Fresh from his arrest over Palestine Action and Gaza, veteran environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt spoke to David Toke about his campaigns
Jonathon Porritt, who is now almost an icon of the green political movement in the UK, is very excited about Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Green Party. He bemoans mainstream environmentalists for not being able to make a strong enough connection to the campaign about Gaza. In the 1980s, Porritt was a Co-Chair of the Green Party before becoming a long-serving Director of Friends of the Earth. He also served as the Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission under the last Labour Government and co-founded the international charity “Forum for the Future” – amongst many other things, including the publication of his groundbreaking book “Seeing Green” in 1984. I talked to him recently about politics, campaigning and his latest book “Love, Anger and Betrayal” (Anthoney Eyre). This chronicles the thoughts, struggles and treatment of 26 “Just Stop Oil” protestors.
Suffragists and Suffragettes
He draws parallels with the Just Stop Oil protesters and the campaigners for votes for women over 100 years ago, although he comments: “They are very different movements, but… both were equally compelling for young Just Stop Oil protesters. The suffragists had been campaigning for women’s suffrage for decades, but they got nowhere. They had banged up against this brick wall of intransigent, misogynistic MPs. And therefore, the suffragettes with Emmeline Pankhurst emerged from that as a much more radical expression of women’s rights and women’s suffrage. Of course, it’s a slightly difficult analogy for Just Stop Oil because the suffragettes were undoubtedly a terrorist organisation. According to the terrorism definition in the 2000 Terrorism Act, they were terrorists. They used a lot of violence. They blew up post boxes. They invented the letter bomb. They set fire to God knows how many houses of politicians and other eminent people. So, I mean, the tactics are very different from the tactics used by Just Stop Oil, which is absolutely avowedly non-violent, peaceful, direct civil disobedience, basically.”
Porritt is astonished by the repression meted out to the Just Stop Oil Protesters. “Some judges have simply refused to let them speak to their motivation, haven’t even really allowed them to talk about the climate crisis, certainly haven’t allowed the presence of expert witnesses in the court. They have to address themselves only to matters of law and not to matters of conscience. Some judges have even said unbelievably crass things, like climate change is a matter of opinion. It is not relevant to the proceedings in this courtroom. So there are so many ways in which the law can silence people as they speak out about the (climate) crisis. To begin with, XR ([Extinction Rebellion)] might be looking at certainly ending up in a court and being found guilty, but they were probably likely to get community sentences or a fine or conditional discharges, whatever it might be. Two, three, four-year prison sentences, not part of the deal... the new, very oppressive legislation came in 2022, and was then confirmed, of course, by the Labour Government.
He still has some faith in Ed Miliband, but only just. “I think the government’s whole climate case, its determination to pursue net zero, its determination to phase out fossil fuels, its determination to go after things like fuel poverty and so on, it hangs on a very thin thread. And that thread is mostly made up of Ed Miliband, frankly. I mean, if Ed hadn’t been there, Keir Starmer, who hasn’t got a climate bone in his desiccated body, he would not be a proper leader on climate.”
Zack Polanski
On the other hand, he is very pleased with the Green Party’s leader, Zack Polanski. He says he is, “As excited as anybody would be, who’s been a member of the Green Party for 50 years. I’m as excited by Zack as you can imagine, to watch the energy that he brings to bear on these issues, to see the way that he confronts the real problems we face, the systemic problems that we face, particularly about the economy and inequality and the need for a different taxation system, fair taxes and so on. I love all of that. I love the way that he takes the fight directly to the likes of Nigel Farage. For reasons I don’t understand, the mainstream parties just decided to give Nigel Farage a free pass, which has pretty much let him impose his utterly vile politics on the people of the UK, and have sat back and not really expected there to be any consequence to that. Well, as we saw, the consequence was that Reform shot up in the polls.
“So am I delighted, if a little astonished, to see now the two most popular parties in the UK are Reform and the Green Party, because the Green Party is now polling above the Labour Party. It may not last, but it is pretty astonishing. And that is down to Zack. Let’s be absolutely fair. Because of his style of leadership, the communication style that he has, speaking directly to these things, and he’s been brilliant on issues like wealth taxes and, of course, on Gaza.”
“Speaking as a Jew, when you hear Zack speak about the genocide in Gaza and his absolute abhorrence of what is happening in Gaza and the complicity of the UK government, the absolutely indisputable complicity of the UK government, people listen to that and think, whoa, okay, now you’re spelling it out in a way we can understand, whereas, of course, nobody in mainstream politics has spelled it out with such clarity… I think it will have a big impact on local elections next year, and I hope that will eventually translate into something that is even more transformative for politics in this country. But that probably still requires a shift in the electoral system.”
A green resurgence?
I asked him whether the election of a right-wing government could bring forward a resurgence of the green movement.
“Would that lead to a resurgence in the kind of climate campaigning enthusiasm we saw in 2018, 2019, the school strikes, the Greta Thunberg movement, strikes for Friday, the emergence of Extinction Rebellion in our midst, which was fantastically exciting? – a lot of which, of course, was knocked back by Covid and various other matters after that. Would we see a resurgence of a different kind of campaigning? We might.
“Mainstream environmentalists at the moment don’t play much part, frankly, in addressing the climate crisis. They’re very muted. They don’t have much impact on the government. Ministers seem to disregard whatever they say. I’m happy to see that Greenpeace is getting its mojo back, which is really good. Friends of the Earth now needs to get back in the game. It’s been out of the game for quite some time. And when you come on to the mainstream establishment organisations, the likes of the RSPB and Wildlife Trust and National Trust and so on, well, they’ve really got to find a new way of mobilising their millions of members to tell this government that further backtracking on both climate and nature is unacceptable, politically unacceptable.‘“ He adds that, “Mainstream environmental organisations struggle with anything that takes them outside of their pretty limited silos. So, making the connection right to the heart of complex geopolitical issues like unfolding genocide (in Gaza) is a big ask. But if they want to make an impact on politics in this country, that’s where they’re going to have to go… You can barely believe that a mainstream environmentalist would ask that question, given the level of ecocidal damage, the devastation of Gaza’s environment and nature that has been going on now, not just for the last two years, but before that. You would think that was self-evident and obvious. But let’s face it, mainstream environmental organisations struggle with anything that takes them outside of their pretty limited silos. So, making the connection right to the heart of complex geopolitical issues like unfolding genocide is a big ask.”
He also gives an apocalyptic political warning: “In my opinion, …. the climate breakdown will lead to the imposition of really horrendous authoritarian, totalitarian rulers of one kind or another, and that this will almost certainly end up in genocidal acts of one kind or another all over the world as the breakdown materialises more and more painfully in our lives.”