19
The McLibel Two
Sunday lunch in the front room of Naylor Road in 1951.
Mother sits opposite Father, who has his back to the bay window, and I, aged nine, sit next to her, from where I can see over the privet hedge bearing that perfectly carved topiary ‘73’, my father’s pride and joy, to the road beyond.
As usual there is complete silence, except for the occasional sound of chewing or slurping (mine). Today I am rather relieved that the strict ‘No speaking at mealtimes’ rule is being enforced, as I won’t have to explain my awful school report: at Holmewood Primary School, regularly banging shut my desk lid from a great height has been deemed enough to warrant a repeat of the whole year.
The slices of bread and butter have been consumed. (It is mandatory to eat it first, though I am never sure whether this is some kind of penance or to fill me up.) Next comes cream-of-tomato soup from a familiar tin. Father has a bottle of Whitbread’s pale ale, Mother and I have water. I am day-dreaming about my fine wicket against the corrugated-iron shed door in the garden, or the next picnic with cousin Gillian, with the fun of travelling on the open boot lid of the Ford with the picnic basket wedged between us.
I glance out of the window and see the milkman and his horse and cart stopping at the houses up the hill to deliver their pintas. A slice of beef, two roast potatoes and a small round Yorkshire pudding. Not a word breaks the quiet. I think back to the trip to Edinburgh to see my brother Gerald play at the Tattoo, and of my ‘guardian angel’, the outrider who gallops alongside the train traversing all the obstacles: station platforms, hedges, rivers . . .
Now the milk cart has reached the cul-de-sac at the top of the hill, and the milkman leaves it in the circular turnaround as he delivers his bottles to the next doorstep. Mother starts clearing the table for pudding, and takes the plates out into the kitchen.
And then I witness a fearful sight. The horse has got bored with waiting and has begun descending the hill alone. He is gathering speed. I spontaneously blurt out, ‘Dad! Dad! There’s a—’
Father is adamant: ‘No talking at mealtimes, Michael.’
‘But, Dad! . . .’
The horse is now into a brisk canter, propelled along by the weight of the milk crates behind him. The milkman is rushing after the cart, but cannot catch up. Father is in direct line of fire.
‘Dad! Please listen.’
‘No. No! No! Michael!’ – and as he sternly speaks those words there is an almighty crash as the horse ploughs through our privet hedge with its proud number 73, slams across the small front garden, smashes into the glass of the dining-room window and lands at my father’s feet. The horse is in obvious pain and distress, and my father is amazed, shocked, incredibly upset. The last time he saw a horse fall like this was in the war in Palestine. It had trapped him by the leg – the left leg. The horse had been shot. Father had been disabled – and that instant in the dining room in Naylor Road he is transported back thirty-four years. Mother ushers me out of the room to spare me the sight of the flailing horse amid the debris of harness, wooden shafts and milk bottles, but I creep back and watch through a crack in the door. I see the poor horse writhing in panic and agony on our dining-room floor. I see my father too, completely distraught. But I daren’t look as the horse is shot.
My lifelong concern for animal welfare has its roots in those few appalling minutes, and thirty years later in 1981 that concern took on a fresh focus on the very first day of Channel 4.
This was a breathtaking experiment in television, and Jeremy Isaacs, the first Chief Executive of Channel 4, wanted an innovative approach to distinguish it from the established format of British broadcasting. Instead of a melange of different programmes following hot on the heels of each other, much as they do now, there were to be themed periods of viewing, which demanded levels of concentration not previously contemplated. This was a brave and exciting challenge, especially since one of the opening gambits in the first week was The Animals Film, a documentary directed by Victor Schonfeld and lasting over two and a half hours.1
The idea was as controversial as the content, and the programme stirred up considerable advance publicity. The film contained a poignantly clear and single message: the extensive and damaging exploitation by humankind of the animal kingdom and of the environment in which we all live. It was a deeply moving, political documentary, which I have no doubt would never surface in the current climate of soap suds and self-censorship. Yvette painfully discovered this over the ensuing years, with many of her political programme proposals on which I had lent a helping hand being rejected. Even back in 1981 I believe there was some last-minute editing of material thought to be too strong for the stomachs of Middle England, and someone felt that interviews with animal-liberation activists should not be afforded airtime.
To be honest, for me the real attraction of this powerful exposé was its narrator: Julie Christie, who had been mesmeric in Dr Zhivago and now had me riveted to the spot, overcome and shocked. Her narration was not an unadulterated rant but a sophisticated and carefully structured journey across terrain that we take for granted: our environment, and especially the animals with which we share it; how we farm with methods that treat life as conveyor-belt, caged cargo; how we contrive mutant breeds of pig which can barely stand; how we pack poultry in dark barns with barely enough space to lift the wing, while standing in a bed of shit. In short, factory food churned out by the processes of industrial mass production.
This was just one message. There were others relating to the fur trade, animal testing in the cosmetic industries and medical research. The experiments being conducted on live animals must have caused (and still do cause) suffering beyond quantification and beyond imagination, and I found it impossible to sit through this experience without wanting to take action, without wanting to change the habits of a lifetime straight away – and the main habit is consumerism.
In one sense this film was truly revolutionary, because without propagandising some dogma, mantra or diatribe, it highlighted in one go the excesses of corporate greed and the way in which we collude with it on a daily basis. It also made me think about what right we have, as some kind of master race, to experiment with animal life as if we owned it. If this were applied to human beings – as of course was done in Nazi Germany through the application of eugenics – we would all be appalled. On one occasion, when appearing on Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4, I was asked whether I deprecated the use of animals to develop cures for human illness, and therefore whether I would rather die in their absence. I answered that there were other ways of developing such cures, for example through computer models or in Petri dishes, but my main point was made by asking whether any member of the audience was happy to volunteer for such experiments on themselves.
Eight years after The Animals Film was shown I was being interviewed by the journalist Duncan Campbell for his book about the changing face of professional crime2 when I mentioned the film and freely extolled the virtues of Julie Christie – without being aware of his long-term relationship with her. As I rhapsodised about her, Duncan sat studiously silent: holes only get deeper. Shortly after this, I met Julie at a mutual friend’s wedding, where she explained that the film had had the same profound effect on her as it had on me. Stranger still, and quite by chance, I ended up renting the very same remote summer house near Monemvasia on the Mani in southern Greece, just after she and Duncan had stayed there. It was situated in a dried-up river bed known as Butterfly Valley: there was no electricity and no running water, just a self-sustaining eco-wonder world – now, I suspect, obliterated by a concrete jungle of hotels, the foundations of which were under construction at the time we were there.
This is a fine example of the ever-expanding consumption of which we have all been a part. Can it really be said to be progress, let alone necessary? Can it really be justified in the context of a world in which a roof, a bowl of rice and a cup of water are denied to the people living in two-thirds of it? Even more fundamental is whether the planet’s resources can possibly support this expansion. In 2008 we were confronted by an economic meltdown, which both symbolically and actually could be directly linked to the environmental meltdown. What are we to do about it? Spend, spend, spend? I think not.
The feelings The Animals Film had generated in me highlighted the need to reappraise my way of life. I don’t tend to use much lipstick, eye-liner or foundation cream, but there was plenty of room for improvement on other fronts: diet, clothing, energy consumption, car use, plastic packaging such as bags and bottles, waste recycling and disposal. I had already thought that dustbins, and more recently the ubiquitous black sacks, were a seriously antiquated and unhealthy way of rubbish clearance, particularly as I had worked ‘on the dust’ as a student for a short time. In idle moments I had dreamed up a scheme whereby every home would be connected by subterranean pipes like mains water drainage, which would separate the different types of waste, and one pipe would lead to a municipal compost heap. Much to my amazement, I discovered recently that such a system has been put into practice in Scandinavia, and for the first time is being employed on a new, privately owned housing estate in Britain.
These thoughts also influenced the work and campaigns with which I wanted to get involved, and there was one case at this time that epitomised and encapsulated all these issues, especially corporate responsibility. Two young people took on the mighty McDonald’s Corporation, and they took it on not for personal gain – for although they had very little themselves, they would gain nothing and, indeed, were liable to lose everything. Neither was it a question of personal aggrandisement, but they withstood the legal assault upon them by McDonald’s where many others had not.3 In similar circumstances, the media and newspapers had backed down when confronted by the legal might of McDonald’s and apologised, but Dave Morris, a former postman, and Helen Steel, a gardener, did not.
Beginning in 1986 as members of London Greenpeace, a small environmental campaigning group (not to be confused with Greenpeace International), Helen and Dave had been circulating a pamphlet entitled ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s? Everything they don’t want you to know’.
The publication made claims about the effects of fast-food production on, among other things, the rainforests in South America, about the conditions of the corporation’s workforce, factory farming, hygiene, health and nutrition. Some of the allegations against McDonald’s were that the corporation sold unhealthy food; exploited its workforce; practised unethical marketing of its products; was cruel to animals; needlessly used up resources; and created pollution with its packaging. Few cases could be said to embrace more important issues or such essential environmental ones.
Ironically, before McDonald’s responded, the pamphlet had been read by a mere handful of people who were given it while out shopping in London; now the pamphlet has been translated into more than twenty-six languages and distributed worldwide.
The court action for libel filed by the McDonald’s Corporation against these two environmental activists began in 1990 – and bear in mind that under our libel laws the burden of proof (on balance of probability) of each and every derogatory statement is on the defendant.
Helen and Dave conducted their own case, and the whole proceedings went on for 313 days in court over two and a half years, making it the longest trial in British legal history.4 Yet they did it without legal aid, and with just the free advice of committed lawyers – outstandingly from Kier Starmer, now Director of Public Prosecutions, and from me and others whenever we could. The pair did enormous amounts of research and eventually called 180 witnesses to help prove their assertions. McDonald’s spent millions of pounds on the action, while the protesters had just £30,000 donated by the public, but it didn’t look good for the corporation when top McDonald’s executives were forced to take the stand and be questioned by two non-lawyers, who did a fantastic job.
The travesty of the case was that none of the evidence was heard by a jury, because no jury, it was thought, would understand the many complicated points of scientific interest involved and only a judge was deemed able to deal with the amount of complex material. I totally disagree: the proper adjudication of issues of such public importance should be by the public’s representatives, a jury sitting in a court. Public debate can only be sparked by public involvement, and the whole ‘McLibel’ trial was heard by a single judge, Mr Justice Bell, whose verdict, when it came in June 1997, was something of a split decision – six of one and half a dozen of the other.
On the whole the case and the media exposure were devastating for McDonald’s, for the judge ruled that the Corporation ‘exploits children’ with its ‘misleading’ advertising, is ‘culpably responsible’ for cruelty to animals, ‘antipathetic’ to unionisation and pays its workers low wages.5
Unfortunately, Helen and Dave failed to prove all their points, and so the judge ruled that they had libelled McDonald’s and should pay £60,000 damages. The two refused and McDonald’s didn’t pursue it – more out of embarrassment, I imagine, than benevolence.
Later the defendants learned that McDonald’s had hired spies to infiltrate London Greenpeace and agents to break into their offices and steal documents, and in September 1998 the pair sued Scotland Yard for disclosing confidential information to investigators hired by McDonald’s, and received £10,000 in compensation and an apology.
Still angered by the judicial decision, the pair weren’t about to give up, and in March 1999 they went to the Court of Appeal. The fight had taken its toll on both Helen and Dave, and the preparation for the appeal was gruelling – but a request for further time was denied by the court, despite medical evidence of their exhaustion.
Nevertheless they won. The Lord Justices made further rulings that it was fair comment to say that McDonald’s employees worldwide ‘do badly in terms of pay and conditions’, and true that ‘if one eats enough McDonald’s food, one’s diet may well become high in fat etc., with the very real risk of heart disease’.6 The court went on to state that this last finding ‘must have a serious effect on their [McDonald’s] trading reputation since it goes to the very business in which they are engaged’.
Dave and Helen were spurred on by the backing of the vocal Anti-McDonald’s Campaign, massive press coverage and a feature-length documentary, which was broadcast around the world, but predictably could not get a public screening in the UK, so had to be shown in private before an invited audience at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. The two took their case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to defend the public’s right to criticise multinationals, claiming that UK libel laws were oppressive and unfair and that they had been denied a fair trial. On 15 February 2005 the pair’s twenty-year battle (and fifteenyear court battle) with the company concluded when the ECHR ruled that the original case had breached Article 6 (the right to a fair trial) and Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights, and ordered that the UK Government pay the McLibel Two £57,000 in compensation. After this momentous victory, Helen and Dave made the following statement:
The McLibel campaign has already proved that determined and widespread grass roots protests and defiance can undermine those who try to silence their critics, and also render oppressive laws unworkable. The continually growing opposition to McDonald’s and all it stands for is a vindication of all the efforts of those around the world who have been exposing and challenging the corporation’s business practices.7
The McLibel Two encouraged us all to question the nature and scope of all corporate activities, be they legal, illegal, morally defensible or morally dubious, and they prompted us to examine and reassess the regulatory systems currently in place that govern the actions of corporations – or, rather, the lack of them. I salute them.
Many others have followed in their footsteps, dedicated and honourable. In 2001 a group of demonstrators, including the environmentalist George Monbiot, were arrested for criminal damage during a protest at a genetically modified crop trial in Wales, and on 13 August 2007 over 2,000 environmental campaigners set up a camp on a field near Heathrow to protest at the damage caused by the airport and its seventy million passengers a year. The police drafted in 1,800 officers and Heathrow’s owner, British Airways Authority (BAA), desperate to minimise any bad publicity, won a court ruling to ban the protesters. The problem is that with the new Terminal Five and projected expansion of a third runway, things at Heathrow can only get worse, so along with many others I have signed up to help purchase small plots of land in the path of the proposed runway.
In 2008 ‘climate camps’ proliferated, one of which, Climate Rush founded by Tamsin Omond, organised an effective protest against the third runway on the roof of the Houses of Parliament. At the same time a jury at Maidstone Crown Court acquitted the Kingsnorth Six, Greenpeace activists who had been charged with causing £30,000 of criminal damage to a chimney at the coal-fired power station in Kent: they scaled the 200-foot stack and occupied it while they painted the name gordon down the outside. Their defence of lawful excuse was unequivocally rooted in the immediate need to protect the property of another: the environment, people and wildlife. The 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted daily from the power station is equivalent to the combined emissions of the thirty least-polluting countries in the world. Similar acquittals have been secured by those protesting against the Trident nuclear submarine and the development of the Hawk fighter jet by BAE Systems.
This movement is international, and communities worldwide are attempting to reclaim their heritage. A prime example is Nigeria, where oil companies like Shell have decimated the land with fires and oil spills, which turn into a hard brown crust several feet thick. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which monitors emissions by major British companies listed in the FTSE index, revealed in October 2008 that the total amount of carbon produced by Shell extracting and then burning oil and gas had reached 743 million tonnes in 2007, an amount that was higher than the total for Britain as a whole (587 million). Livelihoods in the Niger have been ruined by such activity, and opposition has been suppressed by the use of brutal military force. I joined the campaign in London to support Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was leading a number of local community groups in protest: he was arrested and executed by the Nigerian authorities. They never learn. You may kill the man, but you never kill the cause, and resistance has re-emerged with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. Then along comes Gordon Brown in July 2008, offering our troops to train Nigerian ‘security forces’ to restore order. Or should that read ‘to restore oil profits’? The Saro-Wiwa family have since launched a legal action in a New York Federal Court against Shell alleging complicity in human rights abuses in the early 1990s in Nigeria.8
In 1996 the Sea Empress was grounded on rocks off the South Wales coast near Milford Haven, and about 72,000 tonnes of Forties light crude oil were released into the sea, devastating over sixty miles of coastline. The images of birds smothered and struggling against the sticky black oil were horrific. There had been many such disasters before this, notably the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, and I helped advise an environmental group over the Sea Empress spill. Without their vigilance, issues relating to such tankers would themselves have been submerged: their size; their construction and the need for a double hull; the provision of sea-going tugs; and the installation of land-based radar to reduce the risk of pilot error.
Another active and successful campaigning organisation is Viva!,9 a vegetarian and animal-welfare charity of which I have been patron since its inception. Its founder, Juliet Gellately, is a ferocious campaigner who gave important evidence in the McLibel trial, and among her many awards are the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain, Linda McCartney Award for Animal Welfare. Her partner Tony Wardle is not only a great activist, but an exceptional researcher and writer too: he and Yvette produced films together for many years. In 2007 Tony researched and wrote Diet of Disaster, for Viva! Campaigns, cataloguing the environmental destruction engendered by meat and fish production – it is a devastating indictment of man’s disregard for nature and the consequences for our planet.
I believe that powerful action can end animal suffering, protect the environment and bring fairness to the world’s poor. Today, millions of children in the developing world die from hunger – and die alongside fields of high-quality food destined for the West’s farmed animals. Animal feed is increasingly taking precedence over food for people.10 The startling truth is that meat causes starvation. Worse, agriculture is the biggest user of fresh water (demanding up to 90 per cent of supplies in many poor countries), so a scarce resource is getting even scarcer.
It’s now a common theme from major institutions such as the World Health Organisation that ‘The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage – deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution and climate change.’11 In September 2008 this opinion was supported by the United Nations chief climate expert Rajendra Pachauri, and by the Food Climate Research Network based at the University of Surrey. The animal-welfare group Compassion in World Farming has calculated that if the average UK household halved its meat consumption, that would cut emissions more than if car use were halved. In fact, aircraft produce around 3 per cent of greenhouse gases, and 13.55 per cent comes from all forms of transport, but livestock produces 18 per cent. Methane is lethal to our planet; it is a gas twenty-one times more damaging than CO2. Both are hugely significant in meat production. Animal agriculture is responsible for over 100 million tonnes of methane a year: 85 per cent from digestion and 15 per cent from slurry lagoons.
The global-warming situation is far worse than anyone appreciated, and scientists at the Emergency Climate Conference in Copenhagen in March 2009, in preparation for a climate-change summit in December, described many of the developments as irreversible. The combination of warming ocean waters and melting ice sheets, especially land-based, is causing sea levels to rise twice as fast as predicted by the UN in 2007. Levels will rise by a metre or more by 2100, swamping coastal cities and obliterating the living space of 600 million people.12 At the same time the Amazonian rainforest is converting from a beneficial carbon ‘sink’ that absorbs CO2 into a detrimental carbon emitter, due to the prediction that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature increases over the next century.13
Meanwhile our insatiable drive for meat and fish escalates the deterioration even further. Every year, one billion animals face the barbarity of slaughter in Britain, while a further 4.5 billion fish and
2.6 billion shellfish are killed for the UK market. At sea, over-fishing has brought all the world’s oceans to the point of collapse.14
Responsibility for the world in which we live, for the environment on which we place daily demands, rests with each one of us. International treaties and accords are important for setting agendas and frameworks, but at the end of the day we personally have to make choices that collectively reduce exploitation and the erosion of resources. We are the consumers. It is time to change the nature of that consumption to ensure that our planet has any chance of survival for us, let alone future generations. We can’t do everything at once, but since watching The Animals Film I’ve tried to do my bit. If I stray, I turn to the Bible for inspiration – spiritual salsify and scorzonera with humble crumble.*
* The book I rely on most as the cook in our household is Leith’s Vegeterian Bible by Polly Tyrer, Bloomsbury, London 2002.