It’s a new year and we’ll soon be starting a new Tuna campaign, but before we do let’s have a look back at everything we achieved in 2010.
Campaigns
We started the year with the Cut Trident Campaign which was running throughout the election campaign period. Both the Conservatives and Labour said they would renew Trident (the country’s nuclear weapons system) if they were elected, only the Lib Dems said they wouldn’t invest in a like for like system (although they did say a lot of things before the elction). The campaign was based on the In The Firing Line report carried out by Greenpeace into the true costs of replacing our nuclear weapons as opposed to the costs reported by the government. The official figure released by the government was £15-20bn, the true cost is actually £97bn. We spent most of the early part of the year out on the streets getting this message across and the fact that after the election there would probably be heavy cuts so no reasonable person could justify spending £97bn on replacing something that was obsolete and irrelevant to the modern world. This message was reinforced after several senior figures within the military came out against replacing Trident. We carried out a street survey in Dudley asking people if they would cut Trident with over 95% saying they would. The campaign succeeded in getting the issue of Trident raised in the televised pre-election leader’s debates and the decision on whether to replace Trident has now been delayed and wont be made during this parliament. However this is still one to watch as this post on the Peace & Disarmament site points out.
It was quite a busy period after the election with two more campaigns on top of the Trident campaign. The first was a Palm Oil campaign which aimed to stop Indonesia's rainforests being replaced with palm oil and paper plantations. The focus was on a company called Sinar Mas who are the main culprits behind deforestation in Indonesia and make their profits by selling raw materials to consumer companies like (until our campaign) Nestle. This was possibly one of the biggest successes of the year after a very high profile campaign against Nestle which included a spoof KitKat video in which they very quickly gave into our demands and stopped using Sinar Mas to source their palm oil. The campaign then turned to HSBC who invest in Sinar Mas.
The second campaign was Behind The Logo which looked behind BP’s nice green logo into some of its not so green practices in particular its planned investment in the Canadian Tar Sands. The Tar Sands are the biggest industrial project on the planet and the dirtiest most destructive type of oil. It's wrecking the Canadian boreal forest, destroying the homelands of indigenous people, and accelerating dangerous climate change. Part of this campaign was to get people to design thier own version of the BP Logo. We also went to see a screening of Dirty Oil at the Birmingham Just Film Co-Op and spent most of the summer campaigning on this issue and our efforts paid off after our protest outside two BP petrol stations ended up in the Halesowen News. We should probably also thank BP themselvs for giving us a lot of help with this campagin, they decided to help us get our message accross about the dangers of unconventional oil by having the biggest oil spill in history and did far more damage to their reputaion than our Greenpeace campign ever could. So yeah thanks again for messing up our planet.
Festivals
The summer also means festivals and we went to quite a few this year. Festivals are a good place for fund raising and campaigning and generally getting our message across. The first and biggest of course is Glastonbury which was another great success, this was followed a week later by the new Mostly Jazz Festival in Moseley and then a month later by the Moseley Folk Festival. We were helped at the folk festival by our very own Orang-utan who's home is being destroyed by Palm Oil plantations. Our Orang-utan was very popular with the children (and adults) who all wanted photos taking with it. Earlier in the year we also went to the Birmingham Climate change festival, which isn’t a music festival and isn’t a festival to celebrate the wonderful effects of climate change, sustainability festival is probably a more suitable name.
Finally we ended the year with the Go Beyond Oil campaign which followed on from the BP campaign but broader in its scope in that it focused on all oil and unconventional oil not just the Tar sands. It also highlighted the positive sustainable alternatives. The campaign started after a load of Go Beyond Oil posters started to mysteriously appear on billboards that were advertising cars. The campaign itself involved people sending a Go Beyond Oil postcard to their MP to try to get our message reflected in the energy bill that is going through parliament.
So another action packed year but now it time to start focusing on the next campaign which will be about Tuna. More info on that coming soon.
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