Ecology Movement
Another one from my WordPress blog, this time from two years ago.
In medieval times, Coventry became an important city due to its weaving and cloth dying industries, 'Coventry Blue' from woad being valued because of its purity. In that era it attracted many families from within a roughly twenty to thirty mile radius, such families escaping a harsh rural life, which if not serfdom, may have not offered a much better standard of living. Many of these people had supported and continued to support the Lollard 'heresy' against the established Roman Catholic Church. That led to a tradition of religious non-conformism and later political non-conformism, Puritan Coventry siding with Parliament in the Civil War against the monarchy.
By the 19th Century one of the major trades in Coventry was ribbon weaving, with the districts of Foleshill and Hillfields to the north and north-east of the city centre respectively becoming the sites of the factories. However this industry only remained economically competitive due to import duties on ribbons imported from France. Another major industry was watchmaking. In addition to some large factory-based firms, there were many individual watchmakers working from home, a 'cottage industry', in the districts of Spon End, Chapelfields and Earlsdon, located to the west and south-west of the city centre. From 1860 onwards, both of these industries suffered as a result of a Free Trade Act reducing import tariffs, US-made watches in particular were so cheap they could be imported and resold at a profit for less than the cost of manufacturing watches in Britain. Competition from Switzerland had a similar effect.
In 1861 the Coventry Sewing Machine Company was founded by James Starley, Josiah Turner and others. In 1866, Rowley Turner, nephew of the latter, was sent to France to act as the company's agent and whilst there acquired one of the newly invented Michaux cycles, which he brought back to Coventry. Within a year the company produced its own version and thus became renamed as simply the Coventry Machinist Company, opening a factory in the southern suburb of Cheylesmore. This was the start of Coventry's industrial renaissance by the transport industries, the company went on to manufacture a cycle called the Swift after which the company itself was renamed. There was a ready-made pool of skilled workers from those industries that had declined. This mass production of bicycles made them more affordable, so they became an essential item for many working men, not just a leisure pursuit for the wealthy.
Several other cycle companies such as Rover and Singer were founded and in time many of the cycle manufacturers went into making motorcycles and then cars, for which Coventry became best known. Not only did Coventry have the world's first bicycle factory, it also had Britain's first car factory (the latter located on a site that is now a modern housing estate). Local industry then developed even further into aviation and specialised areas to support it. In the century from 1870 onwards then Coventry's population quadrupled to more than three hundred thousand people, the city expanding into existing villages and with new suburbs, some of which contained these factories, built on former rural land. The high wages paid by the transport industries led to inward migration from throughout the British Isles and following the Second World War, from the Commonwealth. Coventry was thus transformed from being a moderately-sized English city to a large British industrial centre. Not only did the city itself prosper economically, but so did a high proportion of its working-class inhabitants.
It was due to this prosperity that Coventry had a high-rate of car ownership and a high level of owner-occupation in housing. For the well-paid skilled working-class employed in the transport manufacturing industries, a motor car was a status symbol of affluence over their peers in other industries and for many a display of pride of the fruits of their labours. During the inter-war years of the 1920's and 1930's Coventry had one of the highest rates of car ownership, at twice the national average, of any city in Britain. Car ownership during that era was mainly for leisure purposes, rather than commuting, as industry was largely located in the suburbs, with private housing developments located within walking distance of the main centres of employment. Even in the present era, a large proportion of the housing dates from the inter-war era. What car ownership allowed was for employees to be more selective as to which suburb they chose to purchase a property in, however this trend of cross-city commuting did not take root until later in the post-war era.
Coventry's medieval city centre had survived during the urban growth up until the 1930's when the urban corporation decided to undertake slum clearances by demolishing some of the old housing and creating wider streets for new developments in the process, with a major demolition project to that effect taking place in 1936 to the horror of some locals and visitors alike. The following year the running of the corporation changed from a 'Ratepayers Coalition' of Tories and Liberals to Labour, who appointed the first City Architect. The appointee Donald Gibson was inspired by Modernist ideas, notably those of Le Corbusier's The City of Tomorrow, for a zoned centre, the local version of which developed by Gibson's department became placed in an exhibition of May 1940 self-consciously entitled The Coventry of Tomorrow.
Six months later Coventry became the first provincial British city to experience large-scale bombardment by the Luftwaffe. The replanning of the city centre from scratch subsequently gained more popularity. It was a trend to take place in other blitzed cities, though as in those the expense incurred led to spending cutbacks resulting in an ugly dystopian feel. Specific to Coventry again the original plan for an 'at grade' ring road encircling the centre and with buildings facing onto it became one elevated in places, at ground level in others and at no point forming a boulevarded thoroughfare with buildings facing onto it. When this was being built in the 1960's, it represented the ascendancy of the car over the pedestrian in urban planning.
The economic prosperity previously mentioned and with it a low level of unemployment, however bred complacency amongst employers and employees, with the agreement of the trade unions, being allowed to give each other two hours' notice to quit. By the late 1960's British manufacturing industry and not just in Coventry, because of this widespread complacency, had started to decline nationally. Even the devaluation of the pound from $2.80 to $2.40 by Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1967 was not enough to increase competitiveness by boosting exports. By the time of the 1970 general election, unemployment had reached a then record of half a million people. This general election was won with a small majority by the Conservative Party, led by Edward Heath. His government was beset by a global issue beyond its control, the Nixon Administration dropping the gold standard and consequently the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system in the Autumn of 1971. A collapse of confidence in all fiat currencies followed with world-wide commodity inflation setting the trend for the remainder of the decade.
However Heath's government foolishly tried to reflate the economy during his Chancellor Anthony Barber's budget in the Spring of 1972. That budget was intended to encourage borrowing and spending, against a backdrop of already high price inflation for the basic cost of living. Many people put such borrowed money into property (a trend that would be repeated during 1987-92 and from 1999 onwards); whilst those who could afford to buy non-essential goods as likely as not purchased goods manufactured abroad. Altogether it was a disastrous policy that led to a spiral of rising wage demands in a highly unionised labour market, including those from miners and power workers, two groups who could and did effectively hold the country to ransom with resultant power cuts in 1972.
Worse was however to come. In the Autumn of 1973, the Arab-Israeli war and the USA's support for the latter, led the oil producing Arab countries to embargo all sales to the USA. Although this embargo did not directly affect Britain, it led to a quadrupling of the price of a barrel of oil, with the resultant increased impact on commodity prices worldwide. Ironically it was that high price of oil that made Britain's North Sea reserves economically viable but they did not come on stream until much later in the decade. At the start of 1973, Britain joined the then European Economic Community (EEC), having failed to do so at the outset in 1957 and having had its two subsequent applications in 1963 and 1967 respectively vetoed by the French delegation. This belated membership of the EEC further exposed the weakness of British industry in the face of its competitors on the near continent.
That long preamble then sets into context why Britain's environmental movement started in early 1972, originally under the name of PEOPLE. With hindsight it might seem strange to some people that it originated in Coventry, but the city had a dissenting political tradition (and as mentioned in an earlier post, it was where the first public vegan meal was produced in Britain). It could also have been a reaction to the industrialisation that had taken place in the preceding century and the large-scale population growth in that city that had went with it; the latter of course meaning urban expansion onto what had been farmland. So there were more people living in the city but less local farm land from which to feed them.
There may also have been a desire for a return to a society characterised by 'cottage industries', as watchmaking had partly been, rather than large-scale factories. Not only that, but the destruction of the medieval city centre during the 1930's and early 1940's and the subsequent car-oriented post-war replanning was bound to produce a reaction from those local people who did not believe that the city should be so dominated by the motor industry. With hindsight it could be seen as a desire to rehumanise towns and cities, a rejection not of modernity in itself but the Corbusiesque manifestation of it. PEOPLE contested the two general elections of 1974, the first of which resulted in a minority Labour government, the second of which was won by Labour with a small majority. In 1975 what had originally started as a campaigning group became the Ecology Party, still based in Coventry as it was for a decade, putting up candidates for the general elections of 1979 and 1983.
PEOPLE were also influenced by the views of Edward Goldsmith and his A Blueprint for Survival, which advocated population control and society being organised into small-scale local communities; Goldsmith himself stood as a PEOPLE candidate in the first of those 1974 general elections. The link in that article claims that 'people had only just begun to examine global warming and consider the perils of climate change'; however in 1972, the received scientific wisdom as relayed via the mainstream media was that of global cooling, that the world was heading for another Ice Age. There was none of the 'Net Zero' nonsense in relation to the small anthropogenic contribution to carbon dioxide levels. The link posted in 2012 even states that 'Greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by 42 per cent since the 90s due to the switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation'. The use of that natural gas was an idiotic short-term market-driven post-privatisation policy, that has now resulted in an energy crisis that will push millions of people into fuel poverty. It is hardly a cause for celebration.
The population control aspect is the least savoury part of the 'survivalist' ideology, as those who preach it are never willing to sacrifice their own lives for the 'greater good'. It was of course the economically disastrous times of the 1970's that led more people into thinking more seriously about the environmental consequences of large-scale industry. That bicycle manufacturing had been to a large degree responsible for the trend may seem ironic given that the bicycle has long been viewed by many in the ecology movement as the sustainable alternative to motorised transport, the ideal form of transport for urban living; a view that I happen to share, so much so that I'd like this industry to be insourced again, for cycles and their components to be made in Britain. There is in fact one locally-based cycle manufacturer, Pashley in Stratford-upon-Avon. Not surprisingly their cycles are expensive compared to those manufactured in lower-cost countries and just assembled in this country.
It should be noted that dissent against the pervasive nature of car-culture continued in Coventry long after the Ecology Party itself had departed. In 1996 in a piece of automobile idolatry, a service was held in Coventry Cathedral to celebrate a centenary of car manufacturing, as if it were the only industry that the city’s economy had depended on. Outside some protestors gathered, highlighting the high number of fatalities from motor vehicle accidents. Within the cathedral a woman whose mother had been killed in a car crash decided to stage a Godivesque protest, disrobing in honour of the city’s most famous former resident. Although she highlighted the effects of pollution she didn’t mention global warming, which was well-known at the time (and it must have been a fairly mild January day for her to feel comfortable in the buff), let alone there being a supposed ‘climate emergency’, as such a narrative had not yet then been invented.
That A Blueprint for Survival should imply a society structured from the bottom-up, not the top down is a good thing. Ernst Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful treads a similar path. However the use of natural gas to fire power stations whose output is fed into the national electricity transmission grid hardly fits into that philosophy. This doesn't mean that we could all live off-grid or that it would necessarily be desirable to do so, but it is surprising that the 'blueprint' doesn't advocate people to become more self-sufficient in their energy usage. That could mean investing in rooftop solar panels and possibly being able to sell any surplus to an energy supplier, the national transmission and regional distribution grids being essentially a transport system for electrical power. Note that the authoritarian 'Covid' restrictions of the past two years 2020 - 2022 have led many people into more community-based engagement, pooling resources with people that they already knew before or may have met during that time. In some cases this is by encouraging the growing of one's own food to share or trade with others, removing dependence on shops and the financial system.
However one should be wary that where this is encompassed by a 'think global, act local' ideology, it is being used to force top-down changes to society, hence at odds to what genuine ecologists believe. It is a phrase that has been adopted by many globalist corporations including Coca-Cola. It is also the one being peddled by the United Nations Development Programme as part of its 'Sustainable Development Goals', re Agenda 2030. You may think that is not a bad thing, but be aware that no globalist organisation has your best interests at heart. You will be told how to live your life, you will be restricted as to where, how and when you can travel, with the pretext for these restrictions likely to be climate change although it is a long-term cyclical process, for which humans are now being blamed as a form of 'Original Sin' for just inhabiting the planet.
England for example is already divided into artificial 'regions' between which travel restrictions may be imposed as part of Agenda 2030. Warwickshire, the county in which I live, borders (amongst others) Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and my home county of Oxfordshire. Each of these three counties falls into a different artificial 'region' from Warwickshire and from each other, although it is possible to pass straight through part of all four counties in about an hour by car. If I go to Stand in the Park at the Rollright Stones that takes me from Warwickshire just into Oxfordshire, hence a different 'region' from where I live. On a more mundane level, economic areas, such as that of Banbury for example, overlap county and in some cases 'regional' boundaries; and themselves overlap with other economic areas. We need to be guarded that freedom of movement is not going to be restricted in the name of 'sustainability' and by globalist organisations whose personnel do not themselves face any travel restrictions, intranational or international.
In summary, as part of an ecology movement, try to adopt as sustainable a lifestyle as you can. If it is convenient and affordable to do so, travel by bus or train, as long as mask wearing isn't mandatory, rather than by car. Consider going by coach or train and then getting a ferry across to the continent, rather than getting a flight, when going on holiday. But don't be told that you should not or cannot visit other countries, let alone parts of your own country, on a fake pretext of 'sustainability' or 'vaccination' status. Reject all forms of global dictatorship including those with a 'green' or 'medical' dressing. Be especially wary of the 'Net Zero' ideology under the pretext of a supposed 'Climate Emergency'. It will be used to impose harsh restrictions on your life, enslaving you to a global dictatorship. You may enjoy more material comforts than your medieval ancestors did but your societal status will be no better than theirs was. You will own nothing and you will allegedly be 'happy'.
References
The Story of England, pp 245-251 - Michael Wood, Penguin, London, 2010
A History of Coventry, pp 218-226 - David McGrory, Phillimore and Co Ltd, Chichester, 2003.
Replanning the Blitzed City Centre, A Comparative Study of Bristol, Coventry and Southampton, 1941-1950, pp 22-26, 30-45, 122-125, 127-129, 131-133 - Junichi Hasagewa, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1992.
State of Emergency, The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974, pp 218-220, 301-304 - Dominic Sandbrook, Penguin, London, 2010. (On the origins of the Ecology Party, Sandbrook's primary reference is Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain , pp 240-243 - Meredith Veldman, Cambridge University Press, 1994 and now long out of print).