7. Receiving the Writ
Every action creates a reaction and the Canadian waste protest certainly provoked a reaction from some of our previously unidentified opponents. Locally, the public, the press, political parties of all persuasions and non-political organisations were positive, with many taking their own form of action to combat the toxic waste.Naturally, the strength of opposition to the imports tended to decrease with the distance from Pontypool, to the extent that some important people far away from the action actually protested about our protests. I was accustomed to a healthy degree of scepticism amongst journalists who were new to the issue and I enjoyed seeing them convert to our cause once they’d experienced the plant for themselves and spoken to nearby residents. However, there were a few distant spectators who suddenly assumed the authority to make a judgement on the value of the campaign before getting first-hand experience of the incinerator. Amongst the dissenters was a leading government figure.
Just days before our Liverpool trip, the new Environment Secretary, Chris Patten, produced a long news release, headed “Statement on the Movement and Disposal of Toxic Wastes”. At the beginning of the statement there was a questionable pronouncement which read: “The United Kingdom has not been, is not and will not be the dustbin for the world’s waste.”The “has not been” may have been true for previous decades, the “will not” was at best a promise, but the “is not” was long out of date and was contradicted by his departments own figures reflecting the 1980s boom in hazardous waste imports. The Environment Secretary’s inclusion of the present tense suggested that despite the facts, he wanted the media to believe in his unilateral declaration that Britain was not a big player in the business. The only semblance of justification for this distortion was a report placing Britain merely second in the league, below France, in European hazardous waste importation. He went through the UK’s regulations and safeguards without acknowledging how superficial they were and he placed ultimate faith in controlling emissions from incineration with the poor powers of Britain’s beleaguered Pollution Inspectorate. He also gave the customary praise for British waste companies’ services to less-developed countries, a ploy regularly used as a diversion from the real arguments about the majority of our imports. However, despite my belief that the Secretary of State misunderstood the present position, and ignoring my lack of faith in his declaration about the future, at the end of the News Release I saw a sign of Chris Patten’s redemption. Perhaps he was secretly embarrassed about promoting the Canadian shipments, for after two-and-a-half pages in favour of accepting the PCBs from Quebec, it appeared that in principle he wasn’t happy to maintain the status quo.I glimpsed a glimmer of hope and my hope lived on, albeit falsely.
The incongruous sign of Chris Patten’s embryonic support for reform re-emerged a month later in a news release for a European ministers meeting. He then became passionate about persuading his EC colleagues to end the exportation of toxic waste from all developed countries. When previously trying to defeat our Canadian campaign, Patten’s attempt to rally opposition against us had not gone down well in South Wales and his true desire for Pontypool to burn the Canadian PCBs overshadowed any rhetorical vision he might have had for the future of the international waste trade. Nevertheless, after our Canadian victory, I continued to look to the Environment Secretary for the forging of his newly emerging principles into the sort of action that would ultimately improve Pontypool’s position.My hopes that this would really happen were dashed when apparent contradictions in his position were eventually explained by his clarification that ReChem’s share of the waste trade would be excluded from any reforms that might take place. In making the ReChem-friendly adjustment to his policy the Secretary of State did serious damage to my emerging defence against the writ from ReChem, probably without giving it a thought.
At the time of the Canadian controversy, our government’ defiant stance had found favour amongst others who were also way out of touch with incineration in Pontypool. The distant damnation of our efforts by a number of prominent journalists did not, however, contain the crumb of comfort I initially found in Chris Patten’s statement. Those other onlookers were quite derisory. Ex right-leaning Labour MP, political thinker and tenacious TV interviewer Brian Walden, who I followed, was writing for the Sunday Times. Because of the timing, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the non-stop coverage of Canadian waste inspired his attempt to question the rationale of the growing media interest in the environment as a whole. He did this with an intellectual argument that translated environmentalism into socio-political collectivism and he claimed that the essential political conflict was the struggle between individualism and collectivism. The way I interpreted his own stance was that he came out clearly on the side of individualism in a free market, with less time for regulation in the common good. I had found that to be quite a trendy view in some circles. In other aspects of the article he questioned the reality of climate change and he expressed fears that environmentalism could sabotage economic progress in the way that, according to him, the welfare state had already done in Britain.
I’d admired Brian Walden as a thinking politician and I enjoyed much of his work in the media, but not this piece of it. The article’s headline in the Sunday Times reflected his conceptual wordcraft, saying: “Stop the World, there’s a fly in my eco-system” and it set the tone for his attack, which I felt radiated some of the traits he went on to ascribe to Margaret Thatcher in a famous TV interview a few months later. In that interview he asked of the Prime Minister:
“You come over as being someone who one of your backbenchers said is slightly off her trolley, authoritarian, domineering, refusing to listen to anybody else – why? . . .
The Sunday Times article was a deeply philosophical disagreement with what we were doing and other British broadsheet journalists took similar sides against us, in favour of continued toxic imports to Pontypool. A leader in The Independent was firmly in agreement with parliamentary approval of waste imports for incineration. Evaluating the alternative to bringing foreign waste to Britain, the article was wittily headed: “A waste of British Expertise”.Then, a huge philosophical analysis, entitled “Waste: the burning question” by Peter Knight in the Financial Times proposed that just as some people have to live along main roads, some near airports and others next to chemical factories, those who live with an incinerator also help to share the environmental burden produced by a modern lifestyle. That wasn’t the end of the Broadsheet onslaught. The illustrious Simon Jenkins in his Sunday Times piece on the issue was the most scathing. He used the Canadian waste to launch an eloquent, entertaining attack on the green movement per se. Having come from humble roots, I was conscious of my own progress in life but being part of the “elitist intelligentsia” as depicted by Jenkins, and having a “bourgeois fixation” were characteristics well above my station and which others on the Liverpool trip would have also found far too flattering. Although he made no mention of coming to Pontypool, he wrote of “whirling green dervishes” to be heard on his radio when driving in Wales and he said: “Yet the Greens’ handling of the PCB issue had broken new heights of crass barminess.” He aligned Greenpeace with “the anorak brigade” and feared that “supergreens were converting to supernimbies.” At least we were grateful for the publicity, which was magnified by Rechem’s own full page advert in our local broadsheet, the South Wales Argus. Its message was: “Without ReChem’s High Temperature Incinerators, Life would be Hell”. Such a message could only hope to influence people who didn’t live in the vicinity of the plant, where life really could be hell. The same style of message was rubbed-in by September’s Professional Engineering which, when describing recent investments at the plant, stated “At its Pontypool, S. Wales plant, ReChem says it has the only incinerator capable of utterly destroying PCBs.”I foresaw that in time the final few words in that statement would have to be eaten.
I felt the antagonistic press articles would have been very different if the writers had attempted to consider their conceptual comments from our standpoint. The article in Professional Engineering was entitled “The high-tech way to a clean environment”, yet the obnoxious air around the Pontypool plant was overlooked. Similarly, the Financial Times’ swings and roundabouts depiction of the way the benefits of industrialisation compensated for environmental problems was, for many, hard to swallow in South Wales. Large sections of our society had missed out on their fair shair of the prosperity through the centuries of industrial progress and the landscape was only just beginning to recover from vast swathes of environmental damage. In that respect, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock was a politician in tune with us, in saying of the waste: “I don’t want this accepted anywhere, especially in an area which has had its fair share of destruction over the past 200 years”. Even considering the positive side of the swings and roundabouts argument, Rechem wasn’t like another road, chemical factory or airport, which arguably provided tangible benefits to people who didn’t like those things on there doorstep. In the nearby community it was a commonly held view that Rechem’s downside greatly overshadowed the small dent that the plant made in the large local unemployment figures. In that way, Rechem was very special in the costs/benefits comparison, by landing misery on the long-suffering locals whilst providing environmental advantages to prosperous nations far away.
Furthermore, in contrast to the broadsheet sermons, we campaigners weren’t what some liked to see us as; those “prophets of doom preaching chemical Armageddon”. Our view was more sophisticated than that. Apart from objecting to the continual and tangible emissions, our contention was that chemicals known to be dangerous in tiny amounts were bound to be coming out of the plant and because those chemicals resisted degradation they would build up in the local environment. There was a strong local consensus for a public inquiry. Our evening newspaper had popularly flown that flag for some years. Furthermore, whilst I was seen to support the call for a costly public inquiry, when pushed I would say that it was neither necessary, nor useful, nor obtainable. My demand was far more modest – a thorough investigation of the environment near the plant. As for the Sunday Times NIMBY label for us, I remained optimistic that anyone who took the trouble to find out exactly what we wanted couldn’t possibly have accused us of being parochial. The tag may have harked back to the early days of the incinerator when the campaign slogan was the punchy but over-protective “Re-site Rechem”, but it was different in 1989 when we didn’t want that incinerator in anyone’s back yard. We knew that there would be no magic wand to spirit the plant away, so we simply requested specific aspects of progress, such as improvements in technology, research into contamination, a selective prohibition of imports and a suspension of PCB burning.We were prepared to accept incremental progress, but certainly not the status quo preferred by those broadsheet journalists who seemed to live in a bubble in London. I felt that the high-minded, self-righteous show of institutionalised opposition to our plans, which occurred after my BBC broadcast but before our Liverpool trip, may have even encouraged ReChem to take action against me a week later. I looked on the bright side though, viewing the reaction of those leading newspapers as more evidence of the impact we were making and, as was the case with The Environment Secretary’s press statement, the highbrow articles failed to have the desired affect on our protest.
I don’t know whether the company expected me to read the warning letter before I left for Liverpool on 16th August, but it would have made little difference if I had, and reading it later didn’t make me change my campaigning stance. In the event, my opponents made a speedy judgement of the likelihood of my compliance with their requirements. After I had made the decision to rebut Rechem’s requests, and as the furore over the shipments was dying down, I received the expected “Writ of Summons” decorated by the official stamp of the High Court.The number stamped on the writ, 3181, caught my eye. The text of the document, which was embroidered with ancient etiquette, clearly identified the Plaintiff as Rechem and the Defendant as me. It also outlined a claim for damages, over the alleged libel, and it sought an injunction against me to stop me in my tracks. In the writ, unlike the warning letter, there were no quotations of specific comments said to offend, just a reference to The World Tonight and, causing me a double-take, a second reference, to a newspaper, the London Evening Standard.
It appeared that the way the law worked was that the company could tell the High Court that I had made disparaging remarks without explaining what was incorrect in those remarks. Then, by asserting that the comments had damaged its business and its reputation, the company would have the financial justification for the court to issue a writ. The amount sought for damages wasn’t specified in the writ but there was circumstantial evidence that my comments had contributed to significant losses. Considering the withdrawal of the multi-million dollar Canadian business and the company’s plummeting share value, I seem to remember stopping at eight figures. John Sweeney of The Observer later calculated the company’s stock market loss to be £24 million.I could argue that it wasn’t all down to me but I couldn’t shirk some of the responsibility. It looked as if a big compensation claim was likely to land on me and to avoid bankruptcy I would need to prove that my comments were correct. However, with defence costs of perhaps six figures, doing that would be impossibly expensive and would also lead to financial ruin for my family. I soon learned that a libel defendant without riches usually gives in, and I was advised about the catastrophic consequences of standing my ground, but this writ was testing my heart as well as my mind. I didn’t take the depressing advice. Instead I experienced a recurrence of the calm that had come over me after reading the original warning letter. I convinced myself that despite all their previous, prestigious scalps Rechem would find me more of a challenge.
When I got to the end of the text of the writ I then looked back at the serial number stamped at the top of its first page. After some mental divisibility tests I longingly looked on my shelves for my table of prime numbers. As I had suspected, 3181 was in the table. With a passion for number types that went back to back to my Open University studies in the History of Mathematics during the 1970s, I was suddenly much happier about holding a High Court Writ in my hand.