So as the new year starts with a new campaign I thought it would be good for all of us too look back and reflect on the amazing work we did in Nottingham during 2010 on Greenpeace campaigns. It was one of the busiest years for campaigning I have known for a while which made it great fun and very rewarding.
We started the year with rumours of a general election and with thoughts of government cuts in the offing it seemed a good time to remind our future representatives that they could make a big inroad into the deficit by cutting spending on Trident - the white elephant of our defence. We asked people to sign a polling card simply asking Trident yes or no and 97% said no. We decided to target one particular constituency - Rushcliffe - and we managed to get all prospective parliamentary candidates to support our campaign to cut Trident but unfortunately the sitting MP didn't even want to talk to us. Humph!
March and April saw the launch of two campaigns - a campaign against illegal logging of Indonesian rainforest to supply palm oil to Nestle and the Behind the Logo campaign focussing on BP's decision to invest in tar sands in Canada. I was down in Croydon as legal support for the Nestle campaign and it was great fun - as was the campaign itself. We asked people to pose with a photo of an orang utan with a message to Nestle. These photos were downloaded onto the internet on a special site and Nottingham got the most photos of all the groups! We attended the May Day festival as part of the campaign and were very well received - we had borrowed an orang utan suit for the day and the orang utan took part in the annual Mayday parade. The campaign was a great success and for the first time ever the internet campaigning on Twitter and Facebook played an important part in the success of the campaign, partly helped by Nestle's reaction, well and truly shooting themselves in the foot!
The tar sands campaign changed direction as it proceeded when BP also shot themselves in the foot with the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico but it served to highlight the risks oil companies are willing to take to extract the last drop of oil from the ground. We had a great day launching the campaign at the Green Festival and followed that up with stalls at the Sneinton Festival and the City Farm open day. Then in July Kirsty, Dave and I went down to London as part of a month long presence outside BP's HQ in London. We joined forces with the Southwell group to have a first time presence at the Southwell folk festival but didn't go to Sounds on the Downs due to the weather. The campaign culminated in Nottingham with us bearing witness outside a BP garage in Daybrook (see previous blog) on one of the hottest days of the year.
As autumn progressed the Behind the Logo campaign morphed into the Go Beyond Oil campaign which linked in with the Greenpeace ships bearing witness against drilling for oil in the Arctic by Cairn Energy and drilling off the Shetland Isles by Chevron. The campaign started off by with subvertising - thanks to those who did this - you know who you are - and then morphed again into a political campaign as the new coalition Governement introduced a new Energy Bill where we asked the public to sign postcards to their local MP to support a ban on deepwater drilling off the UK coast. These cards were delivered in person by local group members who had had special training in how to lobby MP's and - it worked! Our visits were well received and we have now got parliamentary support for the campaign.
As well as the campaigning we have also had a street communications training day in March and an NVDA training day in June and a political lobbying training day in October. All were well attended by people from the local groups and were a great success.Then in November we had a regional get together in Kettlewell in Yorkshire, attended by Andrea and Harry and me. Lots of fun, talks, mental challenges and drinking.
Let's hope 2011 will be just as much fun.
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