The Way We Were

New Ground 64
Spring 2003

Dave Elliott explains how SERA’s blend of socialism, syndicalism and the environment filled an empty niche in Britain’s political ecology

SERA’s roots were in the radical movements of the early 1970s. But it was not just a hybrid of new left and eco-minded liberals. It had strong links with the syndicalist tradition, as resuscitated by organisations like the Institute for Workers Control (IWC), at that time where Ken Coates, nowadays an MEP, was to be found. Indeed the first few meetings I attended, in 1971, were hosted by Spokesman, the publishing wing of the Bernard Russell Peace Foundation, which also provided a base for the IWC.

What had happened was a smallish group of left intellectuals had concluded that the traditional socialist critique of capitalism did not take account of the way it exploited nature, as well as people. They wanted to link the environmental concern that was just then becoming apparent to a radical socialist critique, to alert the Left, and in particular the trade union movement, to the need to treat environmental issues as central rather than marginal. Spokesman published a book mapping out this analysis, Socialism and the Environment, in 1972. Several people who were to become influential in the growth of SERA wrote chapters, myself included.

It quickly became clear that the infant SERA, when it was formally constituted in 1973, was not going to be a mass organisation like Friends of the Earth, which was expanding rapidly at this time. The Left was just too small, thinly spread and otherwise engaged. But neither was it going to become just an academic think tank developing obscure ideas, as often happened to small leftist groups. With the intellectual groundwork laid by the Spokesman book and a few other publications like it, what SERA could do was provide a loose organisation drawing together individuals who were active in separate fields, some of them with professional expertise and others with positions within the trade union and labour movements. It was a classic ginger group whose power was not based on numbers, but on the influence, ideas and energy of members scattered around the political structure, mainly at the grass roots.

SERA itself launched into a series of campaigns. One of the first concerned the ‘jobs blackmail’ issue, the claim that if industry adopted environmental clean-up policies to control emissions, these would lead to poorer economic performance and job losses. SERA argued that any job losses would be more than offset by new jobs created in pollution control and in developing newer, cleaner, technologies. This argument proved to be right and is now back in vogue. SERA’s focus on the job-creation aspect of new environmental technologies led it to submit evidence on alternative employment options to the Windscale Public Inquiry in 1977. If only the Labour government of the day had taken notice, we wouldn’t now be saddled with such a mess and with billions of pounds in BNFL liabilities. SERA also became involved with the campaigns being mounted by trade unionists at Lucas Aerospace and elsewhere for the underpinning of job security through the development of alternative products, including renewables.

Energy issues were clearly a key area. Some parts of the SERA network coalesced into working groups and energy was one of the first, set up in 1978. I was its convenor until 1990. Groups like this made most of the running, as there was no real central SERA organisation. The working style of the groups was primarily agitational. Issues were chosen to bring out links between the environment and, for example, trade union concerns. Thus, on nuclear power, an early slogan was Jobs not Plutonium. SERA did well on the nuclear issue. It fielded speakers at trades councils, local branch meetings, trade-union summer schools and so on. The result of this painstaking work over several years was that an initially very pro-nuclear position was turned around. In 1986, the Labour Party adopted a policy of phasing out nuclear power, a policy eventually echoed by the TUC, which, following its energy review in 1988, called for nuclear power to be phased out within 15 years. Labour later converted this to a ‘diminishing reliance’ policy for its election manifesto.

Of course, what Labour said or did was increasingly of marginal importance, given that Margaret Thatcher was in power and kept getting re-elected. SERA did what it could and, in terms of its energy campaigning, it began to push strongly for renewables, as a clean, climate-friendly and job-creating alternative to nuclear power.

When Labour finally got back into power in 1997, SERA, now for good or ill a Labour Party affiliate, felt that it had a chance to play a significant role. Certainly, the current Labour government has moved a bit on renewables and has taken climate change seriously. But, to judge by the present debacle on nuclear power, with the government shelling out millions to keep British Energy going, more effort still seems to be needed, to put it mildly. Lobbying at the elite level has become the norm but, although these days the Labour Party and trade union movement are politically marginal, perhaps we ought to remember how we started out, and re-energise our grass roots links. Otherwise we will become just another green non-governmental organisation, with vague political credentials.
Dave Elliott helped found both SERA and its Energy Group