A month with Ed Miliband

Starting work at People & Planet has been a total whirlwind adventure, and a home-coming too in so many ways. I got to spend my first glorious week in a sunny field at our baking-hot Summer Gathering. This was a great opportunity to catch up with the young campaigners who make up 2009's P&P network, and all our exciting new campaigns on Corporate Power, Transition Universities and Ditch Dirty Development. It also coincided perfectly with our announcement that we're suing the Treasury (see Stand up to the City below) - a historic legal challenge to the idiocy of letting bailed out banks continue to finance climate chaos. Students got rather excited about this, especially when we appeared on Channel 4 news!

And then something funny started happening. I've had a series of progressively surreal encounters with our Energy and Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband over the last month. On 4th July, People & Planet headed down to Kingsnorth power station to help form a giant human Miliband. Over 1000 people formed a human chain (and mexican waves) calling on Ed to use his 'ead and not allow unabated new coal fire power stations to be built in the UK without full carbon capture and storage (CCS) from the start. P&P's banner and placards made quite a splash across the papers with slogans like "Coal = dirtier than students", "Full CCS, or the canary gets it" and "Coal is, like, sooooo last century".

Then, last week, came Ed Miliband's welcome Low Carbon Transition Plan for the UK, which sets out a roadmap for reducing emissions, driving forwards renewables and building a low-carbon economy. It doesn't go nearly far enough, but it was nonetheless very encouraging to finally see some vision from the Government (just as it limps into its last year in office, mind you). Paradoxically enough, the media headlines last week were stolen by a group of workers from the UK's only wind turbine blade manufacturer - who are being shut down and made redundant but refusing to go quietly.

This week Ed Miliband came to Oxford to face the music. P&P teamed up with Oxford Friends of the Earth local group for a public meeting which quite literally had Oxford Town Hall bursting to the rafters. So many hundreds of people(including vocal Vestas workers) piled in to have their say that the meeting had to be moved to the huge Main Hall. Even then, it was standing room only. Ian, P&P's director, spoke passionately from the platform about the need for the Government to put its money where its mouth is concerning RBS and climate change. Ed Miliband may be talking the talk, but Alistair Darling and HM Treasury are going about business as usual with the bailout banks.

But we're making clear progress each week. On the same day as his visit to Oxford, Ed Miliband announced over £1 billion of funding that bailout banks RBS and Lloyds will be forced to provide to the wind industry and renewables projects. Details are thin on the ground, but this seems to be hinting at a rethink of the Treasury's arms-length principle for managing the nationalised banks. Our legal argument, and the basis for our Judicial Review, is that taxpayers' 70% stake in RBS must be used in the long-term public interest. It appear that Miliband is not a "sillyband" after all, he gets this. Now we just need him to convince his cabinet colleagues to do the same.


Back in the office, my last few weeks have involved trying to keep a large number of other plates spinning. I've been dealing with press enquiries about the publication of our 3rd annual Green League. Our award-winning league table ranks all the UK universities' environmental performance, naming those who are leading the HE sector into the future, and shaming those who lag way too far behind. I've also had dozens of contacts with environmental managers themselves, keen to find out how they can do better in next year's Green League and reporting that their Vice Chancellors are keen to see their unis improve however they can. To put this into perspective, when I left P&P in 2006, we were still arguing with VCs over the need to even HAVE environmental managers or policies in place at their universities. 120 out of 127 now have publically available environmental policies, and only 42 out of 127 don't yet have full-time staff to manage their environmental impact. The shift we've managed to drive forward in just 3 years is staggering!

Meanwhile, as we begin to shift our Go Green campaign beyond its original 4 demands towards a new Transition Universities model, I've been designing the new materials, action guides and campaign strategies for the next term (which starts way too soon!). The same applies for Ditch Dirty Development and the Schools & Colleges strand of Go Green. Alongside all this, we're planning some major events in the Autumn:

- a speaker tour of 6 indigenous people directly affected by tarsands developments in Canada
- the UK's biggest ever climate change mobilisation around Copenhagen in London on 5th December - The Wave.
- A Yes Men Save the World Film tour round universities with the Yes Men
- the launch of the 10:10 initiative with the Sun/Guardian leading football clubs, businesses, universities, hospitals and all manner of other organisations into a challenge to cut emissions by 10% by 2010
- the small matter of a court case with the Government, associated coalition-building, seminar-organising, report-writing etc
- ahhh... this list could go on forever... but it's very late and I now must sleep if i'm going to do anything about all this tomorrow!