believe that with car use in this country on a plateau or declining and with oil prices showing no sign of reducing, increasing Trans-Pennine rail capacity is the solution to the traffic problems of the valley and that, along with electrifying the Hope Valley line and improvements in the Leeds-Manchester line, reopening the Woodhead line would be a way of doing this.

I am therefore very strongly of the opinion that to allow the Victorian tunnels to fall into disrepair now, when we have no solutions at all agreed upon would be the wrong decision and that the Department of Transport must take the necessary steps to preserve them. There will be a cost, but it will be utterly trivial compared to the cost of even an inquiry into a road scheme.

Like so much of what is best about Glossop, these tunnels are the legacy of the forward thinking and sound engineering of our Victorian ancestors. They should not be discarded lightly.

Yours sincerely

Martin Porter

The Death Of Rock?

So who is the biggest rock band in the world?

Come on, it shouldn't be a hard question.

Any guesses? The White Stripes? Radiohead? Muse? Coldplay? The Rolling Stones - sorry, don't count. Did someone say Elbow? Now you're being silly.

Well, I don't doubt that one of them is the biggest rock band in the world, but I doubt you could call any of them The Biggest Rock Band In The World.

This is a coveted title that has been handed down from the The Beatles to The Stones to Led Zeppelin to Queen to AC/DC to Guns 'n' Roses to U2 to Nirvana to REM and so on since the early sixties. We can argue just when the baton was handed on, in which order and to whom, but you get the idea.

But who has it now? That is the question.

If you are the Greatest Rock Band In The World you need, along with the guitars, the groupies and gratuitous drug us; a few smash hits. And which rock band has those today?

"It is the end of the rock era. It's over, in the same way the jazz era is over," said Professor of Pop Paul Gambaccini two years ago. That was after only three rock songs appeared in the top 100 singles of 2010. Things have rallied a little since, but a quick look at the US charts right now shows rock songs in the US Hot 100 Billboard charts at number 5 (Imagine Dragons), 8 (Capital Cities), 12 (Lorde), 24 (Philip Phillips), 25 (AWOLNATION) and 49 (Paramore). A mere 6%. That's less the Liberal Democrats.

A brief history of rock is that it's first incarnation began at about the same time as the space age, arrived in Britain in the bizarre form of a middle aged man with a quiff singing "Rock around the clock" and then died a natural death when Elvis joined the army.

For a while it really did seem that "guitar groups are on their way out" and the charts were dominated by the Clean Cut Crooner, but then came the Beatles and we had rock music as we know it. From then it was straight on to musical pretentiousness and extended drum solos, flared trousers and silver lamé, a brief moment of sanity in the form of Punk, then more musical pretentiousness with synthesisers, more daft clothes from the New Romantics and so on through to the world of rock as it now is.

But what actually is rock?

It's a pretty tough genre to define. Apart from 4/4 time, every rule you wish to make is broken by one of the greats. But apart from bands who write and perform their own material, play live, don't use backing musicians and weren't put together by a talent show, what defines rock is a sort

of perpetual adolescence. Rock stars are expected to pretend to live a teenager's life characterised by hedonistic self indulgence, naively optimistic politics and an utter terror of never getting laid.

But where are the actual kids? Hanging around on street corners with their track suits tucked into their socks listening to grime, mainly. It would be easy to get into a bit of chav bashing here, but let's take a slightly broader sociological view by looking at the views of that late, great historian of social change, Fred Dibnar.

There is an episode of his program where he came upon a graveyard that had been vandalised. There was much mutter about lack of discipline today and a suggestion that we start chopping off limbs or bring back National Service  But why was old Fred on TV in the first place? Because he went around knocking down factories.

Rock music likes to pretend it isn't about money. We don't seem to care too much if our Rock Gods get stinking rich, even if they do so whilst singing songs about the evil of filthy lucre (see Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Pink Floyd, 10CC etc) but at the same time we hate anyone who makes more than the minimum wage out of the music business.

But in reality to believe that you can change the world with peace, love and a massive Marshal stack requires both optimism and at least enough dosh to get by. It means growing up in a world where going to university means ten years of recreational drug use and self discovery and where the worst that will happen afterwards is you get a boring job.

In fact most rock fans in the sixties already had boring jobs. Jimi Hendrix's performance at the 1969

Woodstock festival is sometimes hailed as the greatest moment in the history rock, but if this was the case most of his fans missed it as he played at 8AM on Monday morning and they were already in their cars and heading back to work.

However, if you've been born into a world where the only source of proper employment has just been demolished by a reactionary Lancastrian, where university means debt you'll never pay off and even a job at Poundland is a distant dream, you are rather more likely to get your kicks listening to the somewhat less Utopian lyrics of rap.

So who actually listens to rock music?

In fiction it's Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth, Beavis and Butthead and Jack Black's character in School of Rock.

In reality it's Jeremy Clarkson.

The generation which missed World War Two, dropped out and plugged in the sixties, bought houses with cheap mortgages in the seventies, voted for Thatcher in the eighties, got a twinge of conscience and elected New Labour in the nineties, and which is now jealously defending its pensions against a rising tide of disenfranchised youth, is the main audience for rock.

So should we ditch rock and get down with the real kids.

NO!

Like decent housing, pensions, job security and football, the fact that rock has been stolen by the reverse Robin Hood generation does not make it not worth having.

They might laugh at the clothes, the drum solos, the Marxist hectoring of multi-millionaires and the pensioners pretending to be teenagers. They might want us to be happy with the Prolefeed that Simon Cowell gives us.

But we won't have it!

So, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?

I CAN'T HEAR YOU......ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?

C'MON, EVERYBODY... GET ON YOUR FEET!

Thank you and goodnight.

Top Five Eco-ships

Why do environmentalists keep taking to the water?

Probably it's because we are a water planet, and that what happens to the seas is important for the fate of the planet. The oceans are where most of the extra heat generated by Climate Change goes, where the effluent and waste of humanity ends up, and where the effects of our littering of the planet is most obvious.

But I also suspect it's psychological.

Maybe, as the late Douglas Adams suggested, we are just such reactionaries that we don't just regard coming down from the trees as our greatest evolutionary mistake, but actually leaving the oceans?

Or maybe also it's that with human civilisation out of sight over the horizon the ocean represents the primordial wilderness to which we long to return.

Just possibly it's because for certain (usually male) environmentalists taking to the water allows us to play with the sort of machinery denied to us in our Jeremy Clarkson baiting land-based existence. Having had the fun of piloting a Greenpeace rigid inflatable at high speed past the Millennium Dome a la James Bond I probably qualify here.

5. Sea Shepherd I

Copywrite Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is to many just a a second rate Greenpeace. An organisation run by an egotist who's idea of leadership style has been described as "anarchy ruled by God".

However if this is true, his Captain Ahab persona certainly seems to vanish when he sets foot on land, and he's been perfectly pleasant when I've met him - back in the days when he dared set foot on land.

His much repeated story of coming eye to eye with a harpooned whale really does seem to be a moment of personal catharsis, even if it has become a cliché in the retelling.

The original Sea Shepherd  was the ex-trawler that Watson bought after he was kicked out of Greenpeace for rampant egotism in 1977. It's bows reinforced with concrete, Captain Watson took the ship to sea to hunt down pirates.

A bit of history is needed to set the scene. As the seventies drew to a close the International Whaling

Commission was starting to acknowledge that unrestricted hunting was driving the great mammals towards extinction and the organisation was edging towards a moratorium. However this would only apply to vessels flying the flags of it's members, and not the significant number of whalers that acknowledged no country of origin.

The most notorious of these was the Sierra. It flew whatever flag it chose, it ignored IWC quotas and it killed - or more frequently didn't kill - with cold harpoons. It dumped most of the dead whale back into the sea and sold the choice bits to Japan. By 1979 it had been operating, under various names, for over a decade and had exterminated an estimated 25,000 whales.

Watson set out to find the Sierra, and after an unscheduled stop to swim with turtles, found her and chased her into the Portuguese harbour of Leixoes, where the authorities offered protection. When it looked like the Portuguese were going hold the Sea Shepherd back, but let the Sierra get away, Watson and a skeleton crew rammed the Sierra and sank her just outside the port and then escaped out to sea.

The Portuguese Navy came after them and eventually Sea Shepherd was impounded. After an (allegedly) bribed Judge ordered her to be handed over to the Sierra's owners, Watson scuttled her in harbour in December 1979. The Sierra meanwhile underwent a million dollars worth of repairs only to suddenly be sunk by a limpet mine planted by persons unknown (it says here...).

So the Sea Shepherd's duel with Sierra ended, with both vessels at the bottom of the sea, but for better or worse Watson continues to lead his personal navy in pursuit of the whalers.

4. Calypso

So what was your first wildlife program? Marlin Perkins and Wild Kingdom? Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter, David Attenborough's Life on Earth?

For me it was Johnny Morris's Animal Magic, which possibly explains my lack of gravitas on the subject. Morris was an amiable Welshman, who once blamed the decline of Western civilisation on all the sex and violence in wildlife programs, and who campaigned against the Newbury Bypass when in his eighties. Alas he didn't have a boat so he can't appear in this list.

Instead let's talk about Jacques Cousteau, who with his various film and television appearances from the fifties onwards introduced a generation to an amazing world of adventure.

Having spent the Second World War inventing the aqualung and fighting a covert war against the fascists, he then spent a few years in the navy before renting a old British mine sweeper called the Calypso, from a reclusive Irish millionaire, for the princely sum of one franc a year.


Along with his red beret, the ship became Cousteau's trademark. He wasn't particularly Green at first. He dynamited a coral reef and massacred a school of sharks whilst making his first film The Silent World. But he got better, and in 1960 was successful in stopping the dumping of radioactive waste in Mediterranean.

Thanks to the Calypso, Cousteau's adventures took him to up the Amazon and down the Nile. He explored the Antarctic and hunted for Atlantis and basically had the sort of adventures you can only have with a ship.

The vessel was apparently very French, with dodgy plumbing, but Michelin star quality food. In hot weather it was almost intolerable, but discomfort was alleviated by copious quantities of vintage wine.

I can't say I watched too many of his programs myself, being a little young when he was popular, but I remember really wanting the Revell model kit of this ship.  

Cousteau's adventurers continued until his death in 1997. His beloved ship though had been dealt a near terminal blow the year before when it was accidentally sunk by barge in Singapore harbour. She has subsequently been raised and restored, although this appears to be one of those restorations where they basically build another ship that looks like the original.

3. Arctic Sunrise

Once upon a time Greenpeace set sail on the ocean blue in a collection of barely seaworthy old rust buckets. However at some point in the 1990s they got themselves organised and assembled a decent little flotilla including a small ice breaker formerly used to hunt seals.

The vessel had also been used by the French government to construct an airstrip in Antarctica, which Greenpeace had opposed.

From 1995 the ship had a series of adventures around the world in support of Greenpeace's campaigns. It was rammed by Japanese whalers twice and was impounded by Ministry of Defence police at the Faslane nuclear base.


Then in September 2013 it went north of the Arctic Circle to oppose drilling by the Russian oil company Gazprom, which had teamed up with Shell to drill for oil off the coast of the melting Arctic ice cap. 

Greenpeace had already boarded a Gazprom rig twice, but when the Arctic Sunrise circled for a third attempt Russian coastguards wielding guns and knives seized the vessel and its and arrested the crew for piracy.

Maybe the Russian authorities thought they were selling bootleg DVDs of the back of the boat or something, because by the definition of piracy, an act of robbery or violence at sea, Greenpeace were not pirates.

The Russian authorities even seemed to agree. But then, on the same day the latest IPCC report told us exactly why we shouldn't be drilling for oil anywhere, they remanded the international crew for two months whilst they decided if they could get away with charging them with piracy.

A massive international campaign finally saw the crew released just after Christmas, but the Sunrise itself remains in custody.

2. Rainbow Warrior

The Warrior wasn't the original Greenpeace ship.

That was a vessel called the Phyllis Cormack that was renamed Greenpeace for a trip to the Aleutian islands to 'bear witness' to nuclear tests for a group called The Don't Make A Wave Committee.

How a pretty disorganised bunch of hippies then went on to become an international campaigning organisation is a long story, but basically in the early years Greenpeace was more of a banner than an organisation and anyone who had the means and motivation could get a group together and use the name.

The second Greenpeace ship was a yacht called Vega used by former international badminton player David McTaggart to protest against French nuclear testing. McTaggart ran into a French truncheon, but after film of the French beating him up was smuggled out in an activists knickers the world took the side of the hippies.

By 1978 there were 20 odd Greenpeace groups and very little to bind them together except a set of ideals. However none of them had anything that floated and so what passed for the international part of the organisation (officially to become Greenpeace International the next year) bought an old Scottish fishing boat and renamed her the Rainbow Warrior.

The ship participated in various campaigns and evacuated the population of the radioactive Marshall islands before heading to Auckland harbour ready for a new campaigns against French nuclear testing.

It was there that she was sunk by two limpet mines, the second of which went off whilst there were eleven people still on board. Ten jumped clear or were thrown into the water, but photographer Fernano Perreira was drowned.

The attack was the work of the Action unit of the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. Known as the 'Barbouzes', which loosely translates as 'bearded ones', on account of their dodgy disguises, they were originally formed to track down OAS terrorists opposing the French decision to give up its Algerian colony. The OASs got the better of the Barbouzes then, tracking them down and attacking them in their secret base. The Barbouzes didn't fare much better with the Kiwis. Whilst bombing a bunch of hippies proved easy enough, evading the New Zealand police didn't.

The yacht that brought in the explosives was apprehended Australia, with (allegedly) the two divers on board,
but had to be released as Australia had no anti-terrorism law that could hold them. A French nuclear sub then spirited them away. A spy who had infiltrated Greenpeace New Zealand was tracked down in Israel but fled before being arrested, whilst two agents who helped with the logistics were caught and given ten years for manslaughter, but were free two years later after being transferred to a French gaol.

New Zealand never really forgave it's ally the United States for not condemning the bombing, and instead pursued a far more lucrative line of building a non-aligned, anti-nuclear alliance amongst Pacific nations.

The wreck of the Rainbow Warrior was subsequently raised, but as the ship was beyond repair she was sunk as an artificial reef. Greenpeace subsequently acquired another Rainbow Warrior which, after twenty two years service was retired in 2011 to be replaced by Rainbow Warrior III, a state-of-the-art electric and sail powered purpose built ship.


1. The Beagle 

Prior to the Theory of Evolution, biology was basically just stamp collecting with a specimen jar.

Of course Darwin didn't do it all single handedly. But whilst we can't ignore the work of Alfred Russell Wallace who spurred on Darwin and had figured out Natural Selection independently, and Gregor Mendel who gave us genetics, neither of them ever went on a voyage anything like that of The Beagle.

The circumstances of how Darwin ended up on ship are ironic, to say the least. The ship's Captain was Robert Fitzroy, one of the foremost sailors of his day and the aristocratic nephew of Viscount Castlereagh, the Home Secretary responsible for the

Peterloo Massacre.

Castlereagh ended his life by slitting his own throat. The previous Captain of the Beagle had also committed suicide so Fitzroy was worried topping yourself was either hereditary or an occupational hazard, and so wanted someone along with more conversation than the average Jack Tar to keep him sane.

Darwin though was the wrong choice. A zealously religious Tory, Fitzroy was aghast when Darwin presented his Godless theory to the world and turned up at the 1860 waving his bible and ranting against the heresy. When he eventually realised he'd lost the argument and that he had inadvertently helped to give birth to this monstrous theory he became depressed and......well, you can guess how it ends.

The Beagle herself ended up being used first to chase smugglers around the coast of Essex before being moored in the River Roach as a coast guard ship. She may even still be there, with various bits

of her having been removed to be used for nearby buildings.

Not that the physical remains really matter. The Beagle is now immortal thanks to Darwin's book of her voyages. There is nothing like The Voyage of the Beagle. If Newton had written of his laws of motion after crossing Africa in a canoe, or if Einstein had described discovering Relativity whilst trekking across the Antarctic then we may have something comparable, but as it the tale of exploration, adventure and the research that led to possibly the most important scientific discovery of all time makes it a unique read.

After Darwin, biology became the most exciting branch of science. Physics then had a good century, but now, with a planet on the edge of an environmental Apocalypse, we need another Darwin.

Here's One We Bombed Earlier

As the international community beats the war drums over the probable use of nerve gas by Syria's army analogies are being made with the 2003 Iraq War.

The similarities are obvious; a Middle Eastern country, Weapons of Mass Destruction, a reluctant UN Security Council and even Tony Blair popping up to put the moral case.

However there are also crucial differences. In 2003 Iraq had no WMDs but plenty of oil, whilst Syria has very real WMDs but no oil, and to me it seems we don't so much have a rush to war but a distinct dragging of feet.

A better comparison would be with the 1999 Kosovo conflict.

Then you had a dictator in conflict with his own people crossing a 'red line' in the form of mass ethnic cleansing and being threatened with a punitive bombing campaign. Then as now the Russia stood in defiance of the West, there was a background of regional conflict and, then as now, some the victims of the atrocities were fairly dodgy terrorist types. The US and its allies must hope though that Assad proves more compliant now than Milosevic proved then.

In 1999 Slobbo refused to take his medicine and behave himself, and instead responded to the attacks by driving out even more Kosovans. This left NATO in a dilemma. The bombing hadn't achieved its objective and so couldn't stop, but neither did it appear to be doing any good. Indeed, only later did NATO discover exactly how badly they had in fact done.

The Responsibility to Protect, known as R2P, is a tenet of that nebulous branch of philosophy, ethics and guesswork that passes as international law. The idea is that if someone is doing something bad you have a duty to take proportionate means to stop them. 'Proportionate means' being the term that sets military heads spinning.

In attempting to be proportion NATO pilots had been hunting down Milosevic's military tank by tank. Unfortunately they were hidden by dense Balkan terrain underneath grotty Balkans weather, whilst the jets were 10000 feet above them trying to avoid the Serbian air defences. Not surprisingly they hit very little, and it was to turn out much of what they did hit they shouldn't have done, including numerous dummy guns and a refugee convoy. Even worse the Serbs had used the low frequency radar on an old Soviet air defence system to overcome the stealth abilities of the USAFs best plane and shot down a Stealth Fighter, the bits being sent to Russia.

NATO then gave up on 'proportionate means' and went back to what it knew best; bombing the Serbs back to the stone age. Instead of going for individual tanks they took out bridges, power stations, factories and the national television station. It wasn't pretty - and when a cruise missile hit the Chinese embassy it looked like it could get even uglier - but it was effective and once he realised the Russians weren't going to save him, Milosevic gave in.

The Serbs withdrew and in moved a 30,000 strong force containing the cream of NATOs military might; French infantry, German panzers, American helicopters and James Blunt (yes, him). Everything seemed to be going like clockwork until a unit of British light tanks arrived at Pristina airport and found the Russians waiting for them.

Leading the NATO force was the young Captain Blunt, his guitar was strapped to the outside of his tank. You'd think the Kosovans had suffered enough, but he brought it anyway. NATO commander General Wesley Clark ordered him to attack, but his British number two General Mike Jackson didn't pass the order on, saying "I'm not going to start a Third World War for you." Jackson may have had in mind the 1978 book of that name by John Hackett in which what eventually becomes a nuclear conflict starts with a clash between NATO and the USSR in Yugoslavia. Either way, Captain Blunt was quite sure he wasn't going to be shooting anyone and let the Russians be.

Instead the Russians were diplomatically isolated and their little force in Pristina became an object of fascination for the NATO soldiers, not least when they were observed flogging some of their own men.

In due course they were integrated into the peacekeeping force and the KLA disarmed. Kosovo eventually recovered - sort of - and Milosevic ended up in the dock at the Hague, where he died of old age waiting for the prosecutors to sort out their case against him.

So it all ended more or less for the better. My own tiny role in the conflict was being part of a Social Services team that stayed up all night (unpaid) to sort out refugees arriving at Leeds airport in what was possibly the last occasion Britain actually welcomed asylum seekers.

However it had taken considerably more effort than planned. The French army, for example, had used pretty much everything it had; initially it's helicopters and paratroopers to cover the UN observers, then all its engineers to build camps for the refugees, then it's armoured units as the backbone of the ground invasion.

So what are the lessons for Syria? Don't make threats unless you mean to carry them out, smart bombs can be pretty dumb, expect the Russians to do something daft and James Blunt may be a terrible musician but he did help prevent a Third World War.

How To Hide From Uncle Sam

You know the problem.

One moment you're minding your own business and the next thing you click the wrong icon and find you're revealed the dirty secrets of the CIA, launched a terrorist attack or inadvertently gassed a major city. The Man is looking for you and suddenly it's a very small world. Where do you hide?

Here are the five most popular options.

5. A Cave

An old favourite and still a very reliable fall back.

What about Saddam Hussein you may ask? Well technically that wasn't a cave, but a hole in the ground. The only caves in Iraq are in Kurdistan, where they had been successfully used by the locals to hide from Saddam's forces for years. Light a fire in the entrance and you can even survive a nerve gas attack.

Which brings us to the first rule of hiding in caves; make sure the natives are friendly. There was a reason Saddam didn't make his way to the Kurds.

However if you are on reasonably good terms with the locals - and being hunted by the Americans can make you lots of new friends - you can do worse than your old cave. Osama bin Laden survived two close shaves whilst living in his. The first time was in December 2001 when he was spotted by Britain's Special Boat Squadron, but escaped as the Yanks had told the SBS that they had to be the ones to kill him. The second time was when the Northern Alliance surrounded the Tora Bora complex and he escaped by bribing the tribemen to let him go.

Which brings us to the second rule of hiding in caves. You may think all you need is a roll mat, the complete works of Mohammed and a sack of the finest Afghan hashish, but in reality you'll need your credit card, gold bullion, a large supply of porn or something else that you can trade with the indigene.

That said old Osama survived his years in the mountains and only died when he traded in his trusty cave in for the comfort of home. Very dangerous places homes.

4. The Ecuadorian Embassy

Those who, like Osama, prefer more creature comforts, or who put more faith in legal systems, may prefer to try their luck in one of the world's numerous embassies.

You need to choose carefully. Pick a country too friendly, or too scared, of Uncle Sam and you could find yourself on your way back to him in the diplomatic bag.

However get the right one and you could find yourself drinking Pimms in comfort whilst the agents of your enemies guard you.

The advantages are obvious. Your friends and supporters can drop by, you can read the papers and you get as many Ferroro Roche jokes as you can stand.

That said it's not totally safe. Countries can change their politics, and cruise missiles have been known to go off course and hit embassies.

3. Moscow

Once upon a time a very popular destination.

In days not long gone there were enough former Cambridge and MI6 spooks in Moscow that they could have had their own club.

However they had to earn their keep by working for Soviet intelligence, so if your particular thing is exposing the wrong doings of unaccountable spy agencies, you have to either ignore the suppression of dissent and occasional assassination carried out by those of your hosts and accept being called a bloody hypocrite, or find they've served you Polonium 210 in your vodka.

That said Russia isn't as grim as it uses to be and as long as you don't criticise the government, drink yourself to death or fall in love with someone of the same gender you should do all right.

2.Prison

Possibly not the first choice, but going to jail does have its advantages. 

Navy SEALS probably aren't going to drop in a fill you full of lead, you get the sort of free health care most working Americans would die for (or will die without) and you may well get out sometime - which is not guaranteed with any of the above options.

On the down side they'll probably put you in solitary confinement, which means if you weren't nuts before you went in you will be when you come out. And if they don't, then taking a shower becomes a potentially life changing activity.

On the plus side it's not impossible that you'll win you win your case and get out sooner rather than later. That happened to Daniel Ellsberg, the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers in seventies. That said it was rumored that G Gordon Liddy and some of the Watergate "plumbers" planned to bump him off at a rally shortly afterwards, which just goes to show how much safer it is to be behind bars.

1. Hampton Country Club

Again, not an obvious choice. The conversation is lousy and the drinks are overpriced, but you have to admit, it's better than the others on this list.

That's probably why it was chosen by Warren Anderson, a man wanted by the Indian government for 14,000 cases of manslaughter after his company, Union Carbide, was found responsible for the Bhopal disaster.

India had asked the USA to help find him, but they'd told New Delhi they couldn't.

However Greenpeace tracked him down - to a Country Club on Long Island, New York where he had been cunningly hiding out for 20 years.

Now cynics will say that Uncle Sam wasn't seriously looking for Anderson, even though the Indian courts had issued an arrest warrant. However that would be to suggest that releasing 32 tons of toxic gas in a built up area through cost cutting and gross negligence is a less serious crime than releasing classified data to the press through a desire to reveal an unconstitutional surveillance program, and that surely cannot be true of the Land of the Free.

Can it?